Blogging in class. Most professors would be upset about students having a laptop open and in use during class, but for some reason, I’m in Computer Science 101 over the summer. Sadly, despite being in E2, the engineering building that’s just a couple of years old, there’s no wireless, so I’ll have to wait to get home to actually publish.

The class is Algorithms and Abstract Data Types, one of the main prerequisites for upper division CS classes (or CMPS, as they abbreviate it here). By and large, it’s a theory class, with 65% of the grade based on homework, midterms, and final, which are, by and large, composed of proofs regarding algorithms. The other 35% comes from 5 programming assignments, in which we’re tasked with implementing abstract data types in Java and ANSI C. The programming assignments are pretty trivial, I’ve done two so far, and they’ve taken about 5 hours each.

We have a midterm on Friday, which is going to be all proofs on induction, recurrence relations, asymptotic notation (Big/Little-O, Big/Little-Omega, and of course, Theta). I’ve taken a lot of upper-division physics, and while this doesn’t compete with Mathematical Methods or 2nd quarter E&M, it is quite more of a challenge than I expected.

It’s more of a challenge for my classmates than it is for me, and I’m close to feeling guilty about how easily I’m managing. All I can do is be compassionate towards those who are less prepared.

I am considering purchasing hosting from Dreamhost for my domains (crcon.net, egbt.us, fryballs.net, kaigen.us), I have a few more questions for them with respect to what they’ll host for me. I’d like to be able to host a private irc server and a private http proxy (squid over stunnel or some such). Also, I want to be able to send outgoing email through them, encrypted (SMTP over TLS with authentication), since my ISP blocks port 25 incoming and outgoing, and I’ve no trust in the people that run their mail gateway.

I also need to replace my linux firewall with a Cisco router which still needs to be configured. Said router has IPSec VPN capability, which will be nice when I’m out and about with the powerbook, and will let me run VLANs on my switch, using the hackish “router on a stick” methodology. I’ll probably reinstall my lunix firewall box with OpenBSD and run some slicked up pf and snort on it in front of my most privatest of networks.

My biggest concern with all of this is having my email hosted offsite (I use IMAP over SSL), and losing a significant amount of speed, since I receive a significant amount of email every day. I’m also trying to figure a way to implement greylisting in this architecture.

Current Services

Now my internet connection is quite fast, as I am wired into my university’s network. However, my incoming port 80 (http) is blocked, as is my incoming and outgoing port 25 (smtp). Given that I own my own domains and more specifically the email to them, smtp service is quite important to me. Malice lives at a friend’s house, and relays mail in and out of my home via a non-standard port (powered by qmail). At the moment, only two websites of any content exist in my domain space, those are EGBT (powered by vBulletin & MySQL) and this blog (powered by Moveable Type & MySQL); these both run on malice, which I believe is connected upstream by a 6/2 dsl line. Nameservice to the domains is provided by technics (master) and malice (slave); malice is the ‘primary’ in the whois records.

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Came down to the Monterey 2600 meeting tonight, but noone’s around, at either location. Mayhaps their site needs updating. Either way, this is the third failed 2600 meeting attempt, so next time around I’m not driving around just to find an empty coffee shop. Maiki is bothered because he might have to start his own meeting. ;]