I’ve had a number of scary / dangerous experiences in my life. In fact, I’ve literally been chased down the side of a cliff by a bear ( along with my brother and his now wife ). This weird time dilation thing isn’t something I’ve experienced more than once. At least not the way I experienced it then. Maybe it was the time in my youth it happened or the chain of events I don’t know. But I figure I’d write up a blog post about it. It’s hard to put into words, but it was an amazing experience.

It was sophomore year of High School. I can’t recall, but I believe it was spring. School had just let out, and I was racing down to lacrosse practice to see if there was practice. Then I headed back to the school to pick up gear. I was not the most muscular kid, but I was six foot and rapidly climbing plus I could sprint. The school ( Xaverian ) was situated on an entire block in Bay Ridge Brooklyn ( the following year I moved to Brazil where I finished HS ). The front of the school faced shore road. Shore road is a winding road that runs along the perimeter of the neighborhood overlooking the waters edge. The road is also not one intended for pedestrian crossing at many points. Cars move very fast and there is not much in terms of signage. However, many of the students took liberties with how they crossed around the school mostly out of stupid teenage inexperience. I’d say even today the average speed of a vehicle on shore road ranges from 30-45 mph, sometimes much faster though usually illegally.

Generally I was pretty cautious making my way across that road. But, I was in a hurry and I had done it a million times before. I couldn’t see the road entirely because there was a line of parked cars along the edge obstructing my view, but I could see through the windows of an SUV as I neared the road. I listened for any vehicles. I didn’t hear any. So I thought, I’m good lets do this. Put a little more spring in my step as I sprinted out from between the line of parked cars. By the time I was fully aware of the vehicle that was barreling towards me, it was far too late. Neither me, nor the driver really had a chance. I had failed to see, or hear a little low riding very quiet Saturn. It was cruising along at a fairly high rate of speed. I couldn’t guage the speed myself, but people I spoke to later who saw the spectacle said they thought it was doing 45. I think more likely 30 as I am still alive.

As the car approached the time dilation experience began. First thing I remember thinking, and last thing I could really remember thinking that could be put into words was “shit”. I knew that with the momentum I had I couldn’t clear the car, I couldn’t stop and go back, and I am pretty sure I hauled myself to stop when I saw the thing. I can’t recall clearly exactly what my body was doing at that point. The car had my full attention. I was wondering how fast it was going, trying to brace myself for the collision. I remember thinking about how bracing myself might be bad. And I remember thinking about trying to jump. By the time I had gotten this far in my thinking I was in the air and the car was sweeping my legs up from under me.

I don’t remember jumping. But I did jump. Witnesses said I did, and I didn’t have broken legs when all was said and done. I don’t know exactly what happened when the car hit me in terms of the physics of my body, but I was turned back facing the vehicle as my legs were swept out from under me by the hood of the vehicle. I remember that the time I spent impacting the hood felt like minutes. It was probably a second or less. I remember reeling back and seeing the sky. I remember the feel of the hood sweeping my legs. I remember my body being slung backwards into the vehicle by the force and speed of the hood pushing my legs and me forward. I remember thinking about how utterly fast and terrifyingly strong the car was. I kept waiting for an IMPACT. Where would my body be smashed. It was around this time I realized that my head and back were being whipped backwards and down fast. Too fast. As my head collided with something very hard, I remember thinking something very much like this is it. head injury. game over. I wondered why the lights hadn’t gone out. Why I was still able to continue to experience the hit. By the time I was back from my chilling thoughts concerning my impending demise I was rotating and moving away from the cars hood. I hadn’t slowed the car even in the slightest, and it was quickly rushing away beneath me.

As I was flung towards the side of the car, I remember thinking how much I did not want to be crushed by any cars behind this one. ( turns out there weren’t any ) That may have influenced the unconscious ( maybe ) decision I made as I rolled off the car to try and land on my hands and feet. I actually tried to hit the ground on all fours in the hope I could push myself to the curb or something. That was a mistake. My left foot was effectively compressed to the point that my toes were touching my shin. I later found out I had pulled my Achilles tendon. I remember thinking about how far I was skidding and how fast I was suddenly moving. I don’t remember the moments just after the crash very well.

