school project

Now that exams are over (yes they are!), we have two weeks to finish our school project : SimMobil. This is a wireless network simulator, and one of our big goals this year is to implement a sensor network mode. So in those two weeks we have to implement several things and write a big bunch of documentation. That school project is kind of a joke since it’s not really useful but we’ll have a nice demo (that I’d like to screencast here later) so it’s ok.

simmobil

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.