Here at HOPE the current talk is discussing various methods for communicating without using corpoorate and government controlled and monitored infrastucture that we're all accustomed to.

As a licensed HAM, much of the info about how radio can be used to do long range comms isn't new to me. However, there have been some interesting tidbits: morse transmission over CW is very narrow band and uses very little power.

Software for encoding and decoding morse code is available which makes long range packet radio a good method for sending text communications. Some questionably legal methods for transmitting crytologically secured messages come to mind.

It is legal to use cryptography on MURS frequencies, but the long range low power capabilities are lost. I'm looking forward to finding an inexpensive set of equipment that can be used in combination with GNU radio to exchange messages long range. Perhaps the unlicensed bands will be hospitable.

I'm at The Last Hope right now with Rachel, Mike, and Andrew. Rob should be showing up later. If you're here too, catch me on IRC or call me, I'd love to catch up.

The Attendee Metadata project is quite interesting. It's a voluntary, participatory location system for sharing your location with other people attending an event. It's been deployed here at HOPE, and I hope to see a lot of interesting results come out of the ability to find people who are near me or have similar interests. It's not fully deployed yet, but they're working on it.

More posts to follow.

Sometimes developers toss a few little amusing strings and commands into their programs. VIM is no exception. There are some useful and amusing command in VIM which are real gems.
Hard to remember? Yup. Long? Sure. Gives you the suspicion that VIM has some sort of compressed bytecode command system? Definitely. But what really takes the cake is the command to browse files.
That's definitely not a coincidence. Can't be. Somebody wanted this to be in VIM, and made it so. Unknown coder, you've really got what it takes to say what you mean. I salute you.

If you're too spontaneous, people will just find you unreliable.
If you're not spontaneous enough, you're boring.

How many unreliable, boring people do you know?

This Sunday, I released a short little project I made called PyFBUploader. It went from idea to release in a few hours, and as is wont to happen when little thought goes into a plan, a problem arose. I realized last night that the session storage code for keeping a Facebook platform session open for extended periods of time was insecure; a malicious user with read access to the user's home directory could read the stored session and potentially insert arbitrary photos into the legitimate user's photo approval queue.

This isn't a serious problem, but it highlights something not everyone thinks of when building an application - file security. It is important to make sure files are created in such a way that information that is not supposed to be available to anyone else remains secure.

I've been remarkably averse to uploading pictures to facebook for a long time now. As I haven't ever got around to getting Java applets to work in Firefox on my machine, I quite dislike the interface facebook presents for adding pictures. I'm relegated to using the 5-pictures-at-a-time laborious HTTP uploader. Today I wanted to upload a whole lot of pictures from my brother's graduation, so I spent a couple hours building something to do it, rather than spend 15 minutes doing it manually.

The result, PyFBUploader, is a command line program - it's very fast for me to upload things now. I'm satisfied.

And so it begins. I'm home for the summer, and mostly caught up on sleep, if not caught up on anything else - I think I slep about 20 hours today. Now I get to unpack all my hastily packed things, clean everything, and get some consulting work done. I'll probably be releasing Psyched 0.1.3 within a week or so, as well.

Radio License!

A few days ago the paperwork finally went through at the FCC - I'm now a licensed HAM, callsign KB1QLE. I don't have a radio yet, but I'm on the lookout for one - preferably a dual band portable, but I might make do with a single band that scans.

MQP

I've recently signed on with an MQP advisor, Craig Wills. For those no familiar with the MQP, it's a project drawing heavily on one's major that WPI undergraduates must complete to graduate.

We're still thinking about what exactly my project will be; several ideas have been put out there but there is nothing definite yet. I'm probably going to be doing my project alone, as I've heard plenty of horror stories about MQP partners being incompetent, not being motivated, or just plain not doing any serious work.

Today, I need to do a few things. I woke up relatively early for a Sunday, at 9AM. Feeling the monetary pinch of needing to feed myself, I did a couple hours of consulting work before breakfast - strangely, even though I was working, I felt like I was putting off my schoolwork. I'm not sure how it happened, but I am actually on top of things. It might have something to do with the ridiculous amount of work I did last week.

Back to my original point. I have to do some things today. Amont them are:

Get

• Some blank tshirts
• Poppy seeds
• Deoderant
• Lemons
• Toothpaste

Do

• Update IQP presentation for tomorrow's meeting
• Same with the report
• Do databases homework (due tomorrow at 9)
• Create a framework for multiple lexical scopes for my Compilers class
• Bake

It's all pretty managable. I guess junior year is almost done, then. I'll be taking a few weeks before starting my full time job at Mercury to do some consulting work from home, spending time with family, and probably doing not a little bit of open source work on my personal projects. I have a few interesting ideas that I haven't started on yet.

I found an interesting meme at stopped clock.
My desktop:And my server:Interesting, eh?

Many of my friends at WPI use handheld radios to communicate frequently throughout the day. I've realized that it would be much more cost effective and convenient for me to just get a radio rather than using my cell all the time. Radio is also a much more group-friendly communications medium, so organizing things would be that much easier.

So, I'm looking to get licensed as a Technician Class operator by the FCC. The WPI Wireless Associaion is holding a testing on the 17th, when I'm going to try for my license. I hear I can get a decent starter radio on eBay for 60 bucks or so. Radio ahoy!