I love having nothing to do.
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
My post was added as a guest entry at the MIT Admissions Site!
Intro
So, I’m Joseph Colosimo. I’m an amateur blogger, coder, gamer, and web designer (rather, I try to be). I came from distant lands (Lexington, Massachusetts) to attend what is hailed as one of the best college events in the nation—Campus Preview Weekend at MIT. While I was there, I met old friends, made new friends, lifted a few bloggers (this one needs to be explained later), and learned quite a bit about the school that I’ll be attending in just a few short months.
So, I started a new project. A relative gave me a broken Actiontec M1424WR router because he didn’t quite know what was wrong. After doing a little research and putting my trusty multimeter to use, I discovered that the power supply had died. I’ll buy a replacement one and everything should work just fine.
I took the device apart and discovered that the actual board less than half the size of the case! So, I’ll probably build a new case for it (maybe plexiglass?) and will install OpenWRT, which reportedly works on this device.
Until I can get a new power supply, I’ll probably spend some time reading up on advanced networking.
CPW starts in 3 hours and 20 minutes!
That is all… for now.
Friday… it continues… I’ve already taken well over 100 pictures.
Saturday… I’m still alive. Number of pictures: 196. I met the bloggers. My ability to write regular sentences will return eventually.
Sunday: It’s over! It was awesome! A real post on everything I did is on the way. 301 pics/videos.
(Note: I emailed MIT last week asking for permission to distribute this tool. They have not responded yet. Given that CPW is approaching very quickly, I have decided to release it. However, if MIT responds, prohibiting me from doing so, all of this will have to disappear.)
If you have looked at the MIT CPW schedule, you will notice that it is rather large. It has 573 events, to be exact (as of 3/23). I decided to import everything into an Excel spreadsheet and print it all out. About 70 pages later, I realized that my original idea wasn’t too smart.
I was somewhat bored yesterday, so I designed a script that would import the data from the schedules into a MySQL database. Next, I designed a user interface for accessing that data. This interface allows the user to filter events by their type (there are 13), date, time, name, and place.
The CPW site warns that information is constantly changing and being updated. Since I have somewhat of a life, I can’t update things constantly. But I will try to do it every few days or so. During that time, the script will be down. But it should only take a few minutes.
A few bugs might be lurking around. I know that there is a problem with the character encoding. I’ll try to fix that when I can.
So, without further ado:
http://jwcxz.com/cpw/
Technical details…
