Lithium Flower (2)
one quick google later and here are the credits for lithium flower:


vocal: Scott Matthew
words: Tim Jensen
music: Yoko Kanno

that explains the english lyrics and the semi-cowboy accent. nice music for a japanese composition though!

Lithium Flower
she's so cold and human
it's something humans do
she stays so golden solo
she's so number nine
she's incredible math
just incredible math

oh yeah, i got lithium flower running in my head this morning. its the closing theme from that kickass cyberpunk anime, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. i'm not sure if its by a japanese band or not, but its in english and it rocks! i mean, the genre of the song is rock! complete with electric guitars, bass, drums, and rockin' tune sung in husky semi-cowboy accent.

now, since i still haven't heard from that guy from our customer company, and i still can't proceed with more testing at the moment. therefore, i think i'll just spend the day browsing whatever until we have our general meeting with The Boss today. maybe i'll google 'lithium flower' and see whose song it is...

i smell lithium now...

Rest In Peace, notebook
*sigh*...

i just called up Tricom, the local Toshiba dealer, and followed up the status of my notebook, which i brought there for a checkup and repairs two weeks ago. turns out, the motherboard's fried already, in addition to the battery. motherboard costs P41,000 already, while battery costs 7 thou plus.... at this rate, i might as well buy a new notebook....

i feel weak... nanlalata ako.... i feel like i've lost an old friend.... i feel like weeping, but no tears come. there's just this empty feeling inside. i never even had a chance to recycle it into a robot.

*sigh*

we had a meeting with hedwig yesterday, all of the staff -- that is, all five of us! the good news is, hedwig is getting swamped with proposal requests from prospective clients, which means this year is shaping up to be a real busy year for us. hopefully this is the year when real money starts pouring into our small company. the bad news is, that russian guy alex is getting pressured for results from his boss, bob, and consequently that pressure is getting passed down to us. therefore, hedwig's come up with an aggressive strategy to deliver everything by end of february. yes, february! talk about tight deadlines! a huge telco app suite in only a little over a month! the nice thing of it is, being the only other C++ guy around apart from hedwig himself, i get to do the new all-SIP softswitch itself! W00T!

hedwig will be doing a general framework for the softswitch to make things easier for me. i really don't mind; he's the expert here, so he's in a better position to know the requirements for the project than i am. besides, our working relationship is shaping up to becoming a guru-apprentice type of relationship, so hopefully some of his guru-ness will rub off on me, especially when it comes to VoIP.

also yesterday, i installed fluxbox on my pc. richard's been obsessing on installing it on and off the past few days or weeks. yesterday, without any premeditated planning whatsoever, i went ahead and downloaded and installed it successfully. he on the other hand, had problems with it. ah well; he has this weird habit of envying anything i can do or have, and he kind of tries to show off to me whatever he can learn to do on linux. the thing is, i'm not even trying to compete with him! but my running fluxbox successfully yesterday was kind of cool though -- it'll teach him not to brag too much about his own LI|\|UX |-|4CKI|\|G SKI|_|_Z!

another nice quiet morning at the office. actually everything's really pretty quiet here all day everyday, especially since once we all begin to code, practically nobody says anything for hours and hours on end. what's different now is... i'm actually HERE in the morning! usually i come in 12 noon, and leave 8pm, but the past few days i've been coming in early, around 9:30 to 10 am, ever since i got delayed last tuesday when there was this lameass demonstration at edsa in front of camp crame -- i only clocked four hours at the office then and i had to make up for it the rest of the week.

our customer emailed me back about their radius server. maybe their server sends back replies to a different port, he says. weird. i'll have to discuss this with hedwig; our radius client only receives packets at whatever socket is used to send packets in the first place.

the good news is, they say our radius packets are all good, meaning it has all the vendor-specific attributes they need. all we need now is to figure out how to receive their responses on a different port. hmmmmmm....

