Category Archives: General

It’s been a long time..

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Wow, it’s been a long time since I have posted. So here is a grab bag of what has been going on.

The last semester of my undergraduate degree is almost over. Less than two weeks left.

I handed in my undergraduate thesis last week; the presentation is this Tuesday. Fortunately, I was able to get the main work of the project done a couple of weeks ago which left me with lots of time to write the final report. This is good because I am a slow writer. At some point I’ll probably post a PDF version of the report here. If you are considering doing an undergraduate thesis I certainly recommend it. It is really great to be able to work on something personally interesting and get credit for it. Of course that is the catch, if your not interested in the topic, it is probably very hard to force yourself to do the required work.

After the thesis presentation on Tuesday the only course work I have left is two assignments: one for distributed systems and one for cryptography.

Also on the university front, I received my acceptance to the MSc program a few weeks ago.

Starting my MSc in September will be exciting but for now I’m just looking forward to four months with no homework. I’m pretty much at the burnout point.

One goal I have for the summer (besides being outside a lot) is to catch up on my reading. I tend to get quite far behind during the school year. In order to catch up I have to read: 6 issues Communications of the ACM, 5 issues of Linux Journal, 2 issues of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5 issues of Queue and a few other miscellaneous magazines. Plus all of the unread books that have been accumulating.

And of course, some blogging!

Blog spam

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The blog spam on my site has gotten so bad I decided to use WordPress 1.5’s new word black list feature. It seems that 90% of the spam I get is for online casinos. These posts always contain either “texas holdem” or “poker” so I have black listed “holdem” and “poker”. This is a pretty big stick that I don’t want to use but constantly deleting spam in the moderation queue is getting quite annoying.

LQL# HTB control

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Now that LQL-Sharp has been released I thought I should put together a quick little demonstration of just how cool it is.

I have created a extremely simple GUI control that can modify the rate and ceiling parameters of a HTB class. This control should really subclass Gtk.Widget but it serves its purpose as is.

TC HTB Control

using System;
using Gtk;
using LQL;
class HTBControl {
	private LQL.ClassHTB klass;
	private LQL.Con con;
	private Gtk.SpinButton rateSpin;
	private Gtk.SpinButton ceilSpin;
	public HTBControl(LQL.ClassHTB klass, LQL.Con con)
	{
		this.klass = klass;
		this.con = con;
		Gtk.Window myWin = new Gtk.Window("TC GTK+");
		myWin.DeleteEvent += new DeleteEventHandler(WindowDelete);
		Gtk.VBox vbox = new Gtk.VBox(false, 3);
		Gtk.HBox hbox1 = new Gtk.HBox(false, 2);
		hbox1.Add(new Gtk.Label("Rate (bytes/sec): "));
		this.rateSpin = new Gtk.SpinButton(0, 10000000, 1);
		hbox1.Add(this.rateSpin);
		vbox.Add(hbox1);
		Gtk.HBox hbox2 = new Gtk.HBox(false, 2);
		hbox2.Add(new Gtk.Label("Ceiling (bytes/sec): "));		
		this.ceilSpin = new Gtk.SpinButton(0, 10000000, 1);
		hbox2.Add(this.ceilSpin);
		vbox.Add(hbox2);
		Gtk.Button modifyButton = new Gtk.Button("Modify");
		modifyButton.Clicked += new EventHandler(Modify);
		vbox.Add(modifyButton);
		rateSpin.Value = this.klass.Rate;
		ceilSpin.Value = this.klass.Ceiling;
		myWin.Add(vbox);
		myWin.ShowAll();
	}
	static void WindowDelete(object o, DeleteEventArgs args)
	{
		Gtk.Application.Quit();
		args.RetVal = true;
	}
	void Modify(object o, EventArgs args)
	{
		this.klass.Rate = (uint) this.rateSpin.Value;
		this.klass.Ceiling = (uint) this.ceilSpin.Value;
		this.klass.Modify(this.con);
	}
}
using System;
using Gtk;
using LQL;
class MainClass {
	public static void Main(string[] args)
	{
		Application.Init();
		LQL.Con con = new LQL.Con();
		LQL.Interface nIf = con.FindInterfaceByName("eth0");
		GLib.List classes = con.ListClasses(nIf);
		foreach (LQL.Class klass in classes) {
			if (klass is LQL.ClassHTB) {
				new HTBControl((LQL.ClassHTB) klass, con);
			}
		}
		Application.Run();
	}
}

LQL#

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Work has begun on the long promised Mono (C#) bindings for LQL. This little C# program will display traffic statistics for all of the queueing disciplines that are supported by the C LQL library.

using System;
using LQL;
class MainClass {
    public static void Main(string[] args) {
        Gtk.Application.Init();
        LQL.Con con = new LQL.Con();
        GLib.List ifList = con.ListInterfaces();
        foreach (LQL.Interface netInf in ifList) {
            GLib.List qdiscList = con.ListQdiscs(netInf);
            foreach (LQL.QDisc qdisc in qdiscList) {
                qdisc.UpdateStats(con);
                qdisc.PrintStats();
            }
        }
    }
}

Very exciting stuff!

LQL# is not nearly polished enough for a public release yet but I am quite happy with how the work is progressing.

LQL 0.7.0 released

Another new version of LQL is available.

0.7.0 changes:

  • Add some new test programs to the tests directory.
  • Fixed a bunch of small bugs that were found with the new test programs.
  • Change the return type of a few _new() functions from GObject to the proper object type.
  • Update docs to match new API.
  • Add some background comments to the documentation.
  • Add support for the DSMark QDisc and corresponding documentation.
  • Add –with-kernel-source=PATH option to configure so alternate kernel include directories can be specified.
  • Add support for the Netem QDisc (everything but distribution tables). This means you now need the headers from a kernel with Netem support in order to compile LQL.
  • Add support for the TCIndex classifier.
  • Put some more time into the classifiers. Still not complete.

LQL 0.6.0 released

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I just finished a new release of LQL. This release contains the statistics support I have been working on. The basic statistics are available for each queueing discipline and class but I have not added the extended statistics that are specific to each qdisc/class type yet. Adding support for these statistics will just require modifying a single function in each type. I’m not sure when I will get this done as I don’t need this feature at the moment.

Changes:

  • Add statistics support to all qdiscs and classes. See the get_stats.c example.
  • Add print() method to LQLQDisc and LQLClass so that it’s easy to see their settings.
  • Add printStats() method to LQLQDisc and LQLClass to output all statistics information.
  • Lots of small bug fixes.
  • Clean up and add new documentation.

Lord of the Rings

For the past three years it has become somewhat of a Christmas break tradition to see one of the Lord of the Rings movies in theatre. I managed to be at the opening night of all three releases. Obviously, that was not possible this year. Instead, in what may be a new tradition, Bob, Kier and I sat down to watch all three of the extended editions back to back last Thursday. We started at noon and finished just a few minutes before 1:00AM.

The extended edition of the The Return of the King is about four hours and twenty minutes long. That’s fifty minutes more than the theatrical release. After watching the movie I really don’t know where all of those fifty minutes were added. The additional footage in Return of the King seems much less obvious to me than it did with the Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers extended editions.

If you can set aside the rather large amount of time required to watch all three movies I highly recommend it. Besides being a relaxing day there is also a great sense of continuity watching the movies together.