netStack

I’ve have moved to a Wordpress blog.

Found some more papers while following a ref trail - a Wiley journal, special issue on 3G/WLAN integration, September 2005 [more…].
Is peer-reviewed, with some notable names on the editorial board. Papers to read are by 1) Song and 2) Calvagna.

Finally configured the NCTUns3.0 GUI to work over SSH. It sits on the Fed4 simulation box, log in from ubuntu box, and serve it back - great! The method used in thus (from Peter Blog - X over ssh and vnc:

• Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and make sure ‘X11Forwarding yes’ is uncommented
• on the client: ssh -X -2 user@server
• test with xclock &

(usually have add the client in xhost)

This past week has been writing up some more recent findings to do with my Fuzzy Decision Making proposal; well, pretty much a tech report really. Writer’s block took hold over the weeked; only managing a couple of hundred words a day! It looks like I’m coming out of that now, and the text seems to flowing, but making it coherent is a job for the re-draft!

For this report I’ve been using the LyX frontend to LaTeX. It’s not as straight forward to use (coming from OpenOffice), requiring some customising. It seperates the content from the presentation, so you can just get down to writing and worry about how it looks later. I quite like this idea, but I found myself searching the web looking for layout files for my bibliography (.bst files)! For my refs I wanted the Harvard style, and eventually discovered that the Windows install of MikTeX has a package manager! All I had to do was search for ‘harvard’ - it downloads and installs the related files.

I’ve yet to try this on Linux, and also try putting in images. It a bit tricky to get it all setup, but I plan on using this for my thesis. Not doubt there will be more hurdles with LyX and LaTeX, but I do like its consistent layout. Also, could be useful for writing on devices with limited resources (I’m thinking PDAs or my old Fujitsu Lifebook).

After investigating a source website of a Python networking framework, I followed a link to the DHARMA project. From what I’ve gathered from a quick scan on the front page and some of the materials, the project is designed to support session continuation accross networking domain. Some of the concepts could be useful to reference in my research, or at least have knowledge of its existence.

From the Dharma website, there is also links to similar projects and papers. Some of these may be worth exploring further.

• What concepts or issues have they indentified as important that I may have missed in my review of the problem?
• What further work has been done; any simulations?

After more playing around with Python, I’ve stumbled accross a few libs that could be of use. Firstly, matplotlib is a plotting library which has nice asthetics and can output SVG, but requires some fussy setup. Other plotting libs, biggles and Gnuplot.py; both quite similiar, but the latter requires gnuplot to be present.

Another module, is Pexpect. This appears to be able to interact with other command like applications that are interactive in nature; ssh, ftp, etc. Don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but its nice to know its out there.

If I ever need to couple Python and C++, theres SWIG and others, but another alternative is PyCXX.

Having done some demos of Solaris containers concept, I’ve gotten back some interest in Solaris. In my recent demos, I installed, configured, booted, then flogged a series of Zones attached to resources pools. I must say, having limited knowledge of Solaris 10 I had to refer to some good resources online; partiulary Sun’s blueprints. So far I’m really impressed with the power of the tools for implementing containers, but could zone creation be more straightforward, even scriptable? A few google searches later, I found “zonemgr“, a command line tool. I’m thinking this could be used by someone more script savy than me to perform automated zone creation. I might try this myself if I get the time.

Browsing some of the sunblogs, I found a couple of projects based on OpenSolaris. Firstly, is Nexenta which uses the SunOS kernel and GNU applications, and makes use of Debian package management - great stuff! Another interesting one is BeleniX. This is a Live CD version of OpenSolaris. In the process of downloading and will give it a whirl.

This is all very cool for Solaris, and may push me back to using as my main platform of choice. It’s that word ‘choice‘ that I like - providing more for types of applications and users. I think Ubuntu Linux is great alternative to Windows XP as a standard user environment; with OpenSolaris as devlopment.

Yesterday I made a start at getting to grips with Zones on Solaris 10. I created a small zone, which uses parts of the global file system, but have yet to set up the resource pools. Since this is a 10 (I think) processor box, it should be interesting to carve them up between zones.

Today was continuing with the FSM thinking, but spent the later afternoon reading-up and trying out the NCTUns 3.0 simulator. I very impressed with this at the moment. I’ve been playing with the examples, and interpreting the results. I want to get to a point where I can run some real application over an emulated wireless network. I’ll have to draw up some plans for a server layout.

Made an effort to get into the lab this morning; around 10:30, oh yeah!

After reading that Jungmaier paper, and reading around the 802.11 website, got into thinking about my FSM approach. Had a bit of a dabble in the spreadsheet, which there could be something promising here. I managed to draw out some states and transitions, which now forms a starting block (beta1). This still needs further thinking as to how far this will reach; it already feels too cumbersome for a useful implementation. On it’s own, possibly, but developed in cooperation with a decision function, this could be promising.

PM, and had a dabble with the Sun e4k (Solaris 10). Basically restarted it, and can now ssh. Installed python, which required some dependcies, but thanks to sunfreeware.com, no bother. My intentions are to try out the Zones configuration, and prepare a demo for the MDC’s (gasp!).

Enough for today, I think.

With an inspirational performance on ‘Later…‘ I couldn’t wait to hear this new album. I wouldn’t call it ground breaking, or pushing the envelope; it’s ok. There are tracks that pander to the mainstream, and are commercial airplay freindly, such as ‘Put you records on’ and ‘Breathless’ (probably a few others). It’s a shame she went with EMI, but I guess she wants to go for that mainstream direction. I was hoping it would be a bit more edgy, rather than ‘new soul’.

With the negative stuff out of the way, I suspect experiencing her live would be much better than the album. Tracks like ‘Till it happens to you’ are more of what I expected, and shows her soulful range. I still have hope that the next album could be better.