Tag: Networking

30 Days of Geek #5: Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Today’s post is in a very similar vein to yesterday’s post, so I’ll keep it short and sweet:

  • The very short C program that I wrote to remove all the spaces out of one of my teacher’s spreadsheets and turn them into tabs. I think I probably saved her hours of tedium.
  • The script I wrote that stored all my Microsoft product keys within itself. The bash script would accept a search pattern for a product name, and spit out a product key. Much easier than going looking for a physical box.
  • The numerous abuses of iproute2 I’ve made in the last few months, in the quest to make computer networking make sense. My favourite networking hack is this one (in /etc/network/interfaces):

    iface lo:0 inet static
    address 172.24.16.1
    netmask 255.255.255.255

    What it does is add in a second loopback address, not within the 127.0.0.0/8 block. Not original perhaps, but very useful for BGP routing.

Back at University

Today, seeing that I haven’t done so for a while now, comes an update on my life.

I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.