MarcFriedenberg.com

After doing a few days of research on the available tools, I have narrowed my areas of focus down to only a handful of serious contenders: Drupal, Twiki, and gForge. My plan for the next several days is to install these applications (and possibly b2evolution and PHP Nuke as well) on Linux-based virtual machines that are being provided to me. I am also reading “Learning Perl” by Schwartz and Christansen, because Twiki is written in Perl, and frankly it’s about time that I learned that language anyway. So far it seems like a pretty cool way of doing things (the string manipulations are much better than PHP’s, the code is shorter, the number of modules available seems much larger.) Hopefully I can take some of this knowledge and use it not only in installing Twiki, but also in modifying it if necessary or for my own future applications.

Today I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on a VMWare virtual machine. It’s pretty neat how some of the work I did last summer with L’Oreal has come full circle here at the lab.

Very well – let’s get on with it. This space is all about my experiences interning this summer with the Computing and Communications Technology Group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. For the uninformed, the “the Laboratory’s fundamental mission is to apply science and technology to critical problems of national security.” The lab employs about 2,300 people, approximately 80 of which work in CCT. The group I work in serves as a centralized technology resource for the entire lab.

Although many of the research divisions and groups within the lab have their own small IT groups designed to meet their particular demands, we serve everybody by running servers, networks, the help desk, and more, as well as doing research in areas like high performance computing and security. Specifically, my job is to investigate lightweight (probably free, probably open source) applications that the group could use for information exchange and project management.