hacker conventions

con-related busy season is right around the corner.

July 30 and 31 are Maker Faire Detroit; i'll be there from the 29th to the 31st. i'll be back from that for a whole two days, and then on August 2 i'm off to Vegas. i'll be attending BSides Vegas, as well as Defcon. i missed Vegas Con Week last year, so i'm over the moon that i'll be able to see everyone again this year.

then, less than two months later, i'll be attending DerbyCon in Louisville, Kentucky. DerbyCon is a first time con, but a lot of my good friends are attending, and there are a lot of speakers i recognize from other cons who i think are pretty neat.

(of course, if you see me at any of these events, come say hi! i'm not that scary, i promise.)

*****

as for my own projects...i feel like i'm at a bit of a standstill. i wish i could say more than just "i'm attending these events"; i wish i could say "i'm talking about this awesome thing i figured out". it's frustrating, and i'm thoroughly embarrassed that i don't have anything worth talking about or presenting about at any of these events.

part of it probably has to do with work: specifically, the fact that it has been really busy. i'm still working for the same company i've been with for over a year, and i'm really happy with my job, but there have been a few changes that have caused me to devote far more of my time and energy to work than usual, leaving me really just wanting to do things outside of there that don't require much brainpower.

most of it, though, i don't think i can blame on that. maybe i've hit a plateau, or a place where i lack direction. there are a lot of things i know a tiny bit about, or can explain at 30,000 feet. there's very little i feel i know well enough to use fluently, much less apply in new and interesting ways. my lack of natural aptitude in all things computer-related is a double-edged sword: it keeps the field interesting because i'm fighting uphill every step of the way to learn anything at all, but it also means i get frustrated by my shallow skill set, and intimidated by how much i have to retain in order to make it deeper and more useful.

alright, end of rant. back to your regularly scheduled radio silence.

i have been terribly delinquent at updating this site.

that's not to say that i haven't been doing anything technical. in fact, a lot has happened since i last posted here. (has it really been since April?) i've just been, as usual, really terrible at documenting it.

first of all, i have finally gotten a job in the computer field. (well, maybe not "finally", but it's something that happened since i last wrote anything here.) i've been working for a managed data center services company for six months now; i started at the beginning of June. i love it so far...the job is a mixed bag of tasks. some days i'm fixing hardware issues, some days i'm installing and configuring operating systems, some days i'm helping troubleshoot network issues...it's a little bit of everything, and working there is doing a lot to broaden my expertise, and give me the knowledge and the context that i couldn't get without working in an enterprise-level IT environment day in and day out. some days are more fun than others, as with any job, but every day i'm reminded that i made the right career choice. even the worst day working in the data centre is still more interesting to me than the best day working as an attorney.

the weirdest thing about the job is my schedule. sure, it's a regular schedule, but it's 4 days a week, 9pm until 7am. even though i'm a night owl, i've never been specifically nocturnal. left to its own devices, my body likes to stay up until about 4 in the morning, and sleep until around noon. the night shift is kind of stressful between the fact that it's not quite my body's natural state, and it's completely opposite to the time that all of my friends work. however, it's still not as bad to me as working early mornings; i still feel better starting work at 9pm than i do starting work at 9am. the real bonus about night shift, though, is that it leaves a lot of time to work on more interesting projects. there are fewer customer tickets coming in overnight, so i get the time to work on longer-term projects that improve our internal infrastructure. i had never done anything with PXE boot servers before i started working there; over the last few months, i've done a significant amount of work improving both our Linux netboot server as well as our Windows one. i've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about them to feeling like i have a decent handle on how they work, and how they can be configured. i've worked on other projects as well, but so far netbooting infrastructure is the thing that i feel like i've had the circumstances to delve the most deeply into.

i've attended a couple of conferences since i last posted here. in addition to speaking at Notacon and Penguicon in the spring, i gave an updated version of my Notacon talk at The Next HOPE back in July. i also attended Security B-Sides Ottawa last month. i didn't give any talks there, but i had a fun and intellectually stimulating time--the talks on fuzzing and on the NMAP Scripting Engine were particularly fascinating. i have a current project in the works that involves the NSE, so it was enlightening to hear from an expert!

unfortunately, because of my work schedule, i will not be able to make it to the Chaos Communication Congress this year; it looks like the next con on my schedule is going to be Shmoocon, in late January. (thanks to someone very awesome, i do have a barcode, so it's all systems go...and it's time to start planning my Barcode Shmarcode entry!)

probably the only other major development over these last months that would be relevant is about Pumping Station: One...specifically, the fact that i'm no longer a member of the space, and haven't been since September. i don't want to get into too many details on here, but it suffices to say...i miss being a member of a hackerspace, and i hope to be part of one again in the future, although for right now i think stepping back was the best decision i could have made given the circumstances.

that is, in short, what's going on with me nowadays. hopefully i will find a rhythm, and start writing on here more frequently. i know myself better than to make any promises, but i know it would be good for me to document my projects, discoveries, and plans here.

I have made a few much-needed site updates today!

First of all, I have made a new page about Arduino music, and linked it off of the projects page. It contains links to the code for my Arduino musical projects, as well as links to various pages that I have found helpful in exploring the subject.

