hacker conventions

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.