It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything … so much so that I decided today I would psyche myself up and force myself to write something.

Over the past month or so I’ve been toiling away working on my PSD coursework. It’s going fairly well… my portfolio for APS is coming together. I’ve been writing some code, and also writing some blog posts that talk about the code (though they’re still drafts for now. I really need to edit them down, one is about 3000 words and I’m only half-way through writing it!). The centerpiece of this will be a program called SWiNTERNET, which is a Windows GUI client for the Swinburne Residences’ internet cost-balance system, StarNet Data Accounting. Why am I writing a new client for the StarNet system? There’s a long answer which will appear in one of the portfolio blog posts I’m writing, but the short answer is that their provided client fails miserably. My client is an exponential improvement over their provided client. I thought I’d use some visuals to prove this point. Here’s the client we are provided by StarNet:

Here’s my client:

Yes, mine will have usage graphs. However the statistics and graphing part isn’t coded yet: right now it’s just graphing random data. It looks impressive though. All of the quota data is being pulled straight from the StarNet server. The proprietary protocol used for the StarNet client is surprisingly simple, however I’ll talk about that more in a future post.

Sidenote: A virtual cookie for the person who notices the bug here, aside from the statistics and graphs not working.

I also recently finished my Computer Logic and Essentials assignment. This involved taking a scenario for a takeover of a company, and transmogrifying it into a flowchart and pseudocode, as well as doing a bunch of things with Venn diagrams and set theory. Fairly straight forward.

There’s also an assignment for Enterprise Technologies and Architectures, where we have to cost the IT infrastructure for a retirement village. This is a pain, partly because it’s quite unrelated to software development (shopping around for routers? That’s for the Bachelor of IT guys!) and also because it’s a groupwork project. Groupwork sucks.

I haven’t really been doing much else … Last week was the mid-semester break, which I spent at home writing code and playing Guitar Hero. Quite fun.

One other thing I did before I went away, I built a cantenna. As I’ve previously ranted about before, the Swinburne Residences sucks as far as internet access goes. There’s the crappy StarNet wired LAN, which works out to be $0.18/second, or there’s the Swinburne campus wireless, if you can get it. Every now and then, my laptop was able to pick up a very very weak signal, and drop off about five minutes later. I thought I’d try a directional antenna. There are numerous articles which talk about using a can as a directional antenna. Since I didn’t have much else to do one weekend, I thought I’d give it a try. I bought a cheap Netgear WG111 USB WiFi adapter, and mounted it inside a Pringles can. After playing around with the position of it, the results were surprisingly good. Now when I plug it into my machine, it will pick up the wireless signal almost immediately, with an Excellent signal strength. The only downside is now I’ve got this sinister-looking Pringles can with a USB cable coming out of it blutacked to my IKEA shelving unit, which looks suspicious to say the least:

Oh well, it’s not as sinister and suspicious as the evil money-making scheme which is the residences’ internet.

Not really much else is happening in my life, it’s all somewhat consumed by uni. Well, uni and watching British comedies. Two excellent shows I’ve been watching lately are Snuff Box and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. I highly recommend obtaining them from The Usual Sources and watching them if you’re in the mood for surrealist, British laughs.

Anyway, that’s about it for my life for now. Be sure to tune in next month for a heap of long blog posts about my SWiNTERNET project!

–Ben

BTW: Yes, the title is completely irrelevant. However I couldn’t think of anything witty or clever, so I just used what was my desktop wallpaper at the time, which funnily enough, is bearblasting:

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