9:00 am - 5:30 pm 

This morning, we met with Nate and Dr. Skubic to discuss more specifically what we will be doing. Dr. Skubic drew both networking and conceptual diagrams of the system, and many questions were asked as to why things were done a certain way and why we couldn't do them some other way.

Nate is working on getting us the source code, or at least some pseudocode. Dr. Skubic mentioned that the new app really needs to be modular. (We will be porting (rewriting?) a Windows/VB app to Linux/C++.) We discussed individual customization of the PC App, which may be done partly through the web interface that I'll be working on. Nate showed us the existing app on the test machine here in the server room, as well as the test server that it talks to there. 

My instructions for the next little while are to learn Perl.

I spent a lot of time just getting used to Gentoo/KDE. I thought I had to have web space to try out my perl scripts, so I spent some time trying to get SSH2 to work so I could connect to the A&M server where I have some space. (My goDaddy site won't do it, since it's economy and not deluxe. But did you know you can get 25% off this week only ...) In the end, Sam had to fix all my fixes. So much for learning on your own -- sometimes you really do need to ask for help. We found out that after all that, the main problem was that my A&M account had been deactivated since I wasn't enrolled for the summer. And then after all that, Nate showed me that I could run perl from the terminal window. Just as well, since I couldn't get files to transfer to that web space once I did get access. And it's much easier this way.

I've been going through a perl tutorial I found online. The basics look very similar to PHP, although I'm finding new and interesting commands. For example, "unless." It's the negative of "if" -- you could just as well use "if !(...)", but "unless" can make it more readable. Also, it looks like they didn't overload operators like "+" or "<" for strings and numbers. You have different operators for strings, such as "lt" instead of "<".

Nick has been looking for device drivers for the X10 wireless transmitters. That would save us a whole lot of coding. 

I'll continue going through perl in the morning.