A week or two ago it was announced on one of the HacDC mailing lists that we'd been given a pair of tables at the second USA Science and Engineering Festival which was held this past weekend. It was a call to members who wanted to exhibit their work during the festival, and not a few of us threw our headgear into the ring. Rather than hold a Byzantium development sprint this weekend Sitwon, Haxwithaxe, and I met at HacDC to mass-produce demo CDs of Byzantium Linux to give out at our table along with the HacDC stickers, postcards, and …
For everything going on right now, I've had surprisingly little time to work on much of it.
In my last post I mentioned some of the things I've got going on right now, all of which have been keeping me from writing about other stuff. In the past week or so I've had a half-dozen things, all with roughly equal priority in the scheduler pop up and demand attention. I've been seeing to them as best I can, as often as I can, as efficiently as I can. Now that I've got a few of them mostly taken care of …
Last weekend the Project Byzantium development team assembled once again at HacDC, this time to close out tickets because we're getting ready for the second alpha release of Byzantium Linux as well as the launch of the official website. I think we're making pretty good progress - about half of the tickets in the bug tracker are closed (i.e., have been fixed) and we're lining up the next set of features. Some weeks back a group of hackers associated with the Zero State took over a pub in the UK and put Byzantium Linux through its most difficult test yet …
Just a quick heads-up about the Project Byzantium development sprint this weekend:
The development sprint will not be at HacDC this month, but instead it will be held at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Washington, DC because we'll be at Discotech again. DiscoTech will be held between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday. Come one, come all, stop by and see what new things are afoot in DC!
A couple of days ago, a few "Hey, are you still alive?" messages hit my inbox, and just now have I had the opportunity to post an update.
I've been busy as hell since 2012 started and it shows no signs of letting up. When you work in IT and you take a vacation for 10 days, whether or not something blew up at work isn't the question. The relevant question is actually, "How many things blew up at work?" and the answer is usually a number that can be comfortably counted on one hand... in hexadecimal. Lots of long …
Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED
UPDATE: Due to a critical bug in Byzantium Linux v0.1a, a file containing the mesh routing and application software was omitted from the .iso image. The code which makes Byzantium, well, Byzantium isn't there. To fix this, please re-download the .iso image from one of the mirrors linked below and try again. We humbly apologize for our screwup. QA processes are being put in place to ensure that this never happens again.
We're sorry.
Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) is proud to announce the release of v0.1 …
I know, I know, I should get around to writing a proper New Year's post. I won't have time to do that for a day or so. I would like to make a brief announcement, however - there will be a development sprint for Project Byzantium at HacDC on 6 and 7 January 2012 starting in the early evening. It'll probably be cold at the 'space so dress warmly. We're going to be working on the final roadblock before we publish v0.1a, which is the captive portal, or the website that mesh clients will see when they first associate with …
As I mentioned late last week (done so because it took that long to finalize some details), Ben the Pyrate and I were invited by Bread for the City to take part in what they called Broadband Bridge, a technology discovery faire for the public. Broadband Bridge contacted us because one of their major projects - adding broadband Internet access to the services offered by Bread For the City - dovetails with the spirit of Project Byzantium if not the two use cases we had in mind when we started building it. In truth, there is absolutely no reason that one could …
As you've no doubt guessed, the reasons for my radio silence have been many and multi-layered, and now things have calmed down a little. I've been scrambling with the rest of the development team to get Project Byzantium in such a state that it was ready to show off at ContactCon. ContactCon, held late last week, was an unconference dedicated to showcasing and networking the developers of next-generation communication technologies that was driven by the attendees presenting their work rather than gathering to listen to people speak on stage. Most of us who attended are working on technologies that are …
Friday evening the Byzantium development team met once again at HacDC to determine where all of us are in the engineering and development process and figure out what we have to do before we can put the alpha release online and announce open testing. Ben the Pyrate has been hard at work setting up the infrastructure and is constructing an automated build environment for the Porteus project (whose distro we're basing Byzantium on), and which we can leverage to make it easier to compile Byzantium Linux into a bootable .iso image. Right now the installation process is entirely manual, which …
