Projects Relating to the Open Source Community

Welcome to my Open Source Projects Page! I participate in the open source community through the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI). Check out their About Us page for more information regarding what the open source community is all about.




My project goals for this semester:
  • Experiment with Xen
  • Help maintain the lab / servers
  • Learn PHP, develop a simple PHP tree-like website navigation system, work on miscellaneous PHP pages, deploy what I learn to my own site (pdub.net)
  • Get a project started to develop OpenOffice templates (badly needed), perhaps contribute to the creation of aesthetically-pleasing templates to the best of my (in)ability
  • Perhaps hack the old ThinkPad for use in a picture frame? - I doubt the lack of color depth in the screen will produce an acceptable picture, but we'll try it out before hacking.


Summary for Fall Semester
  • Helped maintain lab servers
  • Regularly attended COSI Work Days
  • Participated in ACM Programming Contest
  • Studied PHP
  • Amateur radio station software: expanded linux support of our antenna rotator by finishing the driver implementation for our controller card, wrote a server daemon (Java) to work with a Orbitron Satellite Tracking module that I wrote for remote control of our antenna rotator via our satellite software at the amateur station, wrote a web interface in PHP to control our antenna rotator
  • Contacted creator of linux rotator board driver with my work to see if he accepts that in his driver project (a project that so far only he has worked on), and I am currently awaiting a response from him
  • Regularly opened lab for public use and regularly used and tested most features of the lab build
  • Helped with Xen workshop
  • Played around with Xen a little


Progress Blog

10-02-05: Xen is fun, PHP is too
Performed more testing on Xen and it is still very cool. I also began writing a PHP navigation system for my site. It's functional, but primitive, since I'm new at this. I am redesigning my site to be dynamic and template-driven through PHP and CSS2, and will post examples later to show some of the extremely basic, yet elegant, features of PHP I've discovered so far. I used to be a Perl junkie, but transitioning from Perl to the (better, in my opinion) PHP isn't hard at all. I look forward to the rest of this adventure that I have embarked upon.
09-28-05: Xen Success!
Successfully installed Xen 2.x in my own testing environment. Tested everything out. It completely rocks and is very efficient. More information about the technology at Xen at Clarkson. I am planning on installing typical applications in several domains and experimenting for fun. I hope to also get to test live migration at some point.