The www.wasabiflux.org network is composed of these computers:
Hull - a giant, full tower Athlon XP that serves the majority of the www.wasabiflux.org services.
NIC - a "New Internet Computer" that serves IRC and mail.
Successor - Exotherm's replacement: faster, stronger, better.
JackBook - a fully-loaded black MacBook, my new main machine.
Tibook - G4 Powerbook, multi-purpose Mac OS X machine.
Powermac 9500 - the previous server. It's been dead weight for a while.

Software Projects

News

July 22, 2005
The biggest news is that I have a real domain name now: wasabiflux.org. Hopefully my attempt at messing with Yahoo's website forwarding will let me at least pretend to host this site on port 80. Otherwise, all HTTP access is through port 8080. Cox blocks port 80 and port 6667, and I have to share my single IP address with five other engineers (they're all port-hungry).

I sold Exotherm to a previous roommate, and I'm in the process of building its replacement. The net cost of selling Exotherm and buying the parts for this new computer is only slightly more than what I would have paid to upgrade Exotherm's video card alone, and this new computer is much faster. I have yet to name it.

I've also brought the 9500 with my for experimentation, and I found an abandoned Compaq Presario that I hope to put to good use. My spare parts computer is only lacking a power supply and case, and I may have an interesting Dell motherboard to experiment with.

I've been working for five weeks now, doing mostly Perl and sysadmin stuff. I've been on a project that involves watching gateway traffic and compiling it into a useful log format, so I've been learning a lot about packets and TCP connections in order to track them and log data transfer. I'm realizing that Perl really is a useful language for a lot of things. As far as persistent data formats go, C is much better at binary formats than Java, and Perl is much better at text formats than Java (though Java is catching up), so for what I like to do, there's really no reason to use Java. Too bad I had to spend two years "learning" it.

May 24, 2005
Well, all interested buyers of Exotherm suddenly became uninterested or unable to purchase. Also, the prospective buyer of my CRT decided he didn't want it when he found out it was a CRT. So, I am poor with a lot of junk for the time being.

However! I am in the process of getting a job programming Perl for the summer. I'm halfway through: I've submitted my resume, and met and impressed the company President; now I just have to do the interview with the VP. It looks like that will occur during finals week, though, so I'll have to work out the logistics of it all, including transportation down the coast. If it all works out well, I'll have a bit of money to burn eventually, but less time to burn it. We'll see what happens. More information later.

May 8, 2005
In six weeks I'll move into a duplex in Isla Vista. I'll have my own room, a closet in the hall (server closet!), and shared space throughout the rest of the house. That means I have a lot more room for more computers, and I will be adding to the www.wasabiflux.org network. But, the move will involve some complexities relating to when my stay in the dorms ends, when my lease begins, and having to move everything around, so Hull will be down for about a week before June 20.

As far as new computers go, I've posted a list of proposed new hardware above. Exotherm will be sold by the end of the quarter (I have more than one interested buyer), and when I go home I will collect the spare parts I need to build a Frankenstein-ish addition to the network.

I've also added SILC Aqua to the list of software projects. I'll think about adding EigenMaze.

Dec. 1, 2004
Two and half weeks ago, on Saturday, November 13th, I competed in the ACM ICPC Southern California Regional Programming Contest with two other UCSB students. We managed tenth place out of 62, being beaten by teams from CalTech, Harvey Mudd, UCSD, and UCLA. More here.