I know that I stood up immediately. Half crazed from fear, adrenaline, and shock I remember racing from the street. ( of course I was likely stumbling around like a drunk ) I ran back and forth at least once without any idea of what to do with myself. I saw a park bench facing the shore. I sat down. And I basically for the very first time in my life, and like no other time since completely freaked out. When the paramedics arrived I claimed I was perfectly fine. I just need to go home. My parents had actually arrived by that point ( having been called by a particularly vigilant teacher, beating my cousin who was already on the family grapevine having seen the accident ). My parents were trying to persuade me that going to the hospital just plain made sense. The EMT basically said look at the car. For the first time, I looked at the car. I don’t remember the details too well. My cousin had a better recollection of events from then on anyways. But I do remember the hole I left in the windshield. The one left by my head. The EMT no longer needing to convince me, but completely unaware of that fact said “can you feel this”, and proceeded to pinch my leg… hard. I felt absolutely nothing. He informed me I was in shock. If an EMT says you are in shock. You are in shock. If an EMT says you need something, odds are very good that you should just do whatever he says. Seriously. Don’t think about it.

Anyways, I spent the next few hours on a gurney waiting to have my legs and head x rayed. My head was fine. Another mild / severe concussion. Not a single broken bone. Just a bunch of scrapes, some destroyed clothes, and a soon to be very painful left foot. I was able to return to school the following Monday, much to the surprise of people who had seen or heard about the accident.

Time dilation it isn’t quite. But it is a bizarre experience. And I am very lucky to be alive to write about it.

It’s on their blog.

Here’s the video:

So let me begin by saying a few things. Fundamentally, from an opinion perspective, I am of the camp that believes that VMs are a wonderful thing. Virtual Machines have allowed for safe compartmentalization of execution, distributed resiliency, more efficient use of resources, and so much more. They make automation turn from a gear work, to an aetherous form of magic that seems to have only existed in the writings of Tolkein. That being said, I’ve never liked Java, or their many purpose built VMs. In fact, through the years, I’ve immediately discounted any Java developer who refused to admit that Java ( there are exceptions ) was a horribly broken mess. Primarly because, as a systems engineer I saw the performance of many large applications on servers and mainframes. Nothing ever really compared in terms of wanton gluttony in resource allocation and general lack of stability as did Java VMs and app servers. Web logic is widely regarded as the single largest piece of crap to have ever made a system engineers life hell. No system engineer alive that I know, has ever had a kind word to say about this thing. Web sphere, same deal. JBoss, and Jrocket also have a similar user base of system engineers who would readily glass the development team for these products should they ever encounter them in a bar. We’ve all lost nights over this stuff. 4 am responses to events that should not have happened. Purchase orders for equipment that should not have been needed. And oh the support contracts, consultants, and goddamned developers.

Now, you might be thinking “Well fuck you. You’re a sysadmin. What do you know about development?”

I’m not the guy you go to for your Tomcat environment build outs, though I used to be fresh out of college. Today, I am the guy that does the engine work on automation systems that run private clouds. Big ones. I know a hell of a lot more about scalability than most. I work with APIs J2EE Apps, and APIs to Python, C, etc alike. Oracle, SQLite, and bizarre custom rolled datastructures are what I access directly when the APIs fail to meet needs. I switch up languages constantly to meet use case requirements. Any given week I am reading docs just to remember syntax differences between what I coded in last week. I jump versions of languages based on supported releases, and support contracts. My code executes across the planet and often times across thousands of systems in one go. I don’t even have a title anymore. I am part developer, part system engineer, and part policy maker. Security is a concern too, for probably obvious reasons.