our customer finally set up a radius server for us to play with, but something must still be wrong with their setup. i can send them the right radius packets, but none of their responses get back to me at all. wonder what the heck is wrong with them? i mean, when i test locally on my PC, everything's ok, and when i test against kabo's radius server on his PC, everything's ok too. its just when my program 'talks' to the customer's radius server, that's when i dont get any response back. now their logs show positively that they're getting my packets and that my packets are all valid, and that they're trying to respond to me properly, but somehow i never get their response.... hmmmmmmmmmmmm.........

on the other hand, this idle time i'm enjoying has allowed me to finally catch up on the rest of the issues of MegaTokyo up to the present! W00T! T|-|3 3V||_ IS 3V3RYWH3R3!

alrighty then! my IVR module is DONE! authentication with RADIUS is DONE! previously, the IVR module isn't fully integrated with my radius module, but now they are! calls can already get authenticated and get through! i just earned 1 million points with my boss, hedwig! yeeehhaaaa!

all that's left now is for our customer to give us the details of their RADIUS system and to test against their own radius box. following this up with our customer isn't my job anymore, though, so.... until the customer sets up a test box for me to play with, i can sit back and relax....

thesis update
alright, so i'll be doing a packet sniffing agent. let me now summarize what i'm supposed to do with my thesis...

my thesis will cover three approaches to web services-based network management:

1) Service Oriented Architecture approach
2) Peer-to-Peer Approach
3) SNMP-SOAP Hybrid Approach

in all cases my agent should be able to provide info on a node, all its interfaces, and at the very least, bandwidth utilization on each interface. again, for bandwidth utilization monitoring, i'll need to capture packets on the interface.

i've already sent my new proposal to ma'm mida and sir andrew, but i'm not really sure if its still in time for propsal defense on Jan 27. i had forgotten that i should submit a proposal well before jan 27 to give enough time for my panelists to review my proposal. *cross fingers*!

packet sniffing agent
for on and off the past few months, i've been thinking about how to write an agent that measures bandwidth utilization for a network interface. i'm thinking it should make a good feature to put into my thesis, into the agent i'll be doing. i asked PLUG (Philippine Linux Users Group) about it, and someone pointed me to netdevice as a means of programatically talking with the network interface device and getting/setting its info (IP Address, subnet mask, etc). while this was really interesting, i had guessed back then that in order to measure bandwidth utilization, i'd have to capture packets on the interface. this morning i remembered to look up the topic once more, until i finally thought of looking at freshmeat for bandwidth monitoring software. i downloaded two such software and looked at their sources. in both instances, they used libpcap and actually captured packets in order to measure bandwidth utilization. so, that settles it then -- i am going to have to capture packets to measure bandwidth afterall. this should be really interesting!

just think about it -- i could create a SOAP agent that sniffs packets on a network! actually, for me to measure bandwidth, i WOULD have to sniff packets; its just that my agent should filter the packets so that in computing for bandwidth utilization, only packets destined to and coming from the network interface should be taken into account. now, take away that filter, and i'll just have a plain old packet sniffing agent! coolness!

PH33R MY L33T H4C|<|NG S|<|LLZ!

hehehehe.... got that one from reading Megatokyo. that online comic is darned funny!

anyway, i finally finished my IVR Module... sweet! the softswitch now answers something like "Welcome! Enter your PIN followed by the # sign...." and "Enter the number you wish to call, followed by a # sign". man, it works! of course, it also can actually take your pin and the number you're calling. it also validates the your call against a radius server. in other words -- IT WORKS!

once more, with more "largo" feeling:

PH33R MY L33T H4C|<|NG S|<|LLZ!

W00T!

ok so i sound like a pathetic script kiddie hacker wannabe. its just that, in the context of megatokyo, that is so funny! its not meant to be intelligent -- its SUPPOSED to be stupid, that's what's so funny about it. heck, just go browse megatokyo, willya?

alright, next on my "to do" list, is my thesis. i'll finish my document tomorrow. i hope i can still make it, but i'm not sure i can make the deadline for the defense on the 27th.

whoops! hedwig's here! time to boot to windows... *sigh*