Select a project:
I had the idea after reading about Plan-9 where everything is a file, even a CPU that when mounted provides computation power, that socket programming can be very tedious in C and other low-level library impaired languages. I figured I'd write a perl-fuse filesystem that would present a filesystem where by running the command: touch tcp/google.com:80 you could establish a socket FIFO and just write to the file or read from it. I began to use the FUSE for perl module to leverage the Net::Socket module.
What I've done:
After reflecting on all the security setup I perform on each OS install, I decided to research creating my own variant of the Ubuntu OS that would have some of the default and transparent configurations baked in at install time to less the attack vector. I began to learn about scripting the Debian installer, and drew up a list of some customizations I'd like to make: adding denyhosts, adding default iptables block rules, require signed binaries, setting AppArmor to enforce mode and adding policies for Firefox and pidgin, making /tmp and /home noexec partitions and enabling TCP SYN cookies. In the short term, most of those can be installed through a simple bash script which I will upload and keep up to date as I find extra configurations.
This semester was a major changing point for me in many respects, and it was strange being away from COSI so much. I took on the role at my new job as a major FOSS proponent, migrating our team to using svn, git and Linux as our main build environment, and by coding in a way that was in the linux standard style. Obviously at work I learned tons about different technologies which I can't share, but kept pushing myself to learn more.