It has been along time since I have made an entry. I will begin by summarizing the mailing list I am lurking on and then the project Rob and I have just begun.
So the mailing list so far has not been to kind to me. There is hardly any development on the ipw2100 driver. All discussion has been mainly on the ipw2200 and sometimes on the ipw2915 or something similar to that number. In either case I do not posess that wiress device so I do not care. What I do care about is never being discussed.
That also beings up another interesting question. For some unknown reason to me there has been a release of a new ipw2100 driver. There was no discussion about a new driver being released on the mailing list since I have been lurking on it. This brings up an interesting question because when I was playing around with kismet server the program worked flawlessly with my old version of the drivers, but when I upgraded to these "new" drivers everything stopped working completely. It was like i was using a ip2200 or ipw2915 driver which has no monitoring/promiscous mode. It makes me think that Intel put pressure on the developers of the driver to disable that feature of the driver. Although it might just be my over active imagination and what it comes down to is jsut uncompatibility. It makes you think though.
So on to the project Rob and I decided to take upon ourselves to do. We have decided to manipulate the firefox extension ForecastFox and create a similar extension called SkiFox. After about 30-45 minutes of searching mozdev we were able to determine that any project that was currently being hosted on mozdev was open source and fell under one of three licenses MPL, LGPL, or GPL.
After discovering this fact we promptly registered our project with mozdev and are currently awaiting an acceptance email and information on a CVS server which will be hosted by mozdev. While waiting I have downloaded the ForecastFox extension and have poked around the code to see what is going on.
One obsticle i can see popping up early is that it is summer. There are no current ski reports to test with. This may pose a problem if there is no information on weather.com to hook into. I hope that information that was available from the last days of the ski season are still available by whatever method ForecastFox uses to update itself. I havnt yet figured out where the ski report information is located on the weather.com website. I hope to have these issues worked out fairly soon.
I am thinking about writing a paper on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which will involve steps and practices which web masters can take to hopefully improve their ranking on search engines. I have been conducting a little study of my own for an independent study I have with the TC department and I was thinking about incorporating it into what I am doing for COSI.
Currently there are very few resources for finding out just how search engines rank their pages. There is alot of speculation but there is no hard evidence about how it is done. That is unless you work for said search engines. The paper I am planning on writing would attempt to get to the facts based on what I have experienced while conducting my independent study. It would pull all the information I have gathered into a single place where people could access it easily.
Here are some updates on the mailing list (ipw2100) I have been following:
Since there is no point for me to make up time frames for when I worked on my tutorial I just lumped all the previous report dates into a nice digest if you will. Everything I have accomplished up to the 20th of February is listed below.
So far this semester I have produced a multi page, multi program tutorial for spyware and malware removal. The tutorial's main audience is focused on people who own windows machines and barely know the basics of computers. Although the tutorial is helpful to the advanced user as well if not only for new ideas on combatting spyware.
The tutorial goes step by step describing in painstaking detail every button they have to press to get the programs to work correctly. The tutorial covers two very popular programs and a slightly lesser known but very powerful registry program. The tutorial starts out with the basics of spyware prevention; simple ways to prevent the spyware from ever beign downloaded. It then moves into removal of spyware with the Ad-aware program by lavasoft. The tutorial quickly goes through the operation of said program and then moves onto Spybot Search & Destroy. The tutorial briefly describes the properties of removal, imunization, host lists, and BHO (not in any detail or even mentioning BHO). After the two novice programs have finished working their majic to clean the users computer the next step is a program called RegCleaner by Jouni Vuorio. RegCleaner is a program aimed at power users and as such there is a disclaimer on the tutorial stating I am not responsible for any damage caused to programs/operating systems. The tutorial details the removal of any left over registry entries and startup entries. After using these three programs and using some new found common sense from the prevention page most users should be relatively spyware free.
Another tutorial I have been toying with producing is a Firefox and Thunderbird tutorial. However, due to the sheer number of tutorials already out there for that then my time would be better spent on some other endeavor.
Another option for a tutorial would be one for promoting open source software and/or helping users make the switch to open source programs. Such programs might be gaim, gimp, etc. Although, I prefer the actual programs (aim, photoshop) these open source programs try to emulate. So I am in a bind for this idea.
Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.
The tutorial can be found on my website, www.swiftman.com.