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My Journal |
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| Week One | ¤ | Week Two | ¤ | Week Three | ¤ | Week Four | ¤ | Week Five |
| Week Six | ¤ | Week Seven | ¤ | Week Eight | ¤ | Week Nine | ¤ | Week Ten/Eleven |
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Monday: This morning I made my way across the campus, first to the UCard office to attempt to get my ID card. I got the necessary paperwork from them and then it was off to meet Professor Gao. It took me a little while to find the building her office is in, but with my campus map in hand I made it. Professor Gao helped me with the paperwork for my UCard and also to get a key to the building and lab. We talked a little about the project and then she brought me into the Multimedia Networking and Internet Lab where'd I'd be working this summer. She introduced me to everyone in the lab, including Jane - another DMP participant working with Professor Gao this summer. Jane gave me a crash course in the project and I spent the rest of the day fiddling with the program to get to know what it does, how it works, and what the code is like. I also read Professor Gao's paper "On Inferring Autonomous System Relationships in the Internet" which gave a great background to the basics of what ASes, ISPs, Bgp Tables, and etc are.
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Tuesday: Today I worked on a few small ways to improve the program. Most were just user-friendly additions or visual things that weren't essential, but made the program easier to use. Working on these small things helped me to sift through the code and understand how it works. The programming is all done in java, which is good because that is the programming language I have the most experience with. The improvements are made today were:
-fixed right click option to hide/show the Node Visibility Status window
-fixing a menu bar that on my windows machine was much bigger than it should have been
-fixing a menu lable that wasn't displaying correctly (now says Network, not Netw...)
-adding a right click menu option to view all available information about the node clicked on
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Wednesday: Today we had a group meeting with Professor Gao and everyone in the lab. We all discussed what we had done that week and how it was going. Professor Gao suggested we begin to move forward with the web-based version of the application. we decided Jane would work on the database aspect and I would work on making the application an applet. I found Karim's original applet version. A few things didn't work quite right, such as node dragging and loading the bgp and relationship files. So Jane and I fixed those. I then spent the rest of the day testing the applet's capability, because when trying to map larger pictures I get a java.lang.OutofMemory exception. So I started testing AS mappings starting very small and recording the AS, the number of paths, the file size and whether or not it worked.
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Thursday: Today I continued to test the applet. As I got further into the testing, I realized that soem findings did not make sense. Based on previous results, some graphs that shouldn't have worked did and others that should have work didn't. So upn Jane's suggestion,Ialso began recording an AS's maximum path length. It seems that whether a graph is too large depends on both the max path length and the number of paths. I also discovered that it makes a difference if the graph is drawn after another one or if its drawn when the application is first run - a couple graphs that didn't work when run after another graphing do work if they're run first. This leads me to believe that some memory that is taken up while drawing a graph isn't released after the screen is cleared.
Today I also copied a version of the applet which I want to strip down to its basic functionality so that it won't be so heavy and easier to test once we connect it to the database. So I disenabled several menu options that either didn't work yet or weren't essential and deleted extraneous files from the project.
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Friday: Today Jane and I tried to connect the applet I'd been working with to the database so that it no longer would need to hold the relationship file in memory. Jane had rewritten a couple of classes in the application and was hoping the file could just be placed into the applet. Unfortunately this was not the case, as the applet was not written as cleanly as the application. We finally got it working, however the connection to the database wasn't working since my computer is not connected to the intralab network. While we waiting for someone in the lab who could help us with that connection to arrive, Jane tried rewriting the class that would read the Bgp table from the database and I rewrote some functions to use the file Jane was rewriting and not a second one. Most of the afternoon was then lost to network issues and trying to relocate me to a new computer that could connect to the database.
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Saturday: Well, both Jane and my roomate went home for the weekend and it seems that this is pretty standard for most people here. So I spent this morning working on my website and watching television. Then my sister came to visit this afternoon and we went out to dinner in downtown Amherst, which is a very cute little town center with many restaurants, shops and the like. We then took a nice drive through Amherst and the surrounding towns. I do miss having a car!
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Fun Stuff: This week's fun after work adventures included making chocolate covered strawberries in the dorm kitchen with my roomate and Jane and also a super trip to Walmart with Jane.