So I have a deep love, as I said before of VMs. And from that love of VMs I see Dalvik as being a neat bit of software. Some day it may be of use in the grander world of virtualization. I don’t hate Dalvik for being Dalvik. In fact, I quite love that someone is finally integrating Java execution directly into a generic VM. Java should never have been deployed as a product without something like Dalvik to back it up. Purpose built VMs are bad design. If everyone builds a purpose built VM, suddenly you have a hell of a lot of VMs… running inside of VMs that are dedicated to running that VM. There’s layers of abstraction and optimization in play that result in some pretty nasty resource allocation and scheduling foul ups. And, it’s completely unnecessary. Java was designed by a guy with a vision of 2010 way back in 1995. It was a brilliant idea for its time. But, as it turns out some of it’s base assumptions were mistakes. Some of us saw this from day one.

Java is a wonderful idea, that is if you are a computer scientist ( horrible term btw ). It’s what a developer would think of as a near perfect language. And in a lot of ways it is pretty awesome. I am not a fan of some of the nomenclature chosen for class and object identification ( I much prefer python on this front ), but it really did redefine object oriented design forever. The problem primarily from my standpoint results directly from this being a developer designed language. Sun produced a target JVM to demonstrate the language on. It worked. It was cross platform. And it integrated with web browsers, at least until Microsoft deployed the “Microsoft JVM”. Heh, I’ll avoid bagging on that. We all know what a clusterfuck that was. Java solved a hell of a lot of problems for a hell of a lot of people. And certainly for a long time it was a great solution. Hell I used Java for a long time to handle web content uploads exceeding a few megs. It was really the only way until flash offered a solution. But, the issue that Java had was in serving data. See, there’s a fundamental difference between an app that spins up, executes, and dies in a shortish amount of time, and an application that’s expected to run for years on shared resources.

In a typical application dev process, a customer comes to a dev team ( project managers, designers, devs, DBAs, … ) and they work together to setup a list of requirements, and a set of high level operating flows, and eventually detailed designs. All too often, this design occurs without the proper level of input being made by the guys whose systems this stuff has to run on. This doesn’t happen at good shops. And if you see infrastructure team members in design discussions, your shop is doing some damned fine work get yourself a cookie. Now, while the dev team is focusing on a number of issues related to business value of user requirements, the infrastructure team is trying to achieve business value by protecting the other applications they serve, as well as the resources they actually have available. That means knowing demands of apps, meeting those demands, and never failing to provide the services that their developers and consequently users rely on. Java tries to protect developers from themselves by taking over the resource allocation front and automating tasks related to it. Problem is, generally that approach doesn’t scale very well if the optimization isn’t working 100%. Additionally, as I pointed out before, sometimes the JVMs optimization may end up at odds with other layers of optimization.

Now you must be thinking, what the fuck does any of this have to do with android? Dalvik is awesome right? It can run any language and optimize everything through it. And android is a little tiny Dalvik ran fiefdom. Dalvik is a generalized VM. Yep, a lot of the issues I’ve had with Java over the years go away here. Additionally, those problems occurred on big beefy servers. They share little in common with a hand held personal device. This is absolutely true. I was just trying to open your minds to the land outside the VM. That’s essential to understanding the fundamental issues I have with the Android SDK today. There are some similarities between those server apps and your typical android app. Google made a design call to allow multitasking, and there was much rejoicing. This gives developers a bunch of options, including one that gave Apple the heebeejeebees ( not in aspell? ). Apple was afraid developers would run background processes that could impact the usability of their device. Some of us freedom loving Americans aren’t afraid to have the right to choose what apps are best for us, but some of our nanny state friends aren’t so brave. End result? Android has had some apps that have severely impacted the usability of their device. And there’s where one of the key similarities lie between Android and servers. Apps that multitask are now residing on a shared platform. Background processes will run for days, possibly months, maybe even years depending on the user and their general level of OCD when it comes to keeping connected to their nearest cell tower. And that means resource management on the android just got really freaking hard.

Now, let’s say some stuff about the Android devices. For cell phones they are embedded devices. That is to say, it’s “different” from a laptop or a server. Differences are many. But ultimately it’s a reduction in resource availability across the board, and the introduction of some severe bottlenecks. It’s a small device too, so HID and UI differences are pretty drastic. The results are, we’re dealing with an emerging deployment platform. This is fun, exciting work, and lots of opportunity for successes and failures. I am not going to address TVs, and Tablets for now.

