Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but most of the past week has not been too eventful. I seemed to have hit somewhat of a wall in trying to get Gaim to structure packets the way that I wanted. Anyway, I'll try to stick to the title of the post...
The Good
On Wednesday, I received an email from Keith Lea of the Joust project. As it turns out, joscar (a Java implementation of the OSCAR protocol) has already implemented proxied rendezvous connections (OSCAR file transfers use an AOL rendezvous connection). This is a major help to my project in that I now have a template from which to work. Many holes in my understanding of what my packet captures mean have been quickly filled in by reading over the joscar code. Thanks to Keith Lea for tracking me down just to help out.
The Bad Not So Bad
As I said, my progress has been minimal the past week. Though I've spent many hours reading over code and hacking away, the results have been less than stunning. However, Thursday night, I had a conversation with my mentor Mark and had a nearly religious revelation through our conversation. He went into great detail in describing the journey of a packet from the time it pops out of the socket to the time it is consumed and digested by some part of the OSCAR PRPL. He also suggested that I use a raw bitstream for sending packets instead of dealing with any sort of pre-fabricated frame. These new ideas should make my life much easier. I haven't had time to really flesh these things out yet, but I plan to sink my teeth in tomorrow morning. Things aren't so bad now.
The Ugly Not So Ugly
The ugly is my chest. I've had a cough for 3 weeks now and it was really starting to get to me; looking back on it, I think it's affected my work to some degree also. Anyway, I decided it was finally time to pay the doc a visit on Thursday morning. He quickly identified bronchitis as the culpret, shot me up with some steriods & antibiotics, and sent me on my merry way. I'm feeling like a million bucks now and I'm hoping my chest isn't looking so ugly anymore. The past couple of days have definitely been very good for me. With any luck, tomorrow will be a day of good progress.