Last night, on December 21st, 2011, Jesus Guzman passed away. I am not going into the details; what matters is remembering how he lived and to share my memories about him.

The picture above is two years old. Jesus is the gentlemen with the white and brown-striped shirt. I was planning to post just a picture of him, but I felt that it was better if I shared a picture of him surrounded by good friends.

I knew Jesus since Sophomore year in college. I first met him when he was the tutor for the computer science and computer engineering department. It was not hard to spot him; he was usually running around getting to as many students as he can to provide help on their assignments. Before I met Jesus, my experience with tutors was awful; those guys were not that helpful. I remember seeking help when I was getting stack overflow and one of the tutors just told me to look back at my professor’s requirements (This was when I was still a beginner). That did not help me at all. When I talked to Jesus about the same problem, he actually explained what a stack overflow is, why it is happening, pinpointed me where it was occurring in my code,and provided me some helpful tips on how to combat against it before moving on to another student. Now that is tutor!

When Jesus was close to graduating from college, he approached and encouraged me to become a tutor for the computer science department.

Me: I do not know…I am concerned about giving these guys the wrong information.
Jesus: No, do not worry about that. You are good, you have my support, man!

Although I did not pursue the tutoring position, I became a lab assistant for one of my professors. I held on to that position for three years until I left college. I was really glad that I did. The best way to reinforce your understanding of a concept is to teach it. If Jesus did not encourage me to pursue tutoring, I would not have gone this far in my academics….

Jesus is a very good friend and one of the greatest mentors an underclassman can have in the CECS department. Although I am already missing his kindness and his teaching, I will never forget my friendship with him and the great conversations we had about optimizing different algorithms.

I truly wish all of Jesus’ family and friends the best in this difficult time. May your holidays be full of a good memories.

I am still working at Thales Avionics. I have also started on my own project: The Remote Bandwidth Analyzer (RBA). This application monitors network traffic on remote systems via the client-server model. Just for fun, I have also implemented encryption via openssl.

The project has gone pretty well. I wish I can talk more about it but I am sure you will get bored. I am planning to release it to the open source community very soon to see if anyone will use it. : -)

I finally got someone to replace me at the Sorin Lab. I will be training her throughout the Fall semester, but I know she will take wonderful care of the systems when I am gone for good. Had to deal with two sever problems for the past several weeks: one server’s partitions were wiped out and another server’s hard drive failed). The first problem was a mystery; how were the partitions wiped out? Turned out that one of the research students was trying to upgrade the server to Ubuntu 11.04 (ouch HaHa >_<). The second problem came as no surprise since that server was our backup system who had been constantly retrieving data from several data analysis servers.

My internship at Thales has been coming along great. This past week, I was able to upload my code onto one of the company's entertainment systems for testing and validation. It is been a very stressful month trying to get familiar with all the terminologies, technologies, and procedures, but very rewarding none the less.

Well that is enough rambling for one day. Hope you all are having a wonderful Summer!

You can use that domain for SSH, FTP, or HTTP access.

Since our acm server is using a dynamic IP address, I also set up a ddclient which remaps the domain to the new IP address whenever the IP address changes.

Here is how to setup Dynamic DNS domain:

Visit the website: http://www.dyndns.com/?via=logo
Go down to the free domain box and enter your custom name and click add
Create a new account
Activate your account via email
To map your new hostname to your host’s IP address, go to My Account>My Hosts>Click on your hostname and enter your ip address and save.

