I've been struggling to come up with a suitable title for this post but I gave up on the effort in favor of writing about what's actually been going on in my life lately. First, the good stuff, and then I'll follow up with everything else.
Last month we launched the new Project Byzantium website. It took us a while to get it together - we tried a couple of CMSes before we found one which struck a good balance between ease of use, usability, and plain old "it does what we need." I wish that it had been a smoother …
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 …
Most of my posts lately have been terse, to say the least. When I've had time to sit and write it's been in fits and spurts over a period of hours or days when I've felt up to it. My queue of things to write about has broken two pages, which means that it's time to delete the older stuff and move on. In Internet time, that's a long while, plus there is more important stuff to worry about. It's not ADHD, it's simple practicality. The "when I've felt up to it" means just what you think it does, I …
On 14 May 2011, Ben Mendis and I will be presenting on Project Byzantium at NOVALUG. We'll be talking about what Byzantium is and why we're building it, and we want more people to get interested in this project. Ben and I will be talking a little bit about what routing does (at the 50,000 foot view), what mesh routing is and why it's important, the nature of the Egypt and Katrina Problems, and the solutions we have in place for those problems. We're also going to talk about how Byzantium specifically works, what resources will be available on …
The other day I'd gotten sufficiently comfortable with my cellphone (an HTC Hero) to take the next step and root it (which is to say, I used the z4root exploit to get admin privileges). I mentioned it in passing to Lyssa last night and she made an observation that caught me off guard: "If you had to jailbreak your phone," she said, "how can you call Android 'open'?"
How indeed.
Let's set up an example. The Android OS is based on the open source Linux kernel as well as a suite of applications and systemware different from those of your …
During the last weekend of March in 2011, a few dedicated hackers met at HacDC for the second development sprint of Project Byzantium. Our goal this time was to improvise devices by which gateway nodes of two mesh networks could relay traffic beyond the range of wi-fi to solve the mesh density problem (not enough nodes covering enough ground for complete connectivity). We had a couple of ideas for making a serial link between two mesh nodes that would act as network gateways on each mesh to forward traffic. Traditionally, the easiest way of linking two different systems was over …
EDITED: 20110318 @ 0955 EST5EDT. See end of article.
A few weekends ago at HacDC a small team of highly skilled hackers gathered to work on practical solutions to a problem which has risen its ugly head time and again in the past few months: a lack of connectivity. Most of the time, when your DSL line goes dead for a couple of hours it's no big deal. If your phone service is tied into DSL (e.g., you're a voice-over-IP customer or the line is physically damaged) it's a bit more of a problem if you don't have an alternate …
A couple of months back I mentioned that HacDC had thrown its hat into the ring of the Hackerspaces In Space competition held by Workshop88. The past few months have been a whirlwind of activity designing and fabricating circuitry, running simulations, carving a number of chassis out of high density foam, installing hacked camera firmware and writing code for the microcontroller. Folks with much better engineering skills than I put together all of the interesting stuff - the microcontroller board, the transmitter, the camera controller, and stuff like that. Aside from helping wherever I could I spent most of my time …
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 …
Due to the Department of Homeland Security sending some operatives to The Next HOPE to question Julian Assange of Wikileaks about the release of a certain piece of video footage from Iraq he did not come to the con to give the keynote address this afternoon. The guy who was spotted here and there around the con yesterday afternoon was, in fact, not Julian Assange (a few other people made the same mistake, I'm given to understand). In his stead a man with balls made of pure neutronium, Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project gave the keynote address. I've only …
