Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck!

May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!

May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven.

Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.

And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us.

Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.

For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever, 4m3n.

Sometime in the not too distant past (Assume after 7/12, but before 7/19), in a land far, far away, Charlie Foobar must have been a bit on the cold in the ETL and decided to turn off one of the A/C units. Charlie's comfort was assured... it wasn't freezing in the lab anymore.

Much time passed, and Charlie eventually went home. Unfortunately, Mr. Foobar forgot to turn the A/C back on before vacating the ETL.

The sun came out and the heat and humidity were strong. The temperature in the ETL climbed. The lonely server cabinet, with the 16 machines inside chugging away on their benchmarks and other tasks, became an oven.

Time passed, until one day, one of the resident ETL hackers traveled to the ETL to work on his various projects. Upon entering the lab, he said "Wow, its a tad bit warm in here. I wonder if something is wrong." The hacker carefully checked the lab and found that Charlie Foobar left the A/C off. Immediately the resident hacker turned on the A/C unit.

The hacker then began the duty of inspecting the machines to see if Charlie Foobar's actions invoked the Snafu Fairy. "G64a, nominal. Workstations, nominal...." The hacker continued the check until he was left with the final set of machines: the lonely server cabinet.

The hacker carefully opened the cabinet door and saw that everything appeared ok, so he proceeded to touch top server in the cabinet. "OW! This cluster is exceptionally hot." he exclaimed. So the hacker opened the cabinet doors and left the ETL in order to get lunch and a venti coffee at Starbucks.

After lunch, the hacker returned to the ETL and once again touched the top server in the cabinet. "Much better. The machines are nice and cool. Hurray!"

The hacker started to work on his various projects, bringing happiness and open source software to the world.

And everybody lived happily ever after. The end.

My project is going well. I now have most every feature working (for the most part). I still need to write up some doccumentation.

I will be presenting OWTF v. 1.0 (release) in Dr. George's class soon.

Just in case you were wondering, March 22 is a big day for holidays. To the best of my knowledge, there are 3 big holidays to celebrate.

Listed in random order:
International Goof-Off Day
William Shatner's Birthday
**My Birthday**

Just thought you would like to know :-D

Its been over a month since my last post. Many things have happened since then, and I have been very busy.

First: spring break. Spring Break this year sucked. It started with my mom being hospitalized and having her gall bladder removed. It ended with me coming down with Stomach Flu. Nothing says "spring break" like a fever, the runs, and being unable to eat. From what I heard, CBS wanted to use my dinner from the first night of my stomach flu as a replacement for the show "Lost".

Second: Grad School. This is good news. I have been accepted into grad school at Loyola University Chicago. :-D

Third: my project. Project is going well. I have started the web client. I still need to finish the collector and start the alert daemon, but those will both be easy (hopefully). Everything else is on schedual. This is also a good thing.

Fourth: My ISP has been screwing me around. Hey, how fucking long does it take to fix a reverse DNS entry? Ignore DNS propigation, it should be a relatively easy thing to fix, taking no more than a day or two for the trouble ticket to be resolved. Unfortunately, that isn't the case for my ISP. D'Oh!

Fifth: My birthday is on March 22. Start buying and sending gifts and cards now! :-D

Thats all for now.

I'm sitting in my CS390 class and bored due to the fact that the professor is going on and on about Zope/Plone.

Anyways, time for an update concerning my project.

OWFS: OWFS has released a new stable version. It kicks ass.

My Project:

I have named my project OWTF. That is pronounced "OUT IF" not "Oh, WTF." The website is located at http://etl.cs.luc.edu/research/owtf/ .

I am now working with owpython, and it rocks. I have successfully gotten data from my sensors and have sent it via UDP to multicast on the net. Works nicely.

I now need to work with MySQL and start the web and desktop clients. This will be fun.

I will post an update when news happens.

Today I resume classes at Loyola. This semester I have 2 classes: CS 363 (Algorithms) and CS 390 (Programming Project). The the fun begin.

Part of my programming project will be to build a distributed weather monitoring system. The professor and I have choses to use OneWire based devices from ibuttonlink.com. This project will run exclusively on linux (Gentoo, to be exact).

One of the requirements will be OWFS. There is a big effort to get owpython to work correctly on Gentoo. Currently we are recommending that users add ' export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/owfs/lib ' to their /etc/bash/bashrc file so that owpython can find the correct library files.

This temporary fix works, but a more permanent fix is in the works.

