"I need 15 more minutes." "What? You've had 11 hours and you need 15 more minutes?"

That was the scene at about 6:45 this morning, when everyone was getting ready to show off their work at Hackathon. I needed 15 more minutes to fix a bug I was working on.

So yes, I survived the 12 hour Hackathon event!! The updates to the repository are here. The work from Hackathon starts at r24 and continues all the way to r31!!! I committed often during the event so I would have a log of all the stuff I did to write about it here. So here's how it went, in order:

1) I started small to get my mood set. Deleted some old code that was no longer necessary, and added title bars to all the windows that say something meaningful.

2) Added scrollbars to the telnet windows. You can now scroll up and down to the history command I/O. Not sure how deep it goes, but it's pretty deep.

3) Added what I call the semi-dynamic sizing feature. Tk widgets don't always take kindly to being resized, such as when a user hits the maximized button. The best I can do is allow for user to input desired height and width, in characters, of the telnet windows when creating them.

4) Added a function to disconnect from devices. Because the save and restore scripts contain automated code to connect, do their thing, and disconnect, there can not be any active connections to the devices during that time.

5) Key bindings! I talked about this to the RCOS last Friday. Anytime now there is an 'OK' dialog box, you don't need to physically click the button. (You still can, though!!) Hitting the 'Enter' key on your keyboard accomplishes the same task.

6) Save the best for last. This feature is the breakthrough that sets INMP apart from any other software out there. Without a doubt, the most annoying thing about working with Cisco routers, especially here at RPI, is that router interfaces are shutdown by default. Especially here in the lab, after erasing a previous configuration and loading in your own, you need to physically type 'no shut' at each interface. Well, not any more. When saving configurations through the INMP, it automatically inserts a 'no shut' command into the saved file exactly where it's supposed to be. I.e, only to the interfaces that actually need to have 'no shut' issued to them.

So the software is now at the point where I do not have a problem telling people 'Go download this software and check it out.' I know between Friday and today, a couple people have expressed interest in using it. I will be doing full live testing of it this week in my laboratory work on Tuesday and Thursday, and I hope other Linux users in the Networking classes do so as well.

So overall, I would say the Hackathon was a huge success. Nice too to see that there was a very strong RCOS presence. I know I certainly made tremendous progress and hope the other students did as well. The host, Mike, hinted there may be another one before the end of the semester, I hope it becomes a reality.