Class is About to Begin Again

Just a few days until I start going to class again. I managed to get into the evening physics class I got on the waitlist for (every other Physics class already had full/near full waitlists by the time I registered), and with the morning English class, I now get to stay on campus for over half a day! (on Mondays and Wednesdays) I've experienced going to class early in the morning and late at night (both Computer Science classes,) but not both at the same time. :/ In any case, I'm gonna have to figure out what to do in the ~6 hour gap between Math and Physics. Or maybe that length of time is long enough that it would be worth it to go home and come back later.

SMZX Video Converter, SCALE, PGP, and Other Such Things

A couple weeks ago I started working on my MegaZeux grayscale image converter from a couple several years ago, and extended it to do SMZX, color, and video. After re-enabling dithering, making more extensive use of histograms and other such things, I'm at a point where I can't think of much that will improve it. With that in mind, I'm releasing the (new) converter source code. Maybe somebody will be able to improve it, or at least use it in some interesting way.

I'm gonna be going to SCALE again this year. Hopefully, I'll be a bit more prepared this time around. Since there's gonna be a PGP keysigning party there and a PGP key fingerprint is one of the things you enter when registering to SCALE this year, I decided to go ahead and make myself a PGP key.

Maybe it'll come in handy some time.

In preparation for SCALE and other such things where having money will probably help (need to take a bus or other such transportation there, SCALE lasts until 9 or 10 PM each day, and the buses don't run that late, not to mention the need to eat) and for the lack of a regular job, I'm gonna try my hand at Rent A Coder and see how much money I can get from doing that.

I decided to try and crack my own Wi-Fi network using aircrack-ng to see just how vulnerable it is. Due to the DS's lack of support for WPA, I've settled on using WEP, but I've done other things like disable broadcasting of the ESSID, use a MAC whitelist, and make the subnet the Wi-Fi network uses as small as possible. airodump-ng was able to sniff out the ESSID quickly enough, and cracking the key only took a few minutes after capturing enough packets (took about an hour last night, but only took those same few minutes when my sister was watching the puppycam this afternoon.) I guess I'll see if there's any way to further secure the network while still maintaining compatibility with the DS but it doesn't look likely.

OK, Let's Try This Again

Once again I fail to post in my blog for a significant amount of time. New year's resolution: post in this blog at least once every two weeks. As for some of what happened in the 1.5 years I didn't post:

• Became president of the radio club
  
• Went to a Linux expo for the first time
• Developed an English translation patch for Subterranean Animism
  
• Had the campus radio station shut down temporarily due to construction and such :(
• Went to Disneyland with my sister and her friends who flew in from the other side of the country :/
• Failed to submit anything for the Summer 2009 DsDoZ
  
• Went to an anime expo for the first time
• Developed an English translation patch for Undefined Fantastic Object
• Did some work on LoadMii so I would be able to...
  
• Make improvements to the MegaZeux Wii port (GX renderer still freezes though :/)
• New netbook GET! (ASUS Eee PC 701 4G to ASUS Eee PC 1005HAB)
• Failed to submit anything for the Winter 2010 DsDoZ
• And a bunch of other stuff that may or may not be important

Hopefully I'll be able to actually manage to post here for more than a month. Let's see how that goes...