Sunday, September 02, 2007

Junior Year

I'm back in Chicago for the semester. For classes, I've got Systematic Theology I, Communication of Biblical Truth (a preaching class), Greek Exegesis I, Interpersonal Communication, and Ministry and Staff Relationships. My PCM this year is at a nursing home where I'll be leading a Bible Study. It's awesome to be back on Dryer 2 and really great to start another year at Moody.

On the work side of things, I've quit using, or trying to use Cisco's VPN client on Linux. It was not very well maintained to begin with, and I couldn't even get it to compile against the kernel in Fedora 7. Now I'm using an opensource program for Cisco VPNs now called vpnc, and I really like it. It's 100% open, doesn't require a kernel module, runs as a daemon instead of an active program, and certainly feels faster. I had a great summer doing full time work and look forward to continuing part time for the rest of the year.

Speaking of Linux, my laptop has a Intel 3945ABG wireless card inside it, and Fedora 7 shipped with the new iwl3945 driver for this card. It is my understanding that the license is more open than the usual ipw3945 driver, and though the iwl3945 driver was new and kind of buggy, the Fedora devs had to decide to either bundle this one or none at all. I wasn't able to get the original iwl3945 driver on the CD to work, but when I updated to 2.6.22.4-65.fc7 I tried it again and it seems work well with both open and WPA networks.

Last Friday was the first "Programming Tonight" session I've attended (they started when I was in VA). It was a neat place, I had a good time, and learned something new about OpenLDAP - I didn't realize the registration dates were stored for each user! Pretty useful.