Free stuff, Summer of Code updates, Homeward bound, Off to CSH

The last couple of days have been really good to me in terms of free stuff. At last night's Phoenix Cisco Users' Group meeting, I won Network Design and Case Studies (CCIE Fundamentals) in the raffle... Pretty cool. My dad also gave me the backpack that Cisco was giving out at Networkers 2006. It looks like an excellent laptop bag but I won't really know until I start traveling again.

Speaking of travel, I'm flying back to Corning on the red eye this weekend. I don't mind a red eye flight, but I do mind the three and a half hour layover in Atlanta in the middle of the night. At least I can get free wifi... They want you to pay $7.95 for the day but from past experience I know that they don't block port 22. ssh -D 8080 me@host will setup a nice SOCKS proxy on localhost.

My Summer of Code project is progressing steadily as my todo list is getting shorter. One month from next Friday the Summer of Code is officially over. I still don't think I'll have any trouble getting things done by then.

I finally got things straightened out with housing at RIT and will be living with a freshman on CSH. I've been putting some thought into how I'd like to set up the room, physically and virtually. Physically, I'd like to bunk the beds and put them up against the window, put both desks up against one of the walls, and a sofa on the opposite wall. I've seen this setup a few times and I think it makes a lot of sense, giving plenty of space to hang out and be comfortable.

As far as computers are concerned, I'm planning to slim down from the insane nine computers I had registered last year. I'm going to build an enclosure for the two large towers that will double as a night stand and keep everything self-contained. I'm trying to avoid the mess of cables I had last year. On one tower, I'll be running MythTV and possibly Asterisk. I need to do a bit of testing to see if they can both run simultaneously without problems. On the other box, I'm debating on setting up the usual dual-boot system or going with something a bit more tech savvy with some virtualized servers. I would probably use VMWare Server or write a nice web interface for qemu. Once again, I need to do more testing in this area. The network should be the fun part. I'm going to setup my WRT54G to route across the different VLANs that I'll be tagging inside the virtual machines, giving me a completely virtual network. There is a possibility that I'll get my hands on a Cisco Catalyst 29xx that could give me a lot more flexibility than the WRT54G.

Working toward a few projects I've had in mind, I decided that I needed a quick way to build some 2D graphics apps and have started playing with pygame. I've dabbled in a bit of game programming before, but I've never seen anything nearly this easy to work with. You want a sprite? Just create an object. You want a shape? Just create an object. You want to group a bunch of sprites together to do collision checking and batch updates? Just create an object. While pygame doesn't have the most comprehensive set of tools available, it augments python's natural ability to do rapid prototyping of basic applications. pygame also has a nice mix of object oriented and static methods to make things like graphic contexts easy to work with for the average programmer. For small games and just messing around, pygame is a nice balance of simplicity and extendability.

Aside from the gaming aspect of pygame, I'm actually using it as a quick way to create a graphics intensive app for network monitoring. If you read my blog often, or go back through the archives, you'll remember that I had another Summer of Code proposal accepted by the Jabber Software Foundation. I'm trying to create a simple, easy to understand representation of connections in a Jabber network similar to the 'Swarm' tab in Azureus; though I'm planning to make this much prettier and faster. I'm hoping that eventually, I'll be able to extend the code to do SNMP monitoring and possibly some basic diagnostic actions like ping and traceroute all from an eye candy interface.

Finally, I'd like to quickly rant about SourceForge. This morning, Subversion access was down for a matter of hours. If anything, SVN and CVS access should be the highest priority for open source development. All of the other services (bug tracking, web hosting, compile farms, mailing lists) are secondary to the actual development of code. Just my two cents.

# Free stuff, Summer of Code updates, Homeward bound, Off to CSH

<a href="http://static.neohippie.net/files/cisco_backpack_large.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="Cisco Networkers' 2006 Backpack"><img src="http://static.neohippie.net/files/cisco_backpack.jpg" class="post" alt="Cisco Networkers 2006 Backpack" /></a>
The last couple of days have been really good to me in terms of free stuff. At last night's <a href="http://www.phx-cisco-users.org/">Phoenix Cisco Users' Group</a> meeting, I won <a href="http://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1578701678&rl=1">Network Design and Case Studies (CCIE Fundamentals)</a> in the raffle... Pretty cool. My dad also gave me the backpack that Cisco was giving out at Networkers 2006. It looks like an excellent laptop bag but I won't really know until I start
traveling again.

I finally got things straightened out with housing at RIT and will be living with a freshman on CSH. I've been putting some thought into how I'd like to set up the room, physically and virtually. Physically, I'd like to
bunk the beds and put them up against the window, put both desks up against one of the walls, and a sofa on the opposite wall. I've seen this setup a few times and I think it makes a lot of sense, giving plenty of space to hang out and be comfortable.

As far as computers are concerned, I'm planning to slim down from the insane nine computers I had registered last year. I'm going to build an enclosure for the two large towers that will double as a night stand
and keep everything self-contained. I'm trying to avoid the mess of cables I had last year. On one tower, I'll be running MythTV and possibly Asterisk. I need to do a bit of testing to see if they can both run simultaneously without problems. On the other box, I'm debating on setting up the usual dual-boot system or going with something a bit more tech savvy with some virtualized servers. I would probably use VMWare Server or write a nice web interface for qemu. Once again, I need to do more testing in this area. The network should be the fun part. I'm going to setup my WRT54G to route across the different VLANs that I'll be tagging inside the virtual machines, giving me a completely virtual network. There is a possibility that I'll get my hands on a Cisco Catalyst 29xx that could give me a lot more flexibility than the WRT54G.

Working toward a few projects I've had in mind, I decided that I needed a quick way to build some 2D graphics apps and have started playing with <a href="http://www.pygame.org/">pygame</a>. I've dabbled in a bit of game programming before, but I've never seen anything nearly this easy to work with. You want a sprite? Just create an object. You want a shape? Just create an object. You want to group a bunch of sprites together to do collision checking and batch updates? Just create an object. While pygame doesn't have the most comprehensive set of tools available, it augments python's natural ability to do rapid prototyping of basic applications. pygame also has a nice mix of object oriented and static methods to make things like graphic contexts easy to work with for the average programmer. For small games and just messing around, pygame is a nice balance of simplicity and extendability.