So cell phones. I have apps, you have apps, our friends have apps. What are people using, what are people buying? I’ve only bought 3 apps ever. I bought a PDAnet license for my Droid so I could tether. I bought an alternate lock screen for my iphone so I could get a bunch of awesome info without having to unlock my phone. And I bought a game for my droid, because it was a great way to keep me awake during conference calls. This seems to parallel the sort of use cases people want out of their apps. Entertainment, usability optimization, and special purpose.

Entertainment, usually means games. And I have played some fun freaking games on the droid, as well as the iphone. But, the stuff I see on the iphone today puts the Droid to shame. And I don’t think that is going to change soon. Apple, is generally not known for being a superior gaming platform, in spite of their generally resource rich devices. Why the hell is the iphone suddenly the mobile device gaming mecca? Simply put, Apple allowed native development. Quake 2 wasn’t written in ruby, the Unreal Engine wasn’t written in Java, and Python isn’t going to be running the next Call of Duty bastardization. Game developers, don’t need kid gloves when it comes to optimization. Like systems engineers, they get business value out of pushing the upper limits of what their platforms can do. They get paid to optimize by hand literally. They don’t want a hiccup in their game caused by a rogue optimization process or some 3rd party background task, they want their game to immerse the user define an experience and be utterly true to it. Solitaire will run fine on your droid, but don’t expect the next great 3d racer. Now, of course there are other reasons that iphone has excelled, they were around first and have a larger market audience, also the Android devices have generally had far inferior touch detection to that of the iphones which have been leading in the charts in accuracy. Also, the moving target that is the Android platform and device family causes some issues for game developers optimizing at all. There’s certainly a hell of a lot more in play here to cause trouble. But, in my opinion, one of the few places a rogue or novice game developer can hope to compete against an established game design studio is on embedded devices. The limitations of the device provide a somewhat more equal sized playing field, and one that is not insurmountable for a small team with limited resources. But, it’s the attention to detail, those 10% extras, that the hungrier developers can produce that will will be so groundbreaking. If you don’t provide them with the ability to operate with the mittens off, that opportunity disappears.

Now, you might be saying… well what about the NDK? It still executes through Dalvik, but it bypasses most of the optimization. Yeah sort of, all calls moving through it are still subject to the will of its scheduler, and then subject again to the will of resource management on the Android linux layer where it is properly identified as just another user process. Also, background tasks in Dalvik continue to be blissfully unaware of the applications real needs and will pummel it as they see fit. However, the NDK presents another far more serious problem.

Google’s Android team should never have released the NDK. And that’s primarily because the Android marketplace does not operate much like a market place at all so much as it does like a flea market. You walk into a mall and you can be pretty certain everything sold there is moderately safe and legal. You go shopping at a church flea market and there’s a good chance some hippies will be selling pot brownies, a senile old vet will be selling a browning machine gun, and some sketchy looking rednecks will be selling some plasmas that fell off of a truck. Android’s marketplace is like the flea market. Their approval process is virtually nonexistent, which results in the possibility for an ( reasonable level of ) anonymous developer to add dangerous applications. The lack of a central authority in signing of packages results in the possibility of people masquerading as each other. And the lack of robust ACLs results in people simply clicking accept on the “app wants access to..” page. End result is? the NDK provides a nice big happy open door to kernel and linux environment attacks. Which means rooting the crap out of users just became that much easier. At least if Dalvik was handling everything, some of this could have been mitigated. The security problem fundamentally with the NDK in terms of Dalvik, is that it literally does not execute at the end of the day in Dalvik. The optimization problem with the NDK is that Dalvik should have no interaction with native code execution. It’s inefficient, and pointless.

