Our old wireless router was starting to have some issues, so this week I had the chance to perform a little upgrade.

A while back, I heard about an open-source project called Tomato. By installing this third party Tomato firmware on some cheap hardware, you can get professional-grade features for no extra cost. After doing some research, I ordered a Linksys WRT54GL and downloaded the necessary files.

Installing the firmware onto the router was surprisingly simple. Following the instructions, I had Tomato up and running in no time. At the moment, only the basic settings are configured, but eventually I’ll have a chance to tweak the configuration a little more. I’m excited to unlock the full potential of this $60 piece of hardware.

Today I installed WPtouch on KylanRobinson.com. It presents a mobile-friendly version of the site to iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, and Blackberry Storm users. The interface looks very clean and easy to use, and it seems to work pretty well. The only problem is that the message “[an error occurred while processing this directive]” is displayed at the top of the page. A quick Google search showed that this is a common problem, but I was unable to find any solutions. Has anyone been able to fix this error?

Last week I signed up to beta test the Amazon Kindle Development Kit. It will allow me to write applications that run on the Kindle and sell those applications online in the Kindle Store. After getting a Kindle for Christmas, I thought that this might be a fun experience. Now I just need to think of something to create… any ideas?

I made some significant progress in my master’s thesis research this weekend. First of all, I was able to fix some bugs in the code and verify that all of the low-level functionality works correctly. This meant tackling some intimidating problems that had been hanging over my head for weeks. Fortunately, I was able to develop a clean and elegant solution and tie up the loose ends.

The second big piece of news is that I’ve started writing the actual thesis document. I completed the entire first chapter and wrote a draft of the second. Here’s my tentative outline for the finished product:

Introduction

Part One : Context

-Background

-Past Research

-Motivation and Guiding Principles

Part Two : Application Overview

-Program Flow Description

-Software Architecture

-Use Case Scenario

Part Three : Implementation

-Architecture Algorithms

-Mapping Algorithms

-Novel Features

Conclusion and Future Work

Appendices

-Verification and Testing

-Portability and Extensibility

-Requirements, Packaging, and Installation

-User Guide

I just discovered Sass, Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets. Sass is “a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.” It simplifies the process of coding a stylesheet, and it supports neat features like nesting and variable substitution.

Since I am a web designer with a programming background, I feel completely at home with Sass. Instead of having to wrestle with unwieldy CSS, I simply list the desired properties and values and let Sass generate the code. The syntax of this meta-language is clean and simple. It even facilitates code reuse, opening the door for the DRY principle in my web design projects. What a wonderful little tool!