Secondly, I have updated my presentations page. I added the slides for the talk about instilling a more welcoming culture in the hacker community that I gave at Notacon 7 this month, as well as the slides from the FDCC Virtual Machine talks that I gave at Pumping Station: One's Pecha Kucha Night and at Neighborcon NYC in December. Also, I added the slides for my upcoming talk about Arduino music that I am giving at Penguicon on Saturday, May 1.

If you're going to be at Penguicon this weekend, please come to my talks! I am giving a talk entitled From Microcontroller to Maestro: Music on the Arduino at 3:00pm on Saturday, May 1 in Private Dining Room I. At 4:00pm that same day, in the same room, I will be talking on a panel entitled What the Hack? Hackerspaces in Detroit and Beyond with Russ Wolfe and Nick Britsky of i3Detroit, as well as Mitch Altman of Noisebridge.

It has been an eventful December so far.

On December 4, I presented at Pumping Station: One's Pecha Kucha Night. My talk was entitled Setting Up FDCC Testing Environments on Non-Windows Systems (Or: How Nicolle Lost Four Hours of Her Life for Want of a Nine-Kilobyte Text File). It drew from my rather frustrating experience trying to get the FDCC Windows XP virtual machine image running on my Linux box on VMWare, since the federal government releases it in Microsoft VirtualPC format.

On December 5 and 6, nine of us from PS:One went on a weekend road trip to Detroit to visit i3Detroit, the hackerspace in Detroit. It was a fantastic trip! There are a lot of creative and talented people at that space, and they've set up such a nice hackerspace in a few short months. I'm so proud of them, and I'm looking forward to the next time I can visit their space for a few days.

From December 11 through 14, I was in New York City for Neighborcon NYC. I have been to all three Neighborcons to date, and all three of them have been fantastic. It's a chance to get together with a group of hackers from all over the country in a far lower-key environment than most cons. Neighborcon NYC was held in a bar called Local 138, on the Lower East Side. Both days featured a lot of socializing and casual exchange of ideas, as well as talks later in the day. I gave the first formal talk of the conference, a slightly expanded version of my FDCC Virtual Machines talk.

This week, I have been focusing on getting as much done on projects at PS:One as possible, since I leave for 26c3 on December 25. However, in the last two days I have found out about two very exciting things on the horizon for early 2009.

Yesterday, I was informed that I was accepted for Shmoocon Labs, so I will be helping to set up and maintain the network at the conference! This will be my first time on any kind of network operation crew for a conference. I will learn a lot about setting up networks, maintaining them, and solving computer and network problems under pressure, and I can't wait to make the most of this opportunity.

Then, earlier tonight, I found out that my talk proposal for Notacon 2010 got accepted! My talk is entitled Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward A More Welcoming Hacker Community. I've noticed that in hackerspaces and other organizations, there's a lot of emphasis on trying to find new people to join, but very little time spent thinking about what to do once these new people have found their way to a space or a club meeting. It will discuss ways to make someone new to the hacker community feel welcome and valuable there. I am really excited--it will be my first time speaking at Notacon, and I'm looking forward to discussing a topic that I feel so strongly about.

The video and audio from all of the presentations at DEFCON 17 are now up on the DEFCON archive.

This means you can watch my talk, which centered on legal concerns that arise when you're starting a hackerspace. You can also watch all of the other talks...and I can as well, given that when I was actually at DEFCON, I spent a lot more time in the hallway track and the contest area than I did attending talks.

As most readers of this little corner of the internet probably already know, today was the first day of the free-for-all that is Shmoocon ticket sales. Last year, I was insanely lucky, and managed to get three early bird tickets to the con--two on the first day, and one on the weird mid-December sale date that they had because the server had gone down on December 1. I'll admit it--I was tripped up, like several others on my Twitter feed, by the fact that the cart page said that the ticket sale was not online yet, although the link to the reservation page had been placed at the bottom of the page. That is something I would suggest they fix for the December sale date, and in future years--put the reservation link at the top of the page, not the bottom. I got frustrated the first time I saw a no-tickets-available page, but remembering the confusion and mixed messages from the website last year, I kept trying. Occasionally a ticket reservation page would pop up, although by the time I solved the captcha, it would tell me none were available.

Despite the initial frustration, this has a happy ending. I was not lucky enough to get an early bird, but did manage to get an Open Registration ticket. So, I'll be seeing you all at Shmoocon!

One side question about Shmoocon--has anyone who reads this done Shmoocon Labs before? I'm considering signing up for it.

That's not the only convention on the horizon, or even the one that's closest in time. I'm also planning on going to 26c3 in Berlin this December. I don't have my reservations yet, but that's only because I'm waiting for Hackers on a Plane plans to come out. Nick just confirmed on the HoaP 2.0 list that there's going to be a HoaP 3.0 to Berlin this December. I had such a great time on the trip to HAR that I want to do that again. I hope it comes out soon, though, so I can have the right dates and get decently cheap transportation to and from New York to meet up with the group. I know there's probably very little hope for that anyway, given that the trip is right between Christmas and New Year's, but it can't hurt to reserve it as soon as possible.