2 Bit Hacker

I’ve been thinking for a little bit about writing a perl module to interface with
Kismet, making it easy for people to write Kismet clients in perl. Basically, I envision being able to do something like this:

use Kismet::Client;
my $kismet = new Kismet::Client ( server => "localhost:54321" );
$kismet->add_protocol(NETWORK, "bssid,type,ssid", \&network_callback);
$kismet->run;
sub network_callback (
    my($info) = shift;
    printf("Found network %s (%s)\n", $info->{ssid}, $info->{bssid});
)

Basically, I figure it’ll work best as a series of callback for the various types of information that Kismet can provide, and have the module take care of enabling the various protocols and parsing the information out into hashes for easy access. Once I get my computer at home up and running again, I hope to actually write some code for this.

I slept in the new apartment for the first time last night. Yesterday, Dave helped my move over most of the really heavy furniture, like the bed and my desk and stuff. He’s going to enlist his kids one night this week to help my move all the rest of my little stuff in exchange for pizza. That should be very helpful. Big thanks to Dave.

In other news, I’ve rigged up a bit of an automated LJ crossposting system. It uses a CGI script working as an XML-RPC server to accept pings from MovableType, it then launches another perl script which reads in a specially formatted page that contains the entry, and sends it off to LiveJournal. That should make posting these a bit easier, since I won’t have to copy over the text by hand anymore. Yay!

I’ve been working on moving some stuff over to the new apartment today. The weather is pretty crappy, mostly rain, but now with some snow mixed in. I don’t really want to move any of my electronics in the stuff. I took some pictures of the new place earlier, I’ll get some more once I’m moved in.

Back to moving…

Just writing this before I shut down my computer in order to get my desk cleared off for the move tomorrow. Most likely I won’t have cable back in the new apartment for a few days. It’s strange moving out of here. In some ways, the year that I’ve lived here seemed to just fly by, and in others it seems like I’ve been here forever. I moved here from the hellhole in Lyndeborough to be with my wonderful girlfriend Andrea, now I move out to live alone for the first time, no family, no roommates, no girlfriend. I can’t say I’m really looking forward to it too much.

As I’m packing up my things, a lot of memories come back to me, mostly of the times I spent with Andrea here, of the times Jason and Matt visited, of my 21st birthday party. These also make me feel alone, since everyone lives so far away now, Jason off in Indiana, Matt in Georgia, Dave in Rochester. Andrea lives just the other side of town, but she’s too busy with school to call or spend time with. I have happy memories, and yet they make me sad.

I must look up and forward though. The new apartment is nice. It’s a good deal smaller than this one. I have plans in my mind to build my HTPC and have it serve as a home automation controller as well. I want to get all X-10 controlled lights, and connect the TV in the bedroom to the main entertainment center. It should keep me busy on weekends, at least.

Also, I’m planning a trip down to Georgia to visit Matt and his fiancé during their spring break. That’s in the middle of March. Another good road trip in the Focus, more time to wardrive and attempt to navigate by GPS. I havn’t been to Georgia since I lived there all those years ago. Should be fun, at least a chance to get out of here for a bit.

Ah well, off I go to pack up more stuff. I should have done this earlier in the week, but with my cold/flu thing, I havn’t really been feeling up to doing much of anything.

Well, I finally got around to switching over my personal journal to MovableType. I plan on keeping my LiveJournal going too, eventually with an automatic crossposting script. LJ was just getting too slow and had too many outages, making if fairly annoying. This should work out better.

I’ve imported all my old LiveJournal posts into MT, though I lost all the comments in doing so, since LJ has no export mechanism for comments. I may write a script later to harvest them and import them, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.

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Ugh, for the past few days, since Friday, I’ve had an annoying cold/flu thing. It started with just feeling tired, then started to have a fever, then led to feeling weak all weekend, then just turned into coughing and sore throat on Tuesday. Wednesday it decided to drop the sore throat and just go for annoying coughs, which are still with me. I hope this gets over soon, I’m getting tired of it.

Finally heard back from Colonial Village about the other apartment. They approved my application, and I’m meeting with them tomorrow morning to sign the lease and have my official move-in. Dave’s going to be helping me move most of my big furniture on Saturday, and I’ll be getting the rest of my stuff over the weekend and picked up the last odd picks over next week. The new place is a one-bedroom unit in the next building over, so moving isn’t too bad.

In other news, Matt proposed to his gf Lauren earlier this week. Apparently the wedding is kindof planed for sometime around November, maybe. Congratulations to the both of them.

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Well, I’ve spent most of the past two days at work trying to get PPTP-based VPN working for one of IronCastle’s customers. It should be simply enough, I’ve got it working at IronCastle pretty well, though it doesn’t have encryption since I set it up before FreeBSD’s ppp supported it. It appears that the Netopia router that’s in charge of the T1 line at this location is blocking the GRE packets which are needed for the VPN to work right. It’s being very annoying. Hopefully I can get is straightened out tommorrow, since it’s also a SimPro customer, and it would make everybody happy. Hmm…. actually, it’s pretty simple stuff, I wonder if I should add it as a feature of the SimPro RS boxes….. just what I need, more features

Other than that, not much has been going on since the weekend. I noticed this evening that my TiVo was running at nearly 70° C. It turns out that when I put it back together, I forgot to reconnect the fan to the mainboard, so it wasn’t getting power. Daaaah.

In apartment news, I’m just waiting to hear back from Colonial Village about my application for the other apartment in the complex. Once that happens, I really need to get packing and ready to move. I’m not looking forward to that.