So am I for native code execution? or am I for Dalvik? Truthfully? I want to see open native code SDK. But, if Google decides they gotta have Dalvik, I’d rather from a security standpoint that they went with JUST Dalvik and nothing else. You can’t have both here. You are either optimizing and securing inside of Dalvik or you are doing it inside linux. One or the other, definitely not both. As to why I’d rather have an open native SDK, I don’t believe that embedded devices as they exist today, benefit from a VM such as Dalvik. I don’t believe that Dalvik has the resources it needs, and I believe that it hurts developers in the long run because of that. But more to the point, I’m not a nanny state fan. I was glad to hear that Android decided to allow multitasking, and I don’t want anyone making me put on mickey mouse gloves before I get my pointers on.

At the end of the day, a lot of this is personal opinion. But, I do know a bunch of developers that have been turned off completely by the Java centric SDK that Android relies on. Very few embedded device developers I know have any desire to learn Java. Most game developers working on these devices would rather code in C or some near equivalent. And when it comes right down to it, either you have a generic VM handling all the execution, or you have no VM. If you can’t figure that out, you are doomed to fall flat on your face. To date, Dalvik has only provided Java SDK interfaces. It can do more for Google, but it hasn’t. And no clean comparison can occur between the two until it can. However, we do know that as things are now, Android has some very serious problems that Google is seemingly having trouble coping with. That concerns me as a customer.

So there’s been some news regarding Scrabble making some rule changes as of late. I’m not sure I hold with all those rules, but I figured if we’re looking at making scrabble better I’d toss my hat into the ring.

My new scrabble tile set provides game players with a fully international character set through the miracle of character set encoding standards. By using my entirely hexadecimal tile set you can deploy your scrabble words in full unicode, or simple ascii. I think however, I might need a bigger board. The memory space on this bit of antiquity is a bit on the small side.

More on My Flickr

Dear Parker Brothers, this is a parody. Please do not threaten litigation. I mean you no harm. In fact I am quite sure my suggestion of homebrew tile sets can only increase interest in scrabble and scrabble related paraphernalia. I am your friend. Love me as I have loved you. Please.

PHP devs need a conference just for PHP, Python devs need a conference just for Python, Debian needs a conference just for Debian, Yahoo needs a conference just for yahoo APIs, TechCrunch needs a conference just for TechCrunch, Apple needs a conference just for Apple devs, Google needs a conference just for Android devs, the list goes on ETERNAL.

So, on the eve of Summercon, and the beginning of the summer con schedule which will be headlined by The Next HOPE, Black Hat, Defcon, Maker Faire NYC, and Plumbercon, I have to ask myself… why do all these conferences suck?

Now before you start in with the rotting vegetable blitzkrieg let me explain what I mean. No one can recapture those magical times in the early days of Defcon, or the abject anarchy that was Rubicon. These days of old are gone. New days are ahead, with new generations of awesome, but the times have changed. Technology conferences aren’t a couple hundred technical guys getting together at a seedy hotel to party and discuss the latest and greatest anymore. Now it’s about money, politics, culture, and all these things that take away from the culture of hack. They dilute it, and they pervert it, and they market it as something it’s really not.

And that’s not to say I don’t enjoy these events. I do. But like most folks I don’t have a limitless supply of money and free time. I can’t go to more than a couple non local events a year in good conscience. I have other things I want to spend my time and money on. I have commitments to work, family, and actually hacking. So, when I do jump around I want to go to really special events.

HAR was pretty special. I have to say. The novelty of flying to the Netherlands and getting knee deep into the european hack scene was fun in its own right. But the event itself was utterly exceptional. There were amazing projects on display, from electric track cars, to DIY segways, and even open source uav quad copters just to name a very small number of amazing projects. There was a 10 gig fiber line ran to the camp. There was an open source GSM network in place. The dect network was rolled out. Power ran across the site, but the CCC brought their own generators just so they could throw the last party of the event after HAR brought down the camps power. This is an event that involved thousands and thousands of hours of peoples collective contributions. Hacker ran, hacker organized, and every part of it defined by people’s commitment to hacking. This was also, an incredibly fun time.

This year I am going to hit up burning man. Not a hacking conference, but a once in a life time experience I figure. We’ll see. I figure I have to do it once just to try it.

