Category Archives: Computers & Technology

SCALE 2008 Wrapup

I had a great time at SCALE, here’s a wrap-up of some of the things that went on:

The first day had two tracks all about open source in healthcare. Speakers included Scott Shreeve (co-founder of Medsphere, and founder of Crossover Health) who gave a very motivating talk about the importance of transparency in healthcare, and [...]

Conferences Roundup

I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the past few months, here’s a short summary of them:
May ‘07: Toorcon Seattle (BETA)

I wrote a separate post about this, see here.
July ‘07: Ubuntu Live

I took the train down to Portland with Andy, which is so much more enjoyable than flying, I don’t even know where start. [...]

Seattle Linux User’s Group Meets this Saturday

I’ve been working with a few other people to resurrect GSLUG, the Greater Seattle Linux User’s group.
The next meeting is this Saturday (September 1st, 2007) at 12:00pm, here’s the announcement that Ian sent out on the list:

The September 2007, inaugural meeting of the Greater Seattle
Linux Users Group (GSLUG) will be [...]

Ubuntu Live and OSCON

I’ll be heading down to Portland tomorrow afternoon for Ubuntu Live! and OSCON. I’m really looking forward to meeting up with Chris and Steve, both of whom I haven’t seen in over a year.
Hacking BoF
I’ve organized a “hacking session” BoF at Ubuntu Live, anyone interested in improving Ubuntu and GNOME is invited to attend.
Here’s the [...]

Linux Filesystem Quotas

I have a Xen VM set up on my server that I give accounts to friends on, and I thought it would be nice to set up filesystem quotas, so one user couldn’t take down the server for everyone else by filling up the disk.
Enabling quotas is easy, just add usrquota and grpquota to /etc/fstab, [...]

ToorCon Seattle (Beta) - Wrapup

This past weekend was ToorCon Seattle (Beta), a weekend long free & invite-only get together of around 100 security professionals and hackers.
It was a lot of fun!

Talks were on Saturday at the Last Supper Club.

A list including slides are up on the website.
Saturday night’s party was at the Public N3rd Area, which was temporarily converted [...]

Space Balloon - Tethered Test

Due to intense fog at the launch site, we weren’t able to launch as planned. After a lot of consideration, we decided to do a tethered launch to test everything out. This was a huge success, and proved very valuable. The balloon got to around 250 feet and took lots of pictures. All of our [...]

Space Balloon

Over this past week, I’ve been involved in an amazing project to build a weather balloon carrying a bunch of cameras and launch it into the edge of space. We’re just finishing up some last minute details right now, and plan to head out to middle of nowhere eastern washington very soon. We’re going to [...]

BillMonk + Obopay

Earlier this month I had the great opportunity to become the first person to join the growing team at BillMonk.com!
BillMonk is a free service that makes it easy to track expenses between friends, and to settle them up instantly online. Particularly popular with roommates, young professionals, and college students, it has been used for splitting [...]

Patent Protection Lovefest, Update 1

The Wall Street Journal published a spot-on article a few days ago about the Novell+Microsoft arrangement.
It’s only available online to subscribers, so I scanned it:

And making the news yesterday, The CEO of Microsoft has straight up said that every (with the exception of Novell/SuSE of course!) linux company, developer, and user is violating Microsoft-held patents, [...]