Older blog entries for vab (starting at number 92)

I've quit my job with e-Tech and I'm now working for UF Network Services. I'll also be going to school to study molecular biology. This change should give me allot more time to work on cool stuff in the free software world. Yay! Life is good.

I made a release of cpwc, a web cache to help gnutella peers with their initial connection. I also wrote some code for a p2p network I'm planning on calling MetaNET. I got to spend allot of time coding this weekend it was great.

Personal

My resolution for 2004 is to be more focused and productive. I made a clear description of what I wanted to accomplish with my life and made a list of goals to help me get there. It's helping already.

I checked mozilla out of CVS and built it. I'm trying to get involved as a janitor in the project. We'll see, I'm not sure my skills are good enough for me to produce any worthwile patches for them.

Personal

The move from Miami, Fl. to Gainesville, Fl. went smoothly. I've been here for about a month now and it's nice to be back. My internet is provided by a wireless project sponsored by the city and aimed at mending the digital divide. It's really nice.

I spent Christmas in Boston with friends and family. It was really nice to get up there. I had a few days to enjoy the city so aside from the requisite pub crawls, I went to visit the MIT campus and Harvard Square, and where the Novell offices and (old) Ximian offices where. Of course, I visited Fenway too and a bunch of other places and spent some time just walking around the neighborhood, the houses there and the baseball field remind me of when I was a kid. I love the T. I love that city. This is gonna be the year for the sox. I wish it wasn't so expensive to live up there, damn gentrification.

Work

I think I've finally gotten the "hang of" work. Hopefully this should result in more free time for free software. I'm already finding myself with more time now that my major project is done, most of it so far has been spent catching up, but I'm almost caught up. It's so weird to look back and see like this 2-year hole in my life where I gave up everything and just focused on that project. *shiver*

I've been so busy with work I haven't really done anything other that some bug reports related to deploying open source in the real world. Hopefully, that will change very soon.

Personal

I'm moving this weekend from Miami back up to Gainesville, Fl.

I've been continuing to work on the projects related to the p2p technical goals that I'm trying to accomplish. Another release of cgWebCache was made and I've started working toward a release of a related project called cmp - a peer which will bootstrap through cgwc.

Community

I found a volunteer to help me create some wireless freenet resources. I see WiFi reviving the old, formerly

dial-up, freenets that used to exist in communities. What a great way to close the digital divide!

Advogato

Why are all of the diary entries rated so low? If there's too much censorship it's going to kill this site. Many people have already left, let's not loose this great resource. I personally liked when people discussed their personal life, and their thoughts on currently events and movies and music and books on here. It was interested to me because I have many of the same influences, inspirations, and problems as others on here due to my involvement in free software development and the influence of the hacker culture on me. Do we really need to focus so heavily on software development? I don't want to have to keep two blogs.

gWebCache is a bootstrapping system to help clients get on the gnutella p2p network. I've started a port of gWebCache to C. The result is cgWebCache, and it's still very early in development.

I needed to port it to C to get better performance because of the number of hits I was getting against the cache. I set up a cache on my server expecting to get about 1m hits per month. But, it looks like I'll get about 10m-25m and use about 3GB-6GB in bandwidth. There's about 175 active caches right now, we need more. If you'd be willing to run a copy of this CGI once it reaches v1.0 please let me know. The more caches, the less bandwidth each cache will use. If we could get a 5000 caches running, the load and bandwidth useage would probably be low enough that we'd hit a critical mass point and anyone could run one.

I've also started working on patches for some of the opensource p2p projects including GTK-Gnutella and QTella to make them better integrate and better balance across the gnutella web caches.

Community

I gave couple friends accounts on my server so that we can start to work on some free software projects together. I'm trying to work with them to get a security project off the ground, which is one of the reasons for my recent interest in the p2p stuff. We're going to try and use FSPN (gnutella and bittorrent) to distribute the results of the security project.

Personal

ummm... It looks like I'll be taking a trip to pittsburgh soon and I've started hanging out on irc.freenode.net.

I set up an account on Friendster, which is really really cool. If I know you and I forgot to invite you, click here. If not, check it out any way, it's really cool - it would be super neat to apply some of the ideas deployed there to advogato (you can only see people in your social/friend network, and you get to approve or reject their comments about you.)

Work

Things are going a little more smoothly now that I'm starting to really get the hang of the non-technical side of my job. But things are still very slow due to the poor economy in the US. I'm focused right now on building up my certs.

I've been doing allot of work on CKS to support a developing standard for PKS Keyserver protocol. A new release should happen after Q2 finally ends and everyone at work stops working like crazy to try and squeeze stuff into the quarter.

I've discovered valgrind, and it has helped me find some memory leaks in various code I have written. It's worth taking a look at if you're developing with C/C++. There's even a howto to get you started. I think the coolest thing about it is that for me it's kind of like a spellchecker, after it has me correct an error once or twice I learn the correct way and don't seem to make that mistake any more. My code is much better for having used it.

Community

I set up a Gnutella Web Cache to help people bootstrap onto the Gnutella network and share free software. It's at http://gwc.fspn.cryptnet.net/. I started working on the Gnutella Web Cache code to improve its efficiency.

I also set up a South Florida Linux Users Mailing list, since the other LUG lists in my area seem to have pretty much died. If you're a Linux user is South Florida, come on and join us.

Personal

I'm getting much better w/ my acoustic guitar. I've been practicing a great deal lately. I've been thinking about working on some music/guitar related software for Linux and some open content. Any other guitar players here on advogato?

I made a new release of CKS my openPGP Keyserver. I'm going to mark it 0.2.5 very soon, which is the version I've designated as Beta. It's not there yet though, I just released 0.1.3. I've learned allot about project development from that project. I've been surprised by how long it's taken me almost two years now (thousands of hours). Certainly something I will keep in mind before I start my next free software project.

This release is a good step though, because it's able to do full syncing with the other pks server networks. It was very nice to see its first syncs show up on the MRTG es keyserver graphs.

It's still not ready for other non-developers to run though.

Personal

ehhh... still working for an IBM bp. Still living in Miami. Still going out to SoBe nearly every weekend.

I finally started using mozilla for my email. It's catching 400+ spam messages a day for me - nice! That saves me allot of time. I'm using enigmail too, which rocks. It's very nice to have easy to use PGP mail support.

I set up my own mailman mailing list server, and my own cvs server. That's helping allot with my productivity too.

Work

I had to architect an LDAP solution for some customers so I created a support community for them. Specifically LDAP in higher ed. I set up a mailing list w/ archives and got a bunch of people running openLDAP in higher ed to joing up. I'm trying to get everyone to share code and war stories a la the MIT AI lab in the 60's. If you're not running LDAP in higher ed please don't join. But, if you are running LDAP in high ed, please do join.

Due to advogato's inspiration (thanks raph) I'm still very interested in understanding on-line communities and how to build vibrant and thriving ones.