But, so many of the conferences I have been to have been focused around “talks”, “presentations”, and “vendors”. That’s not all bad, but it’s really not the point at all. Hacking, is about HACKING. The talks, the vendors, and the presentations are really just supporting stuff that’s on the periphery of hacking. And that’s where my disillusionment with these events comes into play.

I loved my first hackathon. It wasn’t much at all, just some food, some beverages, and a comfortable place to work. I didn’t complete my hack at my first hackathon. But, in spite of that, I enjoyed every second. Later hackathons I did complete projects, and that was still more rewarding. Getting an acknowledgment at techcrunch hackday was still more rewarding. But, what really was thrilling about these events was the actual hacking.

Mitch Altman has been hosting soldering classes, and hardware hacking villages at conferences across the planet for the past few years. He’s just this nice guy who looks a little bit like the San Francisco type that he is. And he just draws you into his hardware hacking just by showing you the stuff he’s built with all their captivating accents. Leds, tie dye colors, and mischievous but benign purpose. He makes you want to be a part of what he’s doing, and then right then he points you at a kit that you might love and says he’ll help you build it right then and there.

Mitch isn’t making money doing this, or if he is not very much. This is definitely a labor of love. And probably some of the most rewarding work on earth in terms of seeing immediate value in what you are doing. He gets people young and old to learn a new skill, and get excited about being a part of our world. And that’s pretty sweet.

Maker Faire’s do the same thing. Sure they expo a ton of amazing work, but the entire DIY community is built around telling people “you can do this too.” It’s a faire that shops skills around to the visitors. You can choose to just enjoy the fruits of other peoples labors, but you are barraged at every turn by the opportunity and encouragement to get your own hands dirty and be a part of the event in a way that isn’t just a spectator. That’s something I saw at HAR. That’s something I’ve seen at every hacking event that I’ve ever enjoyed. Defcon, and Rubicon in their own perverse way did the same. They reached out to you and said, hey… compete in this CTF, chill this beer, steal the punch clock from the employee lounge for the scavenger hunt ( okay maybe not the best advice on the planet ). Today they still do, but I still see them not quite getting the point.

The Next Hope to their credit is starting to get it. I think Mitch made an impression last hope. They’re setting aside a large part of the main floor to be an open hack area. Mitch, and hackerspaces will be present pushing out kits, and describing their spaces and projects. Just hackers sharing each others trade. But when I think about what I love about all these events, I think we’re just heading somewhere we started out but didn’t quite understand. We’re coming full circle, but this time we know what made the magic.

In that regard, I am looking forward to the hacker conference that like HAR, and toorcon’s desert debacle, that is as more of a group hack than it is an event. I want to see every person who shows up get drawn into the areas of expertise represented. I want to see the vendors, and the sponsors feeding a frenzy of people DOING stuff. Not people in chairs checking their email, or falling asleep. I want to see the presenters saying “hey and in two hours we’ll be building some more of these” or “and our api is available to you for the hackathon”. I want to see the CTFs taking center stage. I want to see the vendors saying “hey our product x would be perfect for your badge hack, here try it out.” I want to see people coming in expecting to work their asses off, expecting to succeed, and expecting to share their work with everyone else.

I love cool down parties, or pre-event parties. But, I don’t want to see vendor sponsored parties. I want to see a vendors team of engineers show up with their own homebrew, or just working the bbq, or maybe even making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. I want to see some folks champion some food / beverage hacking at these events. I want to see people rewarded for best contribution.

This is what I want to see. This is where I think we are headed. And when we get there, we’ll end up with small events that are like block parties in our geographic regions. But when we do major events, once a year or even once every three years… you’ll see PHP devs build a camp, Python Devs build a camp, Arduino Devs build a camp, and so on and so forth. And a major event will just be built by the people who are just plain there to build, destroy, and rebuild into something entirely different.

Anyways. I suppose I am just looking forward to the conferences this summer, but also dreading the inevitable let downs I’ll be hit with. But, there’s one thing I know. We’re learning. We’ll figure it out eventually.

