Marcelo Toledo

If you look major book sellers for Linux Kernel books, you will be disappointed, there aren’t many titles available, I remember a long time ago, when Alessandro Rubini wrote his first book about Linux Device Drivers, I think it was the first big hit, then shortly it became obsolete, as Linux runs fast.

Accordingly to Amazon the most popular Linux Kernel book nowadays is Linux Kernel Development written by Robert Love, in it’s second edition focused in version 2.6.

I was deeply involved in other subjects, reading piles of books when it came out few years ago. Right now in my vacations I had the opportunity to start reading it, you know, writing kernel code makes me relax, and I must say, Robert has talent, it’s very well written, clear and a not so simple subject becomes accessible, I recommend.

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A compilation of classical computer science texts, from people including:

• Brian W. Kernighan
• Donald E. Knuth
• Ken Thompson
• Dennis Ritchie
• Sergey Brin
• William Henry Gates III
• Paul Graham
• Peter Norvig
• …

Source: http://e7l3.org/classics.html

Idea: http://www.tellesfera.com/?p=27

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“(…) Best Current Practices for Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) Roaming. (…) WISPr was chartered by the Wi-Fi Alliance to describe the recommended operational practices, technical architecture, and Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) framework needed to enable subscriber roaming among Wi-Fi based Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs). This roaming framework allows using Wi-Fi compliant devices to roam into Wi-Fi enabled hotspots for public access and services. User can be authenticated and billed (if appropriate) for service by their Home Entity (such as another service provider or corporation).”

Download WISPr V. 1.0!

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Ulrich Drepper works for Red Hat, is the lead contributor and maintainer of glibc, telling you this I don’t need to comment how talented he is. Last year he gave a talk in Red Hat Summit in Nashville about CPU Caches, in his opinion the time for the talk was not enough to transfer all his thoughts about the subject, after this he worked around six months on a document titled What every programmer should know about memory, 100 pages of pure high quality knowledge, Drepper released it in PDF for free.

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Microsoft has just applied for a mind reading patent, two engineers are responsible for this patent, they are specialists in Human-Computer Interaction and Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Asking people to execute specific tasks in the computer, video recording and asking questions later might not produce reliable answers. “Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,” Microsoft says.

The patent application details how this interface would work. Secret sources points that Google is writing a plugin to search your brain.

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One of the systems I work on is VexBox, a multi-architecture Linux distribution for hotspots, it comes with all the softwares needed to serve a user, dhcp server, legitimate ARP Spoof, web server, radius client, etc.

For simple testing purposes it’s ok to open up a notebook, find the SSID, connect and do all your tests. But some times you need more then this, you need more users, more time connected and you might not have all the resources you need.

That’s when I came up with the idea of creating a hotspot simulator. For each client we use an Access Point (AP) running a modified version of VexBox.

Each one of them can be seen as a real user with a Wi-Fi enabled device, they will do exactly the same thing users does, it will navigate, download, idle, roam between APs, disconnect, reconnect and everything you can imagine.

We have projected and implemented a model to handle twenty simultaneous users, they are stored in two piles connected to two switches and one external power source with enough watts with an on/off button.

The main software controls the clients telling them what to do, find the SSID, try to get ip, authenticate, do some traffic, disconnect and so on.

It is written in Python and has a ncurses GUI so you can watch clients activities and control each one of them individually or globally. This way it can run in background or screen for months and can be accessed from any external network via a simple shell.

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