Back from holidays, we had a project week at school. This week (the one ending today) was supposed to be filled with project conception & development. I’m part of a eight guys team trying to improve a network simulator named simmobil. That project is already 2 years old and several things have been (more or less dirty) achieved on it. Simmobil is more exactly a wireless network simulator developped using the Java programming language. One of the improvements we’d like to bring to this software is the simulation of sensor networks. We plan to implement several routage and sleeping algorithm as well. Things that I’m really involved in are the repairing of the graphical user interface which sucks and the creation of a new way to use simmobil through a XML based configuration file. This week, we had to deliver the conception report. Since I’ve wrote the GUI part which is really not the most complicated, I had almost nothing to do (well, nothing to do twice because of a misunderstanding of a complicated algorithm). So next we started to code and that’s kinda boring : simmobil is like a dummy project, it will never be used. Our superviser is a researcher whose domain is networks but that tool is really not usable. How can you find motivation in such a context? I’d like my department to choose to attribute tasks on free software to students. That would be useful for the community. So I haven’t really achieved much work on simmobil, and my week was kinda… empty.
Johann Prieur
postponed procrastination
March 5, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Why do you think that it’ll never be used ? It sounds usefull… Make it usable… brake the standards, cereate something new… and it’ll be very usefull. Like a lunatic task to reverse engeneer MSN protocol, and like asabil said: ” to create a nice library on top of messy protocol”. I’m not very usefull, but still i have great time chatting and all…
March 6, 2007 at 6:53 am
It may sound useful to some people, but as long as people working on it don’t believe that it is useful, working on such a research project is generally a waste of time. The problem is not that research tools are useless, of course they are, but the problem is that it is not interesting from a student point of view.
March 6, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Believe me guys, the thing will never be of any use to anyone. It would really need to be started over from the very beginning (I’m part of the simmobil project too). I don’t agree with Asabil, the issue is quite interesting : building a tool to simulate these sensor networks is actually interesting, but the way it’s done just dropped our motivation…