I wonder about that. Mormon missionaries tend to work in teams when in foreign lands, the reason is to watch each other and ensure that neither has a lapse in faith. Or in short, everyone is watching everyone else and ratting anyone out who tries to escape. This has proven pretty damned effective. Even when someone does decide during a crisis of faith to make a run for it, they can be intercepted by a higher ranking missionary and convinced not to do so. Pretty soon the paranoia that is so pervasive in seminal texts such as Orwell’s 1984, become a very real part of ones life. What value is there in curbing crimes if it comes at the expensive of creativity and risk taking? In today’s society, many people are now adopting a somewhat bizarre habit of censor in everything they do. I know many people who simply do not like to be photographed at all. When someone is accused of a crime today, their facebook or other online web presence is suddenly held to the scrutiny of wary hacks looking to sensationalize their stories. Employers regularly use online presence as a vector by which they can gauge whether or not an employee poses a security risk. And of course we are all judged by our peers, our families, and our neighbors based on what actions we are immortalized performing on various sundry sites. We are all at far greater risk today, than ever before in our human history, of having every failure, mistake, and wantonly bizarre action recorded and made available directly to the people we interact with, and rely upon daily. We are now slaves to responsibility, and so much more.

Everyone on this planet has at some point played hooky. Be it in college, or at a job, somewhere we’ve all ended up staying out late during an especially good party, or visiting friends we had not seen in years, or just plain taking a day off to see a ball game or a parade. We’ve all done it. There’s always been a risk you’d be caught, but generally you get away with it. Today, thanks to twitter and facebook and social networks it doesn’t take much to track the comings and goings of co-workers and subordinates. Many people have faced disciplinary actions or lost their jobs based solely on the data culled from these resources. Politicians and famous people have faced the vitriolic hatred of tabloids and fringe lunatics because of photographs taken in public places. Recently the governor of NY was photographed at lunch with an intern sparking speculations of scandalous affairs. And, still more recently an NYPD police officer with all of a few days on the job was caught tackling a bike rider during an activist ride through the city. Officer Pogan is now facing prison time for being caught in a lie in his report, due entirely to the submission of third party video evidence provided to the court.

Yesterday I said on twitter, “Any person that would prosecute someone for filming a police officer in a public area, is not an American.” I still stand by that statement 100%, but there is some grey areas here that I think should concern us all. As I said before, when you are constantly under scrutiny you lose a lot of options. And without a doubt constant video surveillance of police activities would hinder their ability to accomplish their end game objectives. Bad people, will be able to continue to do bad things, and police will fall victim to legislative bureaucracy as lawyers haggle and second guess every frame of every recorded event with 20/20 hindsight. A lens is always a filter, and seeing only the slice of reality available to a camera does not an objective perspective make. Recognizing that in future legislation is essential, not only in protecting the rights of victims, but also in protecting the rights of police officers and other would be defenders of their actions ( mistakes or not ). However, the lens is brutally accurate in recording the things it can record. It provides a degree of certainty to everything it does capture. And that is utterly valuable in protecting police officers and suspected villains alike. Conflicting testimony can be put to rest with the review of video evidence. Accidents, failures, and other catastrophic events can be dissected to prevent future problems and to identify the legitimate causes. And, great moments in history can be preserved for years maybe centuries to come.

And that last one is touching on the real point. In the United States, we have the inalienable right to pursue our happiness free of the oppressive tyranny of our government by default in everything that we do. When laws are enacted they are done so to serve the public interest and protect the rights of the people. Sometimes we limit freedoms of some to avoid infringing upon the rights of all. This happens. But what we don’t do… is we don’t censor the actions of our police. We don’t arrest people for looking on as a man is beaten, or a house burns, or a young girl dies from a gunshot wound inflicted upon her by the police. The freedom of press is clear. And today, our press RELIES HEAVILY on the primary source contributions of people with cell phone cameras, and video recorders. The freedom of anyone to photograph to their hearts content in public is assured. And anyone who would suggest otherwise, simply does not understand what it means to live in this country. They don’t understand the meaning of the constitution, or what our forefathers fought and regularly died for. They don’t understand the basic principles of civility and society upon which all this amazing world is based. They are fools. And, more than anything they are not in any real meaningful way an American. In their world Neda does not have a face, and the violence a world away is nothing more than a fiction.

