There’s a lot happening at SWN lately, and lots of room to help out.

Ken and Matt at Metrix obtained some new space on Capitol Hill. They’ve had a temporary node up for a while and switched it over to a Mark II today. There’s a good link to the Westin via a directional fixed to the third floor window that’s rebroadcasting local internet. We had HackNight there last week and will pick it back up in there space in another week as we’re taking Independence day off.

I’ve moved my 4501 at NodeAwfulShark over to Pyramid SVN and moved the CM9 from my 4826 into it. (A 1/2″ drill was required to make an hold for the antenna pigtail). I’ve approached an old roommate that lives a few blocks away about hosting a node there and possibly getting a good southerly view which I can use to hit NodeCentralDistrict or 2608-swn. I’ll be getting a Mark I from Metrix this week which I’ll put on the third floor balcony or the roof of NodeAwfulShark facing east. Be sure to check out the view on the node page.

I’ve been doing some work on Pyramid and we’ve been talking about redoing the web front end. It’ll be two part, ideally with XML in the middle and possibly a command line interface utility down the road. I’m trying to recruit for this as I’m not Web 2.0 experienced, although I have been hacking on it a little trying to get some bugs and features added. Help is definitely appreciated if you want to get into the thick of it.

That’s been put off for a few though as I’ve been working on another project. It looks like fR might be abandoning wnmap, the software that runs the swn nodemap (and others) as he’s working on meshwork again. With nobody else stepping up I’m bringing some old school php back to town and trying to write some code to let users manage their nodes and add links on their own, which currently must be done by hand either in a php/xml file and/or in the database. Additionally, I’d like to see some method of email users and reminding them to update / maintain their nodes, removing them if they’ve moved and keeping SWN fresh in peoples minds.

Ken had issues apt-getting some source packages for Pyramid recently, which is loosely based on Ubuntu Breezy. It appears that Ubuntu has pulled the Breezy repos, so we may be upgrading Pyramid sooner than planned.

In the interim, I’d still like to get some of the portals working again and try to setup access points with portals about to increase SWN awareness.

I’ll likely be working on some of these projects over the 4th. If you’re around, drop by #swn on efnet.