COSI Notes

Week of Feb 7, 2005:
    Here is my report on my mailing lists:

Gentoo-Desktop:
  1. On average how many messages are there per day?
    About 10, it has relatively low traffic unless there is a big topic.

  2. Are there many different people posting or just a few?
    There seems to be a handful of names that appear quite often...

  3. What were some of the major topics?
    PGP signing - interesting to note that it doesn't seem to work for most people's email systems.  KDE's screensaver (didn't pay much attention to this one because I use gnome).  Another one was on mozilla dependencies.

  4. What was the topic on the list that interested you the most?
    PGP signing because I've messed around with this a lot.

  5. Are the back issues of the list archived?
    Yes.

  6. Where can you join the list?
    http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

  7. Can the average user understand the topics on this list?
    Most of the topics are very straightforward and in plain english (as in not a lot of technical speak or code).

  8. Who should join this list?
    This would be a pretty useful list for anyone who is just starting out because they may share the same problems as the people on the list are asking.

  9. Do new users post a lot of questions?
    I'm not sure.  Some do.

  10. How are new users treated on the list?
    11. All questions are treated pretty much the same, so they get their questions answered.

Week of Jan 31, 2005:

    I have chosen to work on the Kismet project.  In short, the idea is to use kismet to alert the user when there is enough network traffic to break their web key.  Then they can change it for obvious security reasons.

Week of Jan 23, 2005:

    I have been reseaching Stateless Linux which can be found at Fedora Stateless Linux for anyone else interested.  The basic idea is to have network with computers that appear to be thin clients but the applications run on the actual computer.  Also there will be a read only root filesystem.  Originally I thought this would be really cool to do in the lab mainly because it's never been done before.  I will re-evaluate project ideas for next week and see if this is still my plan.

    This week I designed a new GDM theme for the lab.  It runs when the machines are updating, telling the user's what is going on, and doesn't provide a log-in box.  I simply editted the XML file to do this and used the old graphics.