Oh, hey! What’s up? (12/14 edition)

So, it’s been a long, long time since I posted in my dairy.  This is because of finals, relationship issues, lots of stuff – things that I’ll post about today.  Hooray.

The State of WELSH

Yeah, so school is done and I have time to actually write my blog.

I finished this semester at 10:30 pm last night, finishing a paper on WELSH. So, now, I am going to tell you where WELSH is.

WELSH has network communications that allows a user to connect to a server and run certain commands remotely.  Anything that produces text output on the WELSH console will work (so, things like process and file management, not necessarily opening files) will work.  Everything that is sent in between client and server is encrypted in 128-bit Rjaindaul (I never know how to spell it right) encryption.

• However I am not releasing a new beta of WELSH 2 with this feature in for a few reasons:
• It’s still relatively untested, due to problems with actually using .NET’s constructs for using symmetric encryption.  I couldn’t get CryptoStreams, so I decided to emulate them with ICryptoTransform.  However, I haven’t had time due to finals to actually test my solution, and if anything goes wrong, I predict it’s with the facts that the strings are encoded and re-encoded from UTF-8 to Base64, rather then the encryption itself.
• Despite the fact that it is encrypted, I couldn’t get a password system working correctly (probably related to my earlier problems with CryptoStreams), so essentially, it is possible for a malicious entity to wreck your machine.

Essentially, I will not be releasing a new version until I get a password system working, which is one of the goals for the next month.  Other things that will be accomplished: “easy” paths, more mathematical operators (exponent), error logging, fixing WELSH files and another big round of refactoring.  Also,  time -month and time -year will be implemented, and general parsing fixes.

I predict these features will be done by 1/12/10.

Also, I will be presenting WELSH to the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges South Central Region conference at St. Edwards in Austin, TX on April 23-24.  I will also be published in their proceedings as well as the “Electronic Student Paper Journal for Computing Sciences in Colleges”.

So check it out!

WELSH 2ip1 Available for Download

So, I am release WELSH 2ip1 (the ip stands for in progress).  THIS IS NOT A STABLE RELEASE. The download link is on the download page for WELSH…and click the bottom link.

Today and Yesterday: 10/12 and 10/11

Happy Columbus Day, the only holiday that I know where we celebrate the eventual genocide of an entire race!

I kid, and I hope you know I’m kidding, but since Columbus Day is sort of an excuse to give federal workers a break, I’m happy to keep its existence.

Today and Yesterday: 10/11 – 10/10

Well, it’s finally Sunday, and this is where my Fall break turns to a return to Fall normalcy in work and programming.  Not excited for it, but here’s what I did yesterday:

Today and Yesterday: 10/8 and 10/9

So, what happened yesterday?  Well, let me tell you!  Not a lot. 

• Had a turkey pastrami sandwich for lunch.  I love it.
• I realized that I missed going out dancing and just making a general fool out of myself in a public setting.  I’m tempted to go tonight, unless anyone has better plans. 
• Researched NUnit, which is a unit testing framework for the .NET languages.  Looks like just the ticket I’m looking for.  Even better they have a GUI that has some nice graphics.  I’m impressed.