Its been about a month now, hasn’t it? Seems like my blog entries are starting to go onto montly cycles. Hope that isn’t the case, that would be bad.

Well life has definatly been fun for me. Two virus attacks on the campus within two weeks—although I will say the second one that hit was much more mild as we were already preping and patchign from the previous weeks attack(which weirdly enough shared the same vunerability….hmmmm)

Well anyways.

My internship is coming to a close finally. It’s kinda weird. I mean, I have been busting my butt on this project the entire semester. And I am kinda sad to finally see it end. Yeah, I have been busy beyond all degree trying to get this thing to work correctly, but jeesh. It will be over! There is a little anxiety on my part. Especially the first time it goes live on NOAH. Man. T.I.M.S. will be hosted on NOAH. Talk about a nerve wrecking experience the first time it goes up live for its intial test period. Another nerve wrecking experience. Teaching everyone how to use T.I.M.S. Another fun thing there. Speaking of it. I haven’t been on here recently, so a bunch of you probably don’t know what T.I.M.S. is. T.I.M.S. stands for Toner Inventory Managment System. Yeah. The name is kinda lame, I know. But it was either that or LPR(pronounced L(e)P(e)R) or P.I.M.P.(imagine shouting out over the wall—”PIMP DOWN,PIMP DOWN” The jokes that could come out of that are endless.)

T.I.M.S. is my little baby that I had ever since it was conceived. The project idea actually wasn’t mine. It was Andrej’s. And I do need to thank him for that. Really, I do. It’s been one of the more challenging and fun programming assignments I have had in a long time. Something that was challenging but not something that was so rigid that it could not grow or evolve into its own thing as time went on. When I first started this sucker, I had no idea how it would/could work. I didnt know if it was even possible. I searched around online for something about talking to printers in php, and it returned this SNMP(simple network managment protocall) usage idea. The problem was, no one really had fully implemented it. The last known code done on it took place in 2000, with the ability to talk to a few select HP printer models, and even then the data returned was sketchy at best. It was not able to return all the data appropriatly. It was cool to see a demo of some code that could talk to printers and get some data from them. So using that I started to modify it. Learn how SNMP worked. Tried creating forms which sent an IP address to the program and let it look up the array of data that way. For a while, I couldnt get it to work(me and my stupidity at HTML took over) and then started getting it to work. I bulit one function at a time. Slowly adding functionality to the list of things the program could do. First started out with getting printer data. Then started out updating database. Then added to check if it was already in the database or not. And from there things just continued to role out and be more productive.

All of that continued until now. 45+ pages of code. Thats right ladies and gentlmen. 45 pages all coded by hand. That was a blast(now I can never complain of those 10 page papers again…..dang it)

I have been making backup copies of my code everytime something big changes. Like last night. Its up to RC4. WHOO HOO. It is so differnt than the original code I went in and showed my boss this past Monday. The code literally has evolved into almost a new program just becasue of the feature enhancments and code changes they wanted. But hey. They are the ones paying me to intern. So they get to make the shots and the calls, I am just the lowly minion who runs around and does their bidding. But seriosly, its been fun. LOL.

Just to show you I aint joshing and pulling on your legs, here is a snipit of some of my code. This code can be found in anotehr form on the web that I am posting here. This is the only part of my code that HAS NOT CHANGED from the original project done back in 2000. Otherwise, the rest is 100% different.

$a = snmpwalkoid($ip, $community, “”);
echo “”;

if($a)

{

print_r($a);

}

else

{

echo “There is a problem communicating with this printer at this time.”;

}

echo “

“;

Well time to go get my computer from I.S. Hopefully.

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