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Written by Setta McCabe
Ian Ricci’s first words as a baby were not “Mama” or “Dada,” but
“Atari” and “computer.” His fascination with computers has remained as
his skill level has grown. Now graduating from STCC’s Computer Science
Transfer program, and going on to the UMass Computer Science program,
Ian has created his own company, and recently wrote a computer program
that will assist webmasters around the world.
In Professor Tony Silvestri’s class, Ian took on the assignment of
rewriting a program called RDNSLOGS. Originally developed by Prof.
Silvestri, the program allows website operators to identify the
visitors to their site by webserver address. The Windows program reads
log files generated by web servers and produces a file of DNS Reverse
Lookups, says Prof. Silvestri. Essentially, it translates the numeric
IP addresses in Windows log files to the corresponding host names. This
way a webmaster can generate a report showing information on visitors
by country of origin, type of platform (Mac or PC etc.) and domain
name. More information can be found on Prof. Silvestri’s faculty
website http://faculty.stcc.edu/silvestri/rdnslogs .
Prof.
Silvestri said that since writing the program two years ago, “I’ve
received many requests from around the world for a similar program that
will run under other operating systems.” He has regularly assigned the
problem to his Java and Data Structures classes, but it was Ian who
finally created the solution.
“Ian decided that a port
of RDNSLOGS written in Java would fulfill the requirement that the
program run universally on every operating system, from PC to
Macintosh, to Solaris to Linux. The Java computer language was designed
to allow a program to be run on any computer that contains a Java
Virtual Machine, which all computers now do. You may download Ian’s
Java system from his website at http://cs.stcc.edu/~ricci/rdnslogs.”
Ricci,
a graduate of Cathedral High School, plans to continue his education
lto earn a Ph.D. and eventually own “a big corporation along the lines
of Microsoft.” He’s been an independent contractor, and already owns a
small company, Remagine.net. The two-year-old company is doing pretty
well, he reports – in network design, website design, graphic design,
and marketing. “Going to STCC is awesome,” he says. The faculty are
great, and Tony Silvestri is a cool guy and a really good teacher.” 
Important Links
Download RDNSLOGS-
http://cs.stcc.edu/~ricci/rdnslogs |
