I'm writing a quick note to say that I just made a few minor changes to the site. I just got a job near Boston, MA at Lime Brokerage. Kevin is interviewing for jobs in Pittsburgh before returning to school for his IS degree. Corey is in the process of searching for an internship for the summer.
With finals finally over, we finally have time to work on the site and add more content and downloads. Last night, I stayed up until 3 AM working on making zip archives and creating a few pages for SCKShare, a Java-based LAN file transfer program. It has been released under the GPL, so you can modify the codebase for your own customized uses. Check out the project page of SCKShare by clicking here.
In the next few days, I will be working on rewriting "old-school" text-based strategy game that I had online a few years ago. Back then, it took me a few months to write, as I was learning PHP as I wrote it. Now it should take me no more than a few days to have a working version. Check back soon for updates on the project.
It's been quite a while since we've had an update to the site, but we haven't forgot about the site. Summer was not as productive as we wanted it to be (blame the nice weather and hanging out with girlfriends/fiancees... just kidding), and we're now all swamped with school work, but we're still working on our software projects. Here's some things that we're currently working on:
- Improvements to this site (actually adding content instead of dead links and non-links and links to directory listings).
- Occasional improvements to Pitt Lab Printer, which is free remote printing software for the University of Pittsburgh. It was recently moved over from another site (http://pittlabprinter.freelinuxhost.com) to this site. You can find it in the Projects section.
- A LAN file-transfer program. Written in Java, it allows to users to quickly and easily transfer files from one machine to another on the same LAN. It features a zero-config client discovery process, so it automatically finds other clients using the program on the network. It will be released under the GPL and should be available on the site around the end of November. In testing, the program transferred files amazingly fast and it allows the user to transfer files from within a virtual machine to the host operating system and vice versa.
† Posted by theomodsim †
Hello, World!
And welcome to summer... TheSCK members have never been good at updating websites. Eh. I think it's about time I made a significant contribution to the site. There are quite a few exciting things on the horizon.
Here they are:
- Kevin has done a GIG of design work, most of which exhibits his great natural ability to design aesthetically pleasing, xhtml/css compliant, and user-friendly web sites by request. I hope to get some screen shots into the Design section so that the public may check out his work. (Oh, yes. I strategically replaced 'TON' with 'GIG')
- Speaking of Kevin, he accidentally uncovered a potential buffer overflow vulnerability in IE6/7's mshtml.dll file that arises from some rendering unintuitive css/div code.. Internet searches reveal that noone is talking about this particular bug. We plan to spend a few nights debugging to educate ourselves and determine if the bug is a threat. More on that later. At the very least, it is code that can instantly crash or freeze IE6/7 onload.
- Lastly for Kevin, he is completing a multi-platform Port Scanning tool as a project to familiarize himself with multiple network/socket API's.
- Corey spent last night completing the prototype for our WaterPipe project and it is working like a charm. WaterPipe is a convenient tool (protocol? interface?) to circumvent firewalls between two sides of a php webserver where only port 80 is available to both sides. Please check our Projects section for more information about this. There are definitely people out there, (including ourselves), who will have a good use for this.
- As for myself (Shayne), I am updating my personal space to include detailed notes of my current research into Virtual Machines.
- Shayne also intends to help document Corey's WaterPipe implementation, update this website, and document our exploration of the IE bug.
Hopefully you will see many updates to this website in the coming weeks of summer. We hope to complete several projects that we feel are worth sharing. Check back soon.. Until then, take care!
return 0; // i went there
Wow, has it been a month since I've updated?
The latest SCK venture was to Boston, and hot diggety did we have a good time. I'll post more info in my blog and if the S and C ever get around to it I'm sure they will, too. Anyhoo, in summary Boston = sweet. We stayed in the Harvard Square Hotel right next to Harvard University (what a coincidence), which wasn't too bad. Harvard, as you may expect, had a really gorgeous campus, and everyone there was really clean and intellectual. Made me miss Pittsburgh :-).
Boston was itself was just a gorgeous city. Full of culture and history and such. S and his woman and I took an adventure on the Freedom Trail which was really awesome and educational and such, though by the end of it we were all exhausted and had to pee for the 30th time in 2 days. The Trail, which is about 2 or 3 miles, took us all over the city, starting at Boston Commons and ending on the northern (I think) shore of the harbor. We were all buff by the end.
The Imagine Cup competition was pretty good time. The program we had to write was an sql-like database with queries and such, and it was a difficult feat to accomplish in 4 hours. I didn't even get a submission in by the end! The winner was actually a guy from Pitt who finished like 30 minutes early. Beginner's luck.
Overall, a good time was had by all, and you should check for more details on our blogs (or at least mine, since I'll have it up sometime tomorrow). As for the site, we're still in the process so don't you worry, we'll get some stuff up
Oh, one last thing. Something for all us embittered lovers out there: How dating my ex was like playing Doom II on nightmare mode. Laterz.
Currently I have 2.57 essays to complete in the next two days and yet here I am writing a post, the thing that should be the lowest on my list of priorities. The way I see it the sooner I get this site up, the sooner I stop fiddling with the layout and start on my work. Now that I'm done with my brief and unproductive vent, here's the current status of this site.
Most of the links don't work. Now that I've done some experimental clicking, it has come to my attention that none of the links on this page are currently functional. I don't even think I've defined CSS for the anchor tag yet. Not only that, I'm not even sure this page formats correctly in IE, so that's a lil' bit o' Javascript that needs to be done. Lastly, in order to maintain event a hint of efficiency and usability we need to get the PHP working. We finally have a server with decent PHP support and we don't even utilize it. Oy...
On the flip side we're finally posting a real design with simple content that isn't a stupid "coming soon" page. That's what we refer to as a step in the right direction. Honestly, I'm not completely satisfied with this design; just look at the ugly heading for this entry. I think I'll settle for this one, though, since the the S and the C want me, the K, to get something, anything, posted. So here it is. \optimism
It's now getting really, REALLY, late, my head hurts from three tar-like cups of coffee, and the Dropkick Murphys have been replaced by the Faint, so it's time this entry came to an end. Anyone who's currently reading this has to have our emails, so give us some feedback. Out.