Sunday, June 17, 2007

Poland & CalcScript & AntiCense

Poland

Our class just went on a trip to Poland for a week. I arrived back today (first in Germany, now in the Netherlands). We visited Auschwitz and Birkenau, quite an impressive experience. Pictures will be available online at some time in the future.

CalcScript

I have blocked access to CalcScript again due to RAM problems on the VPS. I guess I will look into this at some point, but since I currently have very little time, that will have to wait.

AntiCense

After struggling for quite a bit with user-friendliness, and since I now have even less time available than before, I will provide I quite user-unfriendly version of AntiCense, unfortunately, but it will still be perfect at circumvention. More on this to come.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

CalcScript Website and Access

Public access to CalcScript is now ready, now taking the final steps involved (a website and the DNS changes). Will let you know once that is ready.

The access is based on AjaxTerm, as planned. Once the website is ready and the DNS changes are made, I will make CalcScript available via http://calcscript.dev.gnet-group.com/.

The user guide still needs to be finished, but I guess that is not all that difficult. Maybe we can even get an open-source project license for Excelsior JET (http://www.excelsior-usa.com/) to make distribution of CalcScript easier and thus to promote it further than just with remote access.

We shall see. For now, I will make sure that website gets done.

Friday, May 18, 2007

AntiCense Finally Ready

AntiCense is now finally ready. As soon as the service contract is written up (all the legal stuff) and sales is introduced to the system, it will be sold.

Users must be verifiable (can pay via verified PayPal account or some other verified payment method). Contact me if you are interested in getting involved or in purchasing the AntiCense service.

DNS

Removed XName account, now going for self-hosted DNS.

The dev.gnet-group.com. zone will be hosted by two DNS servers (both BIND, btw). I have already prepared the servers and made sure that the public keys of my SSH shell servers are available through DNS. Basically, I have created several A records [name].shell.dev.gnet-group.com. which point to the shell servers, and associated TXT records key.[name].shell.dev.gnet-group.com. which contain the public SSH key fingerprints of each server.

This zone will be used for AntiCense and any other dynamic DNS hosting.

Will consider hosting your DNS if you need, feel free to contact me.

AntiCense & Public Keys

AntiCense is almost ready for sale. Normal windows VPN.

Some quite complex networking involved there. Currently waiting for DNS cache expiration and domain name registration.

Have also thought up something related to my public keys:

I will probably add the public keys for my SSH servers as TXT records to my domain. Might include my pegwit public key as well. It is quite a simple concept and I would guess that it is a pretty secure way of making sure the keys are distributed.

Name servers for x.gnet-group.com are hosted at XName (http://www.xname.org/), although I am currently still working on getting the DNS to work out correctly. Once that is done, the DNS records for AntiCense should be available immediately, then the last few steps are writing the service contract and introducing sales.

I'll update you as soon as there are changes.

Monday, May 14, 2007

CalcScript User Guide

I am now starting to write a user guide for CalcScript, which I will then publish together with CalcScript (with full source code).

Anybody who is interested in contribution can already email me.

I will see about public access to CalcScript, that is still somewhere on my wish-list.

Friday, May 4, 2007

CalcScript Sample & Access

This is a sample snippet of CalcScript:

main
{
$x = 10;
input($x, prompt = "enter a value for x: ");
print("x is now: ", $x);
copy($x,$z); # make a copy of X for later comparison
$y = 7;
print("y is now: ", $y);
print("now lets add 5 to x");
add($x, 5);
print("(x is now: ", $x, ")");
print("and lets subtract y from x");
subtract($x, $y);
print("now x is ", $x, " - really!");
print("after multiplying by 10:");
multiply($x, 10);
print("x: ", $x);
divide($x, 5);
print("after dividing by 5: ", $x);
divide($x, 2);
print("and again by 2: ", $x);
print("now comparing x...");
subtract($z, 2);
print($x, '==', $z);
equals($x, $z, result=$r);
if($r, then=
{
print("x (",$x,") is still OK");
},
else=
{
print("x (",$x,") is broken");
});
}

This is actually the code I use for testing CalcScript (currently). It should contain all commands currently implemented (I will implement more later on).

Regarding access to CalcScript, I am currently looking for solutions to the web based access. I have looked at AjaxTerm, but there is an issue - CalcScript operates on a file which the user first needs to upload. I will look into this further, maybe I will use some FTP/AjaxTerm combination, until there is a more solid solution.

If anybody has any suggestions, please email me.