idle time, kdevelop, and richard's schizo triple-boot pc
Still no word from our customer. which basically means i've been idle the whole week! hedwig already gave me CVS access to his new openh323, SIP user agent, and toolkit stuff, but i still have yet to get that bucket thing we're all supposed to use. i also have yet to get any softswitch specs!

five days of idle browsing, chatting, and occasional book reading... at least its given me time to do version 2 of my handy-dandy [booming echo voice] TIMECARD COMPUTING UTILITY![/booming echo voice] my first version of the utility was a purely quick C hack, which i wrote a week or two ago. this new one i wrote yesterday, as an exercise to familiarize myself with KDevelop. this time i made it OO and i used C++ to do it (as opposed to just C). ok so it sounds kinda lame, but at least it was better than doing a 'hello world' thing just to orient myself with KDevelop!

Turns out, KDevelop is pretty cool. i tried it some years back but back then i got turned off by the way it kind of forces you to think in terms of KDE -- at least thats how i remember it! newbie as i was, i could have been wrong! anyway, now KDevelop lets you write programs from scratch and doesn't obligate you to use QT/KDE libraries. so, just to get acquainted, i rewrote my timecard utility into object-oriented C++ -- and what can i say? KDevelop rocks! it doesnt get in your way! of course it still obligates you to create a 'kde project' but beyond that, whatever kind of program you want to do, it wont get in the way.

the reason i'm familiarizing myself with KDevelop is, my boss hedwig is using it and he recommends i use it too. we need to 'standardize' on our IDEs because, sometimes when he needs to point out something, and it turns out i'm using Anjuta at the time, he gets lost and has a hard time guiding me through his code and we wind up going to his desk instead.

meanwhile, after failing miserably since yesterday up to the afteroon today, richard finally was able to make FreeBSD work in a triple-boot orgy with RH9 and Win2K on his PC. no easy task, of course, but if i were him, i'd stick to just one of the two -- either linux or freebsd -- i can't quite see the advantage of having the two side-by-side. now windows i understand -- even a pro-linux zealot needs to frag ppl in counterstrike once in a while. but if you can do the same stuff -- browse, chat, use openoffice, program (especially in java) -- on either of them, i don't see why you'd need both a linux partition and a freebsd partition. ah well, to each his own i guess...

yatu: Yet Another Thesis Update
i met with ma'm mida, my IS2 prof, yesterday evening.turns out we were supposed to have our proposal defense! which i wasn't prepared to do! i was under the impression that i was supposed to make an appointment with sir mimick only for consultation at a later date... good thing sir mimick called in sick and i only had a chat with ma'm mida!

anyway, my proposal was, in ma'm mida's own words after she had gone over it, "perfect". so, in the end, i'm in with the first batch to defend next week! w/c means i won't miss enrollment next term afterall! W00T!

i also ran into an old classmate, paul, who is only now submitting his proposal just like me. he works in globe, so we work at the same place -- he at the company globe, i at a tennant of globe. cool, eh? he's still in touch with our other classmate, wealthie, it seems.ack wealthie! the uber rich chinese guy who doesnt really need to work but works anyway! although he's a microsoft guy, he knows networks, and at some technical level we get along well enough.

oh, and i learned that there are only 3 people whose independent studies have to do with web services -- myself, my old classmate dawn, and another classmate cristina, that database/SQL wiz. although, as far as i can tell, i'm the only one mucking around in C++; the others all just use java. yessireebob, i'm the more geekier of the lot!

as you might surmise from the length of my post this morning, i still have nothing to do at the moment. that's because that guy michael, our customer, still hasn't responded to my emails. *sigh*

i wonder when hedwig will finish his new softswitch framework? i'm itchin' to have a go at it already!

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*!