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I survived Las Vegas and Defcon12 and all I got was this stupid blog posting

August 2, 2004 by chris | 1 comment

Well, my trip to Las Vegas was successful. Although I didn’t cover the cost of my trip with my gambling winnings (the only gambling I did was playing slots for free beer), I did have a kick ass time.

Instead of doing the tourist thing with the girls, a few of us snuck off to Defcon 12, the annual (and controversial) computer security convention. Some of the highlights included:

Amazingly, both my laptop and I survived the whole affair. I connected to the warzone that is the Defcon network without being cracked or landing on the Wall of Sheep. However, I did get portscanned at least 4 times and somebody even attempted to crack me via Bluetooth. I’d like to thank SSH and iptables for keeping me safely encrypted and happily firewalled.

I’ve got a whole bunch of notes I took down in a wiki while I was at the convention. I’ll get them up as soon as possible.

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Braindead simple Bluetooth tricks

July 16, 2004 by chris | 5 comments

Jealous of the Mac-freaks and all the cool tricks they can do with their Bluetooth cellphones, like locking their computer automatically when they walk away?

I spent a few minutes today hacking around and came up with a quick proof-of-concept script for something thats been bouncing around in my head for awhile:

!/bin/bash

DELAY="20" BD_ADDR="FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF" LOCK_CMD="xscreensaver-command -lock" while true; do (sudo l2ping -s 1 -c 1 $BD_ADDR > /dev/null 2>&1 ) || $LOCK_CMD sleep $DELAY done

It periodically pings your Bluetooth phone (replace BD_ADDR with the particular BD Address of your phone). When the ping fails (when you walk out of range), it can lock your screen, pause XMMS, etc. Not bad for 5 lines of Bash script.

Now I’ve just got to beef it up a bit, add some more options. If I’ve got the time, I’ll turn it into a Python Gnome applet so you can throw it in a toolbar.

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WhoAt

July 7, 2004 by chris | No comments

James Byers, a sailing friend of mine who also happens to be quite the successful techie, tipped me off to his new startup project: WhoAt.

Yes… it is in fact YASNP (Yet-Another-Social-Networking-Project). But this one has an interesting twist that might make it pretty cool… it’s location aware.

So the theory is that when you hit the coffee shop with your PowerBook (or ThinkPad), you can let the network know where you are and it will alert you to possible new friends in your vicinity. You can then learn more about them or send them messages. You can also use the service from your mobile phone using SMS or a WAP browser (the phone interface is very simple, I was impressed).

Right now the service only covers NYC and San Francisco, but James said he’d be adding San Jose to the list within a week or so.

Update: Be sure to check out my profile, and if you for some reason want an invite (instead of signing up on your own), leave a comment.

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GMail invite up for grabs

June 8, 2004 by chris | 9 comments

I just got a few more invites to Google Mail and I’ve decided to give one of them away to a lucky visitor.

Leave a comment explaining why I should give you an invite. The best comment posted in the next week wins the invite.

Update: GMail accounts are selling for $50 or more on eBay. You’ll have to make it obvious you’re not going to sell it. I’ll expect a prompt email from your new GMail account. However, if nobody claims it, I’m selling it and taking the money to the bar. Update: Its now a week later and the only people to comment already have GMail accounts (I’ve already sent them invites). Sad, very sad. Update: I have no more invites. So stop asking.

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San Jose Wireless Cafes

June 7, 2004 by chris | 5 comments

I’ve started a page in my wiki where I’ll be posting all the coffe shops and similar establishments I find around downtown San Jose that have free wireless internet access.

After spending 4 years in Ann Arbor where there are 3 coffee shops per corner and they all have free wireless, it was a bit of a shock to find out the rest of the world wasn’t the same. This is Silicon Valley… I expected there to be free WiFi on every corner!

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