To set up the ddclient:

Obtain the ddclient program using wget http://cdn.dyndns.com/ddclient.tar.gz
Extract the program using tar xvzf ddclient.tar.gz
The newly extracted folder is called ddclient-3.7.3/
First copy the ddclient program to the /usr/sbin/ directory using cp ddclient-3.7.3/ddclient /usr/sbin/
Create /etc/ddclient using mkdir /etc/ddclient
Create a ddclient.conf inside /etc/ddclient/ and paste the following information (NOTE: the following configuration file is for acmlin only):

######################################################################

##

## $Id: sample-etc_ddclient.conf 8 2006-06-14 19:51:39Z wimpunk $

##

## Define default global variables with lines like:

## var=value [, var=value]*

## These values will be used for each following host unless overridden

## with a local variable definition.

##

## Define local variables for one or more hosts with:

## var=value [, var=value]* host.and.domain[,host2.and.domain...]

##

## Lines can be continued on the following line by ending the line

## with a \

##

##

## Warning: not all supported routers or dynamic DNS services

## are mentioned here.

##

######################################################################

daemon=300 # check every 300 seconds

syslog=yes # log update msgs to syslog

mail=root # mail all msgs to root

mail-failure=root # mail failed update msgs to root

pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid # record PID in file.

ssl=yes # use ssl-support. Works with

use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.com/, web-skip=’IP Address’

login=mylogin

password=mypassword

protocol=dyndns2

server=members.dyndns.org

wildcard=YES

acmlin.dyndns.org

7. Replace the login and password values with your username and password that you created from dyndns.com:

login=please see the ddclient.conf inside acmlin:/etc/ddclient/ for the username.

password=please see the ddclient.conf inside acmlin:/etc/ddclient/ for the password.

NOTE: Only root can read the file.

8. Next move the ddclient start-up script to /etc/init.d/ using cp sample-etc_rc.d_init.d_ddclient.ubuntu /etc/init.d/ddclient

9. Configure ubuntu to allow the ddclient script to start at boot and stop at shutdown using update-rc.d ddclient defaults

10. Next create a ddclient folder in /var/cache using mkdir /var/cache/ddclient

11. Now go ahead and start the program using /etc/init.d/ddclient start

12. ddclient will log all of its activity in the /var/log/syslog file. You should get the following entry in the syslog file:

May 23 10:57:30 acmlin ddclient[11992]: SUCCESS: updating acmlin.dyndns.org: good: IP address set to 134.139.67.210

If you get a FAILED message, check your /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf and start again.

WARNING: Do not attempt to update the ddclient more than once per 5 minutes. It is considered an abuse on dyndns’ system and we might get into some trouble. The ddclient is currently running in the background and set to check the IP address ever five minutes.

Security NOTE: ddclient sends the dyndns account information (username and password) to its server via encryption. In order for it to do so, the server must have libio-socket-ssl-perl installed. To install it on Ubuntu:

apt-get build-dep libio-socket-ssl-perl

apt-get install libio-socket-ssl-perl

You can now visit our acm server via HTTP: http://acmlin.dyndns.org/

We took this photo just a few weeks ago. Guess which one is me in this picture. ; -)

Trivia: I serve the team as Linux systems administrator and Python programmer.

Most programmers use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for their programming projects. IDEs are very convenient as they provide intellisense, formatting options, spell check, etc. For me, I still use vim and gedit for my coding.

What I really want from the IDE is the auto formatting feature. It really sucks that after writing 300 lines of code, you find out that you need an if statement in the middle and that statement wraps around a good 140 lines of your code. Now for languages such as C++ and Java, formatting does not matter when it comes to compiling and executing programs. However, formatting does matter to the programmer. Without proper formatting, we will go crazy just trying to figure out where the indentation begins and where all the curly braces are located.

You can dedicate a few hours just to format everything, but why bother wasting your life when you can just use a formatting program? One program that can do so is astyle.

How to use astyle…
First you have to download astyle. On Debian based systems, just use apt-get:

apt-get install astyle

Here is the format:

astyle [OPTIONS] file_name.

