Not much has been happening lately.  I was supposed to go pumpkin picking today, but Troy weather had different plans.  Hopefully the rescheduled date won't be affected.

My roommate came across this little IRC to AIM, etc gateway today.  It's not bad, and would be even better if it kept connections open when the client was detached.  Looks kinda nifty in irssi.

Argh, senior year is turning out to be a bit of work.  Did I mention that adding external memory to a M68HC12 microcontroller is a pain in the butt?  Ok, I did, now you all know.

Haven't posted any news lately, sorry about that.  Schoolwork has been keeping me busy!

Let's see ... what's happening around here lately.  For one thing, apparently something relating to the steam tunnel exploded in the Ricketts Building today.  Some people took photos, and then were quickly shooed away by public safety.  Gotta love old buildings, I think.

My roommate has been working on a new http/smb/etc search engine lately.  It's opt-in, as to not infringe on the strange networking policies that we're supposedly following.  If you're on campus, check it out.  The http indexer is pretty neat .. some interesting videos have been found floating around on web servers recently.

On another note, I picked up a new wireless card for my notebook, after realizing that the built-in 802.11b adapter apparently lacks a [good] antenna.  The SMC2532W-B seemed like a good deal at the time for a 200mW card, so I picked it up for around $56.  Very nice range; I can get around 68/92 link quality from an AP across the quad.  Oh, and I might add, picks up alot more than my built-in adapter when put in monitor mode.  I sometime wonder how I transmit any packets successfully in the quad anymore.

Well, it seems VeriSign has finally done the unthinkable.  Every unregistered .net and .com domain now resolves to a search page.  Try it.  This is obviously going to break a bunch of network apps that expect to get errors when looking up nonsense domains.

Never fear, there are patches for BIND and DJBDNS.  Please boycott VeriSign for their hijacking of the internet ...

First week of classes went well.  At least two of my classes (MPS and Motivation) involve large projects.  Should be fun!

I've also been swimming daily at the Robison Pool.  Hopefully the trend will continue.

Ah, back to school.  My senior year looks like it's going to be quite interesting, if not totally exhausting.

I have a different roommate this year, but the same room in the Quad.  My job as SAC chair of the RPI-ACM might prove to be quite educational, considering I'm administering things that are somewhat new to me.

And ... everybody should come to the RPI-ACM installfest on Sunday, in Lally 102!

Hopefully power is back for most people by now.  RPI had a few glitches yesterday, but everything seems to be back to normal in that area.

Let's what Win32/Blaster does tonight when windowsupdate.com fails to resolve ...   (Update on 08/15/2003: I think I forgot a verb in that last sentence.)

Just submitted my last Java project for CS352.  Hopefully this will be my last Java project for awhile!

In other news, RPI's network seems to be deteriorating exponentially.  Massive packet loss this past week and a 4 hour Internet 1 outage today.  The outage today seems to be Broadwing's fault, and they patched it by routing our traffic through some loop that totally kills any decent RTTs.  Check out the terrible stats using the MRTG front-end and clicking on "Packet Loss" on the right drop-down box.

I find it very surprising that a $40k/year institution supposedly being the most-wired in the nation can have terrible networking issues like this.  After working at Rutgers this summer, I'm positive that RPI could learn alot from their network engineering ...