I like to keep track of some things I could learn during my summer work term, both so that I can see how think I'm trying to spread myself, as well as to have a place to record good ideas so I won't forget them later. Here they are:
Both my mactop and my old Athlon XP systems have ``firewire''. I've purchased a cable with which to connect them, and I'm going to use this as an opportunity to get more involed in Linux. I think it'll be a good starting point, eth1394 is a cross between drivers and networking subsystems!
So far it's going well. I've got the system installed on my old, spare desktop (AMD Athlon XP 2800+, Abit NF7-S). I've only booted it up once though. It didn't pickup on my onboard nVidia network card after the install, so hopefully the lines that I added to the startup scripts will load that kernel module.
Next, I want to install a custom kernel, and upgrade to the most curreny snapshots of everything. Then to learn more, I'm going to try and help analyze the boot process, and make it faster.
Unfortunately, I've decied not to pursue DragonFylBSD any further right now. I've stretched myself too thin, and should concentrate on Linux, at least until I know what I'm doing.
I've flashed the firmware to Kamikazie 7.09 and as far as I can tell I won't be able to use it as a client on a WPA2-encrypted wireless network but I shouldn't have too much trouble just turning it into a switch to use for my laptop and desktops. The initial setup was cool, telnet in and then change your password, which then turned off telnet and turned on sshd.
The box is now working as a switch. It took some time to figure out how to turn off the DHCP server, configure the VLANs and bridging, and turn off the wireless. That's because OpenWRT.org's wiki and documentation aren't that friendly, IMO. I should try to remember to make some edits to their wiki.
IPv6 is interesting, especially with the whole gateway broker thing. I should see if I can get mine ready to go for such a setup.
It's all about the the elisp really - I'd like some of it in my life. I like the idea of being able to script my text editing with Scheme-like programs. It's also very integrated into StumpWM, which I need to get back into.
So far it's not that bad. I still need to figure out how to: get a decent dd-like command, get backup files to go into one place in my homedir, and figure out some more inner workings.
I wonder how easy it would be to write an elisp program to do tab-completion of variables inside of a source file.