Suppose I have a source code called uglyProgram.c. In it contains the following:

#include //stdio.h
#include //stdlib.h

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
int uglyNumber = 16;
                           char *horribleINdedation = "dsfljksdlfssd";

int counter  = 0;
for (; counter < uglyNumber; counter++){
printf("Do something...\n");

}

exit(0);

}

Horrible formatting. Let us fix that with astyle:

astyle uglyProgram.c

Now when you open up uglyProgram.c, you will get this:

#include //stdio.h
#include //stdlib.h

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    int uglyNumber = 16;
    char *horribleINdedation = "dsfljksdlfssd";

    int counter  = 0;
    for (; counter < uglyNumber; counter++) {
        printf("Do something...\n");

    }

    exit(0);
}

Much better! Note that astyle can format multiple source codes at the same time like so:

astyle code1.c code2.c code3.c

or

astyle *.c

I have not done a tutorial in a while. I promise that my next blog post will be one. I just have a lot of stuff happening right now in my life that require my full attention.

• Systems Administrator @ Sorin Lab (12 hours per week) : A lot of things have happened at Sorin Lab this past week. Will not go into the boring details, but let us just say that they have been keeping me busy.
• Programming Tutor @ CECS 277 (4 hours per week): Still helping Mrs. Donna Pompei with her class. I am planning to keep doing that next semester.
• Network Assistant @ Boeing (13 hours total so far): I have been helping several engineers on a project involving network communications.

I love all of my jobs because they enable me to explore a lot of stuff and contribute to something meaningful for others. But now, as I approach graduation, I need to find a job that will pay me ASAP.

1. Linux Guru is courteous, polite and generous.

He hits the ground running with this one. Whether you believe it or not, a lot of so-called “Linux experts” are a bunch jerks who call people idiots for asking general Linux questions. Do not believe me? Then what was the reason for creating Linux Chix then?

Real Linux gurus are nice fellows. If they do not know the answer, they will politely show you where you can find it, and not say “use Google you moron”.

2. Linux Guru is highly versed in the Linux kernel.

No, that does not mean you have to know very single version of the Linux kernel. Knowing the foundation of the kernel will enable you to work with most of the Linux distributions no matter what GUI they are using (GNOME, KDE, FVWM *shivers*, etc.).

3. Linux Guru will probably specialize in a certain field.

Some guys are kernel hackers, network jockeys, security specialists, or something else. There are tons of things you can do on Linux. Although knowing the general stuff is highly recommended, do not try to memorize every single detail for every single aspect of Linux; your time can be spent more efficiently somewhere else.

4. Will try to preach Linux to the masses.

Do not convert to Linux; just use it. That has always been my statement. Keep using Windows or Mac OS or whatever you have on your machine these days. Using Linux does not mean you have to get rid of your existing OS…trust me. Thanks to technologies such as dual booting, boot camp, and virtualization, you can use Linux without even tampering with your existing system.

Do not convince people to use Linux if they do not want it. Instead focus on people who are interested and you will get better feedback.

5. Will most likely be submitting bugs to developers, anonymously or not.

I have been involved with Htop by reporting bugs and submitting patches. I definitely recommend you do the same. ; -)

6. Linux Guru will not use the cliche …

I hope not. I hate when people do that. >_< Do you really have ten years of Linux experience or is it just one year ten times? : -P

7. Has the ability to separate mundane issues from core problems.

I fail this step a lot of times. I am just too stubborn to give up on stripping the kernel to its bones without making it unbootable.

8. Works mainly on serious stuff.

Stuff that are meaningful obviously. So does compiling the kernel make you a guru? Of course not! Real experts work on stuff that will benefit his team, company, or the rest of us. It is not just about improving yourself, but improving the lives of others in the process.

9. Has no grudge toward Steve … either one.

Haha I always make jokes about how I hate Apple and its products. Apple and Microsoft are just companies that want to make profit. I have nothing against either of those companies, but I always pretend that I do with my friends because it is funny. : -)

10. Is good looking and charming and does not make the camera lenses corrode.

I disagree 1000%. I am ugly so does that mean I cannot be a Linux guru? Pfft. : -P

Here is the link:
VA Project

Here are some other stuff that I am currently working on:

• Htop 0.9: Still need to learn that curses library…
• FalconView: Just started looking into FalconView. I will keep you guys posted.
• Sorin Lab: I am currently setting up a new Linux machine in the lab (Ubuntu).