Long Time, No Update!

It's been a while since I've had time to write in the blog. I spent the past 10 days studying intensely for my Cisco Certified Network Associate-Security exam. Normally, I would not spend such a large amount of time preparing, however, these exams from Cisco cost $250 each time to take, so it is not something to be undertaken lightly. I am pleased to write, however, that I took the exam this past Wednesday and passed with a perfect score of 1000/1000!! I look forward to having my life back, including more time to work on INMP.

So here's what's in the works. I gave my second presentation to RCOS on last Friday. The presentation went well, I had a lot to talk about and ran a little short on time, and thus was not able to demonstrate all the features I wanted. Still, I feel the talk went well and I am really pleased with how the project is turning out so far.

In my last update, I wrote about a way I had thought to improve the save functionality. Right now, the function writes each line of the running-configuration to a file one line at a time, looking for an 'interface' line to add the 'no shutdown' command after. Perl's operations on text file are very fast, so this is not a limiting factor, especially for the small-scale networks built in RPI's network classes. I thought I could gain some speed by writing the entire running-configuration to a file and then adding the 'no shutdown' line afterward. It turns out, this is actually somewhat complicated to do, so I am going to push this goal aside for now, as I don't want to be spinning my wheels trying to accomplish one small task.

After my presentation on Friday, I received an awesome suggestion from fellow RCOS member Joe Dougherty. It boils down to, what if the tabs for each connection knew what device they were connected too, and a timed-out connection could be restarted merely striking a single key? I have started to include functionality so that the tabs keep track of what device they are connected too, again however, as awesome as this idea is, I don't want to let it distract me from my primary goal in the remaining part of the semester, which is adding macros for commonly used devices so as to make the software more useful outside of RPI. I am going to work on both of these goals concurrently, and in a best-case scenario, have them both done for the end of the semester.