JSTUN and Freecast (JSTUN)
Yesterday, it happened again: I released the latest version of JSTUN. The latest release enables JSTUN to handle multi-homed machines. Furthermore, I refactored the demo classes a little bit.

In case nobody else will provide source code for JSTUN this release will be one of the last releases of JSTUN. Of course, I will provide bugfix releases in case a bug will be found. At the moment, the STUN client related parts are up and running, however, a STUN server implemenation is completely missing. For my personal needs (and I assume this is also true for most STUN-enabled software projects) I do not need a STUN server and hence I will not implement one in the near future. If you feel the need of a STUN server based on JSTUN please feel free to contribute code!

I am proud to announce that the latest Freecast release utilizes JSTUN. It is really cool to see that other GPL projects use JSTUN. ;-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 19:52 2006-05-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)

Weitblick 2006: McKinsey BTO Recruiting in Kitzbuehl (General)
McKinsey invited me to a recruiting event in Kitzbuehl, Austria from 2nd February to 5th February. I and a few other Ph.D. students gathered at the Alpine University (a facility owned by McKinsey) for 4 days. The main goal for this event was to bring potential employees together with McKinsey consultants so that the Ph.D. students can learn more about the work McKinsey is doing. McKinsey is hiring best-of-class students of nearly all fields of study. Although McKinsey is paying a very high salary and is offering a very interesting job it is actually very difficult for them to find enough highly qualified consultants. The reason for this is that a job of a McKinsey consultant is quite tough. Usually, a consultant is working at the client's facility which means that the consultant is leaving his flat at latest at monday mornings and comes back home at earliest at Thursdays nights or more often at Friday nights. For many people, this long period of time without being home is very annoying. However, this is not a McKinsey specific problem. Almost all consultants of other consultancies work out-of-town during the week.

McKinsey organised a well-balance schedule for us. Besides a few presentations about McKinsey, McKinsey's work and completed projects we spend a lot of time doing spare time activities (e.g. skiing, open-bar, wine-tasting). And of course, we were asked to do a Case-Study. The Case-Study was a lot of fun. Pretending to be a McKinsey consultant and working on a real case was quite interesting and instructive. It is actually pretty hard to do all the math and asking the right questions, however, we worked in teams of four what extremely helped solving the case.

The reason for this late posting is that McKinsey started shipping the pictures last week. However, I uploaded the pictures that the McKinsey stuff took while we stayed in Kitzbuehl. As you can see from the pictures, we all had a great time.
Posted by Thomas King at 20:50 2006-05-21 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Captcha Support for Poster (General)
In the last few days I have been exchanging a lot of emails with KiyuKo, the maintainer and founder of Poster. Poster is the software that runs this blog. Poster is available under GPL and unfortunately only used by small group of nearly 20 people. However, Poster supports any basic features required to run a blog. I like this software because of its intuitive handling and serenity. As you might know, I hacked a captcha extension for Poster. It will be added to the next version of Poster in such a way that it can be switched off and on by the administrator. The reason for this is that KiyoKo wants to support console-based browsers (e.g. lynx) as well as "graphical user interface"-based browsers (e.g. Firefox). I think this is a good decision. What do you think?

Honor to whom honor is due: My captcha extension is inspired by the captcha program available under http://freshmeat.net/projects/captcha/. Thanks for the great work.

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:31 2006-04-10 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

JSTUN used for education (JSTUN)
By accident I figured out that the university of applied sciences in Dresden, Germany runs a website containing an overview and some deeper information in selected areas of STUN. The good thing is that the websites contains a discussion of my JSTUN implementation, on the other side the website is unfortunately in German. The author does not only describe how my implementation works in general, he also discusses selected parts of my source code. That is really cool! I like that. Hopefully, I will see more websites of this kind. ;-)

Regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 22:11 2006-03-29 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Captcha Support for Poster (General)
As you may have noticed, last night, I upgraded the blogging software I use (called Poster) to the latest release. During the upgrade, I was really pissed about the spammers polluting my nice blog with unwanted advertisements and nonsense. First of all, I deleted all the spam and secondly I decided to add captcha support to Poster so that all the spam bots will hopefully not be able to annotate my beautiful blog entries anymore. ;-) After 2 hours everything was implemented and tested. Okay, for the captcha image support I was inspired by another captcha project (I will release further details later) and the captcha integration is more a dirty hack than a smooth add-on. However, I already contacted the Poster maintainer to see if he wants the captcha support in the main source tree. So far, I have no answer. Hopefully he will add it (after I streamlined the code a little bit). It would be cool! I keep you updated ... stay tuned.

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 09:42 2006-03-29 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)

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