VANET 2006 Conference

Over the last few months, I have been working on a Master's project on broadcast reliability for vehicular ad hoc networks. In early June, I submitted my initial work to the VANET 2006 Conference, sponsored by ACM SIGMOBILE. I was happy to hear that my paper was accepted to the conference as a poster paper. This was the first time that I attempted to submit a paper to a conference so I was pleased to learn that paper was accepted.

Although only a poster was accepted of the paper, I understand why the paper was not accepted as a full paper. My research in the area of increasing the reliability of broadcast messages for vehicular ad hoc networks was some what incomplete, but I didn't want to wait until next years conference to submit the paper.

I think that this will be a good experience for me. My project advisor Dr. Guo and I get to present the paper to the conference attendees. I am excited to learn how the conference process works, so I will be better prepared to submit papers to future conferences.

GNU Indent

When source code is inconsistently spaced it becomes very hard to read. I was using a module for the ns-2 network simulator that implemented 802.11e. The problem with the code was the author either indented 2 space, 4 spaces, or a tab. It would have taken me hours to format the code by hand, so I decided to look for a program that would do the formatting for me. I happen to try the GNU program indent. I was very pleased with how indent worked. One command changed thousands of lines of code for me.

The command I used to change the code was:
indent -i4 -l70 -kr --no-tabs *.cc *.h

-i4 changes the number of spaces the code is indented to 4 spaces.
-l70 makes each line 70 characters long.
-kr changes the formatting of the code to the Kernighan & Ritchie style.
--no-tabs removes all the tabs from the code.

There are a number of different options available for indent.