I picked out most of my courses and, inevitably, my major last week after seeing an advisor at my school.

I’m double majoring in Network Security and Computer Science. Next semester(Winter) I’m doing Work Study, which will give me 4 credits for working where I currently do. Winter is only 4 weeks, however, so Spring is when I’ll be taking 4 courses(possibly more). Depending on what I test into(studying majorly over winter), I’ll be taking the highest math class I can and hopefully co-requisiting calculus with Computer Science I. I’ll also be taking Earth and Space science(for my non-lab science credit) and English 122. Possibly the only interesting class of the quarter will be spent taking Network Intrusion Detection Systems, which’ll just basically show me how to use various popular IDS’ on the market today. Hopefully I’ll have a teaher who has a proper comprehension of his curriculum in his round of technology-related courses.

So I’m thinking of saving up a couple months paychecks + christmas + birthday money, and splurging on a new rig. 

Current specs are a little tedious, since I haven’t had a real chance to research -everything- going into it, but:

Intel Core2Duo E8000 series(or if the nehalems are badass enough and cheap enough, one of those)

LGA 775 Mobo with either an x48 or 780i northbridge. Unless new ones come out. Definitely got to be SLi ready, and either DDR3@1600+Mhz or DDR2@800MHz+ compliant. An 8GB cap on RAM is the minimum I’ll accept. Probably going to grab an Ultra120 cooler for this – with either an UltraKaze 120mm 130CFM fan or one of those fabled 120mm 200+CFM fans. I dunno if I can trust the specs on those – that’s a ridiculous amount of air to push in a minute. They’re rightfully loud as all hell, however.

Video cards are probably what I’ll spend the most time researching, since I spend so much time playing games, and one of the primary driving factors behind this decision to build a new computer is so that I can play the latest games for the next few years on the highest settings possible. ATi recently just put out a card that beats nVidia’s top-of-the-line card hands down in everything, however it’s 100$ more. We’ll see where this goes. I’ll either go with 2xGTX280’s or 2×4870x2’s.

I’ll need some badass RAM, but I won’t go into much detail here because there is no clear leader in the memory market.

I’d love one of those newefangled Intel X25-M or X25-E SSD’s – except their 600$ for an 80GB drive. But they beat out every other drive on the market by a wide margin – impressive performance. Most people don’t even realize the kind of performance gains a faster hard drive can give them. This would be an ideal boot drive, but if I can’t afford one, I’ll opt for another SSD with insane read speeds or a WD VelociRaptor. For mass storage I’ll take the drives I currently have(2×320GB 7200RPM Seagate and Samsung) and probably drop an extra 200$ on two 1TB drives. Hopefully I won’t fill up that amount of space for a while

Powering all of this is going to be tough. A powersupply putting out at least 600W of power(more, probably) is required – and one that won’t die with extreme use. I’ll need to catch up on reviews of power supplies in this range to pick out the best.

I’ve been comparison shopping cases, and so far haven’t found any decent reviews of cases. The Antec 900/1200 models look nice, as do some coolermaster models(the Stacker is _beast_, as is the Cosmos).

All in all, it’ll be fun to see where this goes, and when I’m done I can resume e-penis wagging since I’ll have one of the best machines out there. Who knows, I may even get into overclocking :3

For the past few days I’ve been working with a friend over the Internet(Lutin/Pixy on EsperNet) on a simple IRC bot that is written in Python. Primarily the goal of the project is to expand my knowledge of both Python and programming in general. So far, the bot just connects and displays output from the server(the MOTD currently). We’ll add support for commands as we progress.

Our Assembla space can be found here.

EDIT: Apparently, Lutin hasn’t made the space public(he created/owns the space).

And it’s keeping my harddrives pretty cool. I got it from best buy for 16$ and it pushes 74CFM. Pretty decent. I could have found a better bargain online but I like instant gratification.

(Click to enlarge)

So I’ve necrotized provingGrounds, and it’s now become my simple testing application for opening documents(specifically XML files) and reading them for information.

Currently the program just opens files and displays their contents, and the skeleton of a manual parsing system is in place. However, I’m going to scrap that soon enough for an existing XML parser already existing in .NET – no use reinventing the wheel. Some screens:

[Edit: The existing XML parsing functionality I spoke of in .NET is the MS XML DOM.]

Ideas I’m throwing around in my head:

I’d like to experiment with plug-ins in C#. That is, plug-ins for the program you’re working on, not C# itself.

Depending on what they do they’d be fairly easy to implement. A skinning or theme plug-in would be easiest to use – just have the program look for files of a specific name to use as colors, images, icons, etc in a /themes directory. You could have an XML file determine what the file names are, and have the plug-in interface to the program look for(and if  found) read this file for information abou the plugin. This could also be used for functionality plug-ins, just have the XML file determine the filenames for the plug-in and how or where the program should use them.

I’m considering writing a simple C# app to test these ideas. I’ll post more later if I do so.

All of us over at SlushNet have been working diligently on getting the website working with a decent stylesheet. We also now have a Java webclient(provided by Mibbit).

We’ve also linked a second node to the network, which is currently located next to my desk in my office. It’s address is psy.slushnet.com and is listening on ports 6667-6669 for incoming IRC connection requests.

In addition to this, services is working! You may now register nicks and channels. Yay!

So for about all of July I had been working  with Ryan(blog) on a project dubbed Droids – a simple AI experiment. I got the idea for the project after starting to read a book called Prey by Michael Chrichton, which is about nanobots(incredibly small robots) and the powers of collective intelligence. In the book, the nanobots escape and go rogue, of course.

Anyways, the program created objects called Droids which were entities with their own intelligences that would actively search out Food objects on a generated space. C# and the Visual Studio 2008 for C#.NET were the preferred development languages and IDE for the project. We got far enough that the objects were created with their associated data(coordinates, id numbers, etc) and had a method for the droids to move towards the nearest food objects(just no method to find them). After that all we needed to do was graphically represent all of this data to have a functioning program. Future prospects for the program included evaluating the levels of food and droids(some bigger, some worth more, etc) so the droids would plot the best possible(within their scope of knowledge, at least) course of action, and even a scriptable interface to the droid objects(allowing people to script their own intelligences for the droid objects, aiding research into massive agent-based intelligences, and so on).

I would love to get attached to a focused and driven C# or Python project sometime in the near future, if for nothing more than to watch and learn about software development and programming. I’m especially interested in graphics and network programming, though interfaces seem to be my specialty.

We scrapped that a while back out of boredom, and have since moved on to work on developing an IRC network and associated community(link) called SlushNet with Ryan.

I’ve been bored lately so I think I’ll give a solid update on where things are going with Fizzure currently:

- To debug code that will probably end up in the theming, plugins and networking areas of Fizzure, I’ve created a simple program called provingGrounds. Source on google code is available Here.

So far we’ve made some headway as far as how we want the networking code to function, however we’ve had some complications actually getting those ideas to work in practice. I’m switching off client development to Ryan while I work on proving grounds. If he manages to get networking code working, I’ll update my code to make it working and I’ll add new functionality from there.

As far as theming goes, we’re going to set up a system where there is an installer created directory(My DocumentsFizzureThemes, Plugins) that users can drop folders containing themes or plugins into. Fizzure can pull from these directories and of course what it’ll do with the items inside is obvious – check against established filenames for themes and plugins, and then use any files that match in the appropriate areas. It’s really pretty simple and this will make it easy for us to create other drag and drop files if we need them.

About time I got my own code blog. I’ll probably post all my ideas and stuff that usually come into my head and leave similarly without much thought here, because I think a lot of them could be worthwhile if given more thought.