Certainly I am not comfortable knowing that the next time I go down to park and practice my light saber moves with a sawed off broomstick I could end up famous not for my technical contributions, or kindness, or anything meaningful but merely an extraordinarily entertaining fool. But you know what? If that’s what I am, so be it. I’d rather be judged based on truth than on fiction even if it’s only part of the truth. And everyone dons the the idiots hat at some point in their life. Hell, Shakespeare delivered his best work through the mouths of idiots.

During Hackday I worked on a display for the Stabby ID.

I have six or so HDSP 2111 units lying around. They also come in green and red led models.

Read on for Schematic and Demo Arduino Source

Requirements:

1 HDSP 211x LED Display
1 SN74LS595N Low Current Shift Register
1 Arduino compatible board
1 current reference capacitor ( just for safety )

Schematic:

Source:

I have been working on building the fonera images for the Agora Link project. I have a dev system at my home, and my image is now in use at NYC Resistor, PS:One, and Noisebridge.

More info on that Image here: https://wiki.hamburg.ccc.de/index.php/ChaosVPN::Fonera

We have 50 or so nodes connected, and we’re growing. Fairly awesome IMHO.

• Agora Link Homepage
• ChaosVPN Wiki
• Periodically updated network map

Now apparently these people are wealthy or something, or maybe just using someone else’s wealth. And they lure you into their nightmare with the siren song of riches. Then you become like them. Fallen shadow people bereft of soul and joy, doomed to a miserable life of feasting upon the lives of others. To me there is no worse fate. And yet, for some reason they are drawn to hackathons. It’s like moths to a flame. It’s terrifying. God I can’t stand when these guys show up at hackathons. One of these guys gave me his card the other day. I went to the website on it. It looked EXACTLY like a squatted domain, full of spam links to shell businesses and everything. I was disturbed. I mean on one level it made sense, but, I guess I didn’t expect it even though I should have. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their web presence. I wouldn’t call it a window to their soul, far from it… more like one stained glass portrait of a persons aspirations gleaming in the light of the internet itself. When you see this edifice to petty greed and find that the person behind it really is some form of monster, well it leaves you changed. It’s like being stabbed by the blade of the Nazgul. The continued exposure to these soulless wretches saps you and turns you slowly into a wraith. I get shivers just thinking about it.

Man, I love hackathons, but these crazy fanboys that show up, scare the ever loving crap out of me. We need to do something about that shit and right quick.

In the video,

Ben Combee is speaking, Max Henstell is working the stabster’s pneumatics and Mark Tabry is standing by to protect bystanders, and I am off camera to the left looking pretty for the cameras.

Not in the video is Bill Ward, Charles Pax, as well as the original Max.

* Special thanks to my friend Adam from Twilio who provided us with some assistance in the effort.

For the blow by blow of the event check out our time lapse. Trust me it was 24 hours of tedium just as grueling as watching this 2.5 minute clip.

As you can see this was an pretty large effort by NYCR and a hell of a lot more went into this project than is readily apparent. Just getting the equipment there was an event all its own. Max and Charles worked tirelessly to repair Stabby’s pneumatic stabber arm. Max also worked on wiring up the actuators and accompanying arduino code to link up with Ben, Bill, and Marks twilio interface code base. I worked with Mark on a display that showed debug info from the arduinos ( blogarythmic cred ) as well as caller ( aka stabber ) id when stabbing.

We finished up about 5 minutes before time was called… literally. Came down to the wire. Stabby was awarded a runner up award, and supposedly will be on display at Tech Crunch on Wednesday some time during the day.

We had a hell of a lot of fun, and were excited to present a functioning project ( a first for me =P ). Even more exciting was winning a runner up award in a contest that didn’t actually have runner up awards. I guess they were afraid of being stabbed.