More information will be posted when it becomes available.

Today I had the fun job of going shopping with mom. After a nice lunch, I drove her to J. C. Penny because she wanted an item that they sold.

Well, the shopping experience sucked. Whats worse is their POS system (Symbol "RealPOS" registers). The thing uses an unsecured windows / internet explorer setup for all credit card transactions. Thats right, no ssl for network traffic containing customer data.

Making matters worse, there were customer credit card numbers (with exp. dates and checksum digits) **clearly** visible across the counter.

We went elsewhere to spend money.

==Project Update==

My weather monitoring project is still stalled.

Its been a long time since I last wrote a journal. ..

My family and I decided to spend Christmas plus a few extra days (read: Dec 21-26) in downtown Chicago. We stayed at the Residence Inn, which is just a few blocks away from the famed Handcock Center, Water Tower, and my University, Loyola University (Water Tower Campus).

Overall the trip was fun... Spent most of the time playing tourist. Got to wander the Mag. mile and browse through the overpriced stores. Got to play consumer and complain that CompUSA has shitty service (and threaten to not make our next big corporate purchase there for the Comp. Sci. department).

We also got to visit the Field Museum and see everything it has to offer. Now that was fun. :-) They have a lot of great new exhibits that are worth checking out.

For Christmas dinner, we ate at Bijan's Bistro. Overall the food was ok. Everything upto dinner was good. Unfortunately, my steak was ice cold, and after two valiant attempts, the kitchen staff was able to raise the meat temperature to body temperature. At least my dinner was free, as well as free coffee and desert for the rest of us. I may go back there some day when it is not an extreme day.

Anyways... my newest project for ChiOSI is a distributed weather monitoring system. We are using sensors from ibuttonlink.com for this project. The project itself will most likely be done mostly in python.

Already I have hit a snag: OWFS has nearly no documentation and both the release and CVS versions of the software are broken somewhere. Making matters worse, there is no Gentoo ebuild available. So, until OWFS gets installed, I'm stalled.

My next journal will be posted after I get OWFS to install OR after I find a suitable alternative.

Weem this year was great.

Got to the hotel(Sheraton Chicago Northwest) Friday afternoon, and partied all weekend long.

The hotel rooms sucked ass though. I stayed with my parents to save money. We had a disabled room due to my father's MS. Needless to say, the hotel room was sure as hell disabled, but not in a good way. The toilet was lower than any other in the hotel (no joke), the shower was inaccessable (had a shitty looking fiberglass tub, no shower seat...). We ended up getting a free night and 3 free breakfasts (which they charged us for anyways, the bastards).

Convention wise, things went well. Got to see the Great Luke Ski perform :-). The only issue to report was the Pretentious Drinking event. This event is where you are given 4 free shots. Unfortunately, it ends up where people get 10+ free shots and get shitfaced pretty quick. They really need to fix that.

First Slashdot Journal Post Ever! W00T!

(Ok, that was dorky.)

Its been a long ass day, and I think I have a great deal to ramble on about.

Today was a long day of classes and lab work. It started last night around 3am-ish when I started working on my midterm for my computer ethics class. Finished that around 5:20, emailed a minute later. Ended up doing 6 medium level soduku puzzles before falling alseep about an hour later.

Slept till 10:30, got out of the house at 11:45am. Morning commute sucked ass as usual. For some odd reason, the drivers happen to be shittier than usual. Some dorkass happened to cause a multi-car crash which caued the street I traverse to Loyola to be almost completely blocked. Strangely, even with this delay, my total commute time was 35 minutes to LSC.

Class, naptime in class... usual stuff. Ended up doing a couple of hours in the lab. Nothing like having your machine testing being interrupted by such minor things like being unable to reach around the machines due to a lack of usuable space. Ended up having to reorganize the lab and moving the 8 machines across the room.

8 nodes... too bad 2 don't work (not my fault). Guess what I'll be working on next week...

Of course, that will be in addition to testing and mapping IEEE 1394 on the back of the machines.

(For those who don't know me, I am a student at Loyola University Chicago. I'm a Comp. Sci. major who is doing a little side research (clustering) work for a professor. I am also a lab maintainer for our Gentoo Linux Lab. I am also ramping up to do projects for the Gentoo on BSD and SNORT projects.)

Needless to say, I got home pretty late tonight. I still have to get ready for the Chicago Mensa convention, but that will be easy compared to my week.

Anyways, thats enough of this for now.