A little over two weeks ago Sitwon, Haxwithaxe and I made the trek to Barcelona, Spain for the International Summit For Community Wireless Networks, partially because we thought that we might get some useful things out of it for Project Byzantium, but also because Project Byzantium had been invited to attend and present some of our work and ideas for the community at large at the conference. So, arrangements were made in due course, and our journey took us from Baltimore to Philadelphia for a layover, and then an eight hour transatlantic flight carried us to Spain. Sitwon was traveling …
I don't ordinarily do that, because I think there's a conflict of interests between writing in a personal blog and talking about things I get paid to do, but sometimes it can't be helped. The last couple of weeks have been spent preparing for a fairly major server migration (e-mail service for a couple of offices and a couple of dozen employees), which for once didn't involve significant hardware wrangling (though that's going on in other areas) but does take a fair amount of time (most of it spent writing documentation …
For man years I'd always looked somewhat askance at Terrence McKenna's talks about the year 2012, his hypothesis of time having a fractal nature, and Everything Changing in the year 2012 of the common era. That I've taken for myself the name of a certain British science fiction hero (and have a certain interest in Time) aside, it never seemed, well, plausible, to put not too fine a point on it. I even went so far as to ruminate about it a couple of years back to get it out of my system. Then, earlier this year I conceeded …
Project Byzantium will be presenting at FOSScon 2012 this upcoming Saturday. We'll be in Linode Hall at 3:20pm to present. We'll also have a box of CD-ROMs of Byzantium Linux v0.2a with us, so between 1:20pm and 2:10pm we'll be in Workshop #2... well.. giving a workshop on how to use Byzantium Linux. Bring your laptops, USB keys, and something to write on because we're going to be fleshing out the Hardware Compatibility List this weekend...
I finally got around to uploading the pictures I took at HOPE 9 - you can look through them here. As has been the trend in the last five years or so, I didn't take very many pictures because more and more people in the hacker community are simply not comfortable being photographed anymore. We don't have a whole lot left in the way of privacy and being snapped by one of your own just feels... wrong.
I asked everyone in the pictures if I could photograph them and they gave their permission. People who did not were not photographed.
HOPE Number Nine was a success. Due to a massive Boltbus failure on Sunday night, I didn't get home until 0530 this morning. I'm weary, exhausted, hurting rather a lot, and in need of yet another shower. I'll write about it when I've got more spoons.
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 …
I got home from work early last Thursday afternoon after putting in a couple of hours at work to wrap things up and ensure that nothing would crash, blow up, or spontaneously develop sentience and go on a rampage through the city while I was taking a long weekend in New York City to attend The Next HOPE conference, thrown by 2600 Magazine once again. Unfortunately, this meant taking a couple of phone calls on the way home and throwing a suitcase of stuff together at the last minute so that Hasufin, Mika, and I could then drive to the …
