Brr….

After taking a few days off from it, I started to hack on Drink again. Today, I removed a stupidity from the protocol that was inherited from whatever stub daemon that Joe initially used.. It stuck a Null character (\0) at the end of each line of a STAT response. Joe has an excuse, he hacked his client/server out in 10 hours over a weekend. I was just lazy. :P

I cleaned up the source and UI for the Unix commandline client that Joe wrote as well. That is more of an ongoing battle with my dislike for straight ‘C’ more than anything. :)

It certainly does look cold and solid wet outside.

I’ve got a drink-ing problem

Ok, so I continue to work on drink. :) As I believe I have mentioned before, we have broken the project up into phases. The first phase is laying down the infrastructure for the machine and enabling people to ask what drinks are in the machine and letting them drop a drink…

As of this morning, I believe that this phase is now complete. I wrapped up a few loose ends, changed the way I was authenticating users, made users timeout if they picked their nose for too long… This project is certainly keeping my attention. Plus, I talked with Bill about licensing the code, and we agreed on a BSD-style license.. :P Down with the GPL!

Drink

I have been working on Drink a whole lot these days, and I finally added some info about what I have been doing to my projects page. I spent most of this morning (after Chem) documenting the protocol that Joe whipped up last year.

I am hoping to support the ‘classic’ protocol as well once I get some documentation.

Gravity holds galaxies together…..

…..but 8am class rips my head apart…. :) Jetlag and this new schedule are working in concert to really make my life complicated right now. :) I assume that once my body readjusts to the timezone, and my mind adjusts to waking up at 7am instead of noon, things should get better.

It’s early in the quarter, so I am still in that “not much to do” state of mind…. I am going to leverage this to my advantage and do some Calculus this weekend… Man, I really wish I had a professor who spoke english. :) My classes this quarter don’t seem too bad so-far, but I guess that it is still a bit early to pass judgement.

In theory, Jon and I are headed back to Imaging Science around 12:30pm for another round of Junkyard Wars on the big screen. Unfortunately, right now I am less than motivated to do anything… :)

I am also going to try and wrap up my work on phase 1 of Drink (which means getting it back to the classic Drink functionality, dropping drinks over the network when asked to). It turns out that the TINI board does not support either ObjectOutputStream or ObjectInputStream. Of course, I would have known this had I just paid attention to the TINI API Differences. While the TINI API supports almost all of Java 1.1, there are a few differences. Fortunately, I was only using serialization in a handful of places, so I just have to hack out a different solution. I used Serialization because it was easy, not because it was necessary. :P

The Birdcage sucks.

Ok, I like Robin Williams, but that movie blows. My sister, Larissa, and my Mom are currently watching it. Fortunately, life in the dorms have built up my ability to ignore irritations, so…

This break has been great so far… I haven’t done much of anything… Last night I stayed up until about 2:30am hacking on Drink and talking to Chris which was cool. I woke up at 2pm this afternoon (I almost hit 12 hours)… I guess I am catching on all the lost sleep I accrued this past quarter. I found out that I got an ‘A’ in my Operating Systems II course, which is exciting, because our whole team worked our tails off all quarter.

Chuck came over today and we just chilled, and ended up going for a little ride to the Rockaway Mall and Barnes and Noble… Ran into a girl from High School who I hadn’t seen in a few moons…

Bill Kuker hooked me up with his API for the drink hardware today, so I might work on finalizing that work up today. Most of the server is done, but I have simple stubs in the places where I needed to interact with the hardware.

Wow…

Yeah, being home is fun…. I have been chilling with the family, which is cool. My youngest sister Aimee doesn’t return from school until Tuesday, but Larissa is home…. Everyone has a decent amount of time off this weekend, so…

I hacked more on the new server for drink today…. I had some ideas in the car (some inspired by Jon) that I implemented earlier today. Originally my code had it’s own authentication database, but now I authenticate against the house’s db. Only the account balances are kept in the server’s own db now, and once the RTP’s get LDAP kicking on the house’s machines, I can get rid of that too.