• I graduated from Case this semester with my B.S. in Computer Engineering and will return to defend my Masters thesis in March
• I moved downtown into the Bradley Building on West 6^th in Cleveland with Eric Pinzur, a friend and fellow Case and Phikap alumnus – come visit us!
• I start work at IBM here in Cleveland, OH doing technical sales on January 28^th
• I’m heading to Munich and then to Prague to go skiing with the family and visit my sister, Eleanor, who is studying in the Czech Republic

Expect plenty of new pictures and, who knows, maybe some more blog posts. Maybe.

I built a life-size wearable version of the game. I used a clown nose outfitted with an red light LED, a buzzer, and built a 555 IC timing circuit that is tripped by one of four reed sensors located in “body parts” I constructed out of felt. My friend Lyndsey Benson, who mentioned the idea, had a friend who did a costume based on “Operation,” but this costume takes it to the next level by making it actually work!

To trip the buzzer and light up nose, I have attached a ceramic magnet to some kitchen tongs and you simply wave the tongs in front of the body part. Originally I tried to make fabric switches that you would press to activate the buzzer, but failed because I couldn’t find conductive thread and silver wire just wasn’t cutting it.

The one-liners with this costume are endless… Here are some suggestions:

• Want to play?
• Please, touch me.
• Can you fix my broken heart?
• Many, many more that are much worse

For my purposes, I wanted to be able to download a single webpage from many different hosts located around the world to see if a problem detected on one host would appear differently or not at all at another host. I created a command line client to access the DipZoom network so that I could automate such tests in the framework I am helping to develop.

If you are interested in using this Java command line client, you may download dzcommand here. You must go to DipZoom to download the necessary support files to run this client, as described in the readme.txt file, and you will need a suitable JDK and JRE to compile and run the code.

Using wget, you can download each of the 1000 . The URL links seem to be slighly random, but they are found between 1.html and 5000.html. Thankfully, wget just ignores saving 404 error pages. So, we download all the links in an empty directory:

• for i in `seq 1 5000`; do wget http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/snapshots/$i.html ; done

Ah, that’s nice - we somehow have some extras. After some analysis, this will fix the problem:

• for i in `fgrep xxxxx *|awk ‘{ print $1 }’|awk -F “:” ‘{ print $1 }’|sort|uniq`;do rm $i;done

Woohoo! 1000 html files - perfect!

• cat *.html|grep Website|grep headersmtext|awk ‘{print $4}’|awk -F “\”" ‘{ print $2 }’|sort|uniq > output.txt

Oddly, you’ll only end up with 996 unique urls because the following are duplicates (which is correct):

• http://www.cvscaremark.com
• http://www.fcx.com
• http://www.integrysgroup.com
• http://www.oshkoshtruckcorporation.com

I found a solution to this problem on Jeff Terrell’s site, but here it is in a nutshell. Assuming you have libpcap already installed, all you should have to do is:

• cp /usr/include/pcap-bpf.h /usr/include/net/bpf.h

Alternatively, edit the header file with the problem and point it in the correct location.