I was at Johns Hopkins over the weekend visiting the alma-mater in what arguably is its best season. The campus is beautiful in springtime, perhaps more breathtaking than its sensational fall self.

During my visit, I was delighted to find out that the plans for the renovation of our most historic and iconic building, Gilman Hall, are finally laid out. The Gilman Renovation plans have been endlessly talked about for most of my 4.5 years at Hopkins, but planning for this must have been exceptionally difficult. Reinventing a building full of dead-end corridors and cranky heating pipes, without robbing it of its character, is no easy task.

This is what they came up with:

It seems, according to the Hopkins Gazette article I took these pictures from, they’ve managed to strike a good balance; It’s a shame it won’t be up and running again until 2010, and I envy the class of ‘14 already (Are they even born yet?)

The standard network on JHU wireless, available at least on the homewood campus, requires an authentication upon succesful connection to the wireless, even if you have the right WEP key.

If you are running linux or any other machine where you’d like an automated transition between networks, it is difficult to do this seemlessly.

This perl script will fill in that form and authenticate for you. Make sure it runs immediately after a connection to standard has been established.

Note: Depending on your distribution and level of expertise, there are different ways to establish a wireless connection on your typical linux. On Fedora for example, a typical way is to export the ESSID and KEY (as well as any other variables you might need) as environment variables and then call ifup. This could be done by another automated script that is configured to detect available wireless networks and roam among them. Many solutions like this one are available on the internet.

See Also:
Official information on JHU Wireless

Jean Tourrilhes guide to Wireless Linux