Technology Bytes

Allright. It’s that time of the year again when we ask you to reach into your PayPal pockets to help keep KPFT on the Houston airwaves. I don’t know who first equated the price of a cup of coffee with a pledge amount, but it was a genius move, given the explosion of coffee’s popularity and its equally high prices. This is one area where geeks didn’t overpay as early adopters, though we’re certainly paying the price now. In 1980, a large cup of premium joe was going for around 80 cents and probably closer to 40 cents 40 years ago when the station first came online. In 2010, we’re solidly in the $2.00 range for your basic cup of black, and easily up in the three to four dollar range if you append an -ocha, -atte or -ino onto the end of your caffeinated beverage of choice.

I did my own math and came up with a (scarily conservative) number upwards of a thousand dollars per annum. Yeah – as soon as I hit the Enter key, I wish I hadn’t.

Even Jay Lee’s single pre-show cup would net him a membership at the $150 hoodie level, but *I* believe that money is better spent to keep him awake and to help maintain his cheery disposition.

So here’s where I’m going with this: I’ve been in the car a lot this last week and have had the opportunity to listen to several of the other programs on KPFT reach for and meet their fund raising goals. Two things really stood out to me among the talk shows: First, much to my dismay, nobody ever used the “For the price of a cup of coffee” plea and second, that Technology Bytes, as a show, is extremely a-political. We’re definitely tuned into the laws and legislation that affect your digital life, but as a whole, we don’t really talk politics on the show. I think that Geeks, for the most part, transcend political boundaries, if for no other reason than, as a group, we have enough existing personality quirks to effectively overshadow any off-putting we may do with talk of politics.

Now, don’t get me wrong: we do have *our own* political battles, but they’re usually over things like operating systems, mobile devices and text editors – You know… well defined battles where there is *clearly* a right side and a wrong side. (Apologies to the vi camp.)

I also got to watch a fair amount of network and cable news this last week as I was packing up my place in anticipation for a move to new geek digs. While KPFTs political talk is, for the most part, well thought out and on point, it’s not nearly as fun as some of the fear-mongering going on elsewhere. So, it being so close to Halloween, and in an effort to balance the voices of sanity you may hear during other times of the week on 90.1, I’d like to indulge in a little techy fear mongering of my own, spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about what the world would be like without the benefit of KPFT and especially Technology Bytes.

First, spyware would run rampant. Aside from reminding listeners to keep current on Anti-virus and Anti-spyware programs, the mere *presence* of Jay Lee keeps Houston free from 40% of the malicious code that has infested the rest of the nation. If you check out virus trends for the periods that Jay has been out of the country, you’ll notice very significant spikes in virus and malware infestations in the Houston metropolitan area coinciding with his exact travel dates.

We’ve all heard about the IP address shortage in the IPv4 address space. What you haven’t heard about is the impending shortage of Zeros and Ones. phliKtid is actually responsible for running the master /dev/random device, barely keeping up with local demand. If phliKtid goes, the computing world may have to find some other system of base notation with which to communicate. That’s right – if the current times have you a little spooked, you need to stop buying gold and move to the real currency of the future, Zeros and Ones. In fact, anyone who makes a pledge tonight just has to track me down at the next Geek Gathering and I will hand them a DVD full of zeroes and ones. I’m talking billions of them… I can also email them. Just a little added incentive there…

Without the presence of Peter and Dwight, Steve Jobs and the Apple design team may not feel compelled to design any new quality hardware. The MacBook air would get a little chunky at the bottom, and would have to be renamed the MacBook Pear. iPods would start to look like first generation Zunes and Apple TV would only carry over-priced re-runs of Glenn Beck and grainy episodes of the original Lassie. For the record, there’s nothing wrong with Lassie… It’s just that I’d prefer to watch her pull Timmy out of the well in 1080 HD splendor.

And without Groovehouse’s voice on the airwaves, your computer’s clock cycles would get out of sync, wreaking havoc system wide. It’s that low steady voice with its inner groove that keeps your clock cycles beating-along at their prescribed pace.

And finally, without me, you may have missed the Ubuntu boat and wound up with HML. I’ll give you a hint: it’s a linux distribution based on Kubuntu. Is anyone familiar with it?

HML stands for Hannah Montanna Linux, which can be downloaded from hannahmontana.sourceforge.net. If you’ve been listening to Technology Bytes for any length of time, you’ll know that we were early proponents of Bootable CD Linux distributions like Knoppix and Ubuntu. Without us, your first foray into the world of Linux could have been met with a purple desktop adorned with the teen singer, complete with a rebranded Tux the penguin sporting the Hannah Montana graphic on his rotund little tummy. Now, this is a fine distro for an eleven year old girl, but I think we can all agree that that isn’t the case for a fourty year old man.

So…what *do* you get if you don’t do your part to help KPFT?

Rampant Virus, spyware and malware infestations in the Houston area; a worldwide shortage of zeros and ones, no new mac gear, your computers would lose all sense of rhythm, (something akin to Carlton on the Fresh Prince of Belaire), and you’d have to hide your laptop’s screen in public for fear of ridicule (or masked envy) of your Hannah Montana Desktop. Not a pretty world, yet somehow still not as bleak as the one painted by the guys over at Fox.

That’s it for your Fair and Balanced FUD-One-One and that’s that for your Big Fat Greek BarretTime.

All right – I’m sure you’re all familiar with the quote, “In this world, nothing is certain but death and Spyware”? Actually, that’s Jay Lee’s version; Benjamin Frankin’s version was death and taxes. Now, either the good folks at the Houston Area Apple Users Group haven’t realized that Jay has added some Apple to his arsenal or they’re just wholly unconcerned with Spyware.

Whatever the case, they’ve chosen to take the tax route in this Saturday’s main presentation featuring 2011 QuickBooks Pro, given by Clair Jascske, at the Bellaire Civic Center located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas. Special interest groups get going at nine AM with the main presentation at 11:15. Things wrap up by 1:00, allowing all the attendees to go balance their books with their new found accounting prowess.

Actually, when QuickBooks was first released, it found huge favor with small business owners who had *no* formal accounting training. It soon ate up 80% of the small business market, even though professional accountants balked at its lack of audit tools and its poor security controls. As early as 2000, these issues were addressed by Intuit, the software’s publisher, and the product was forked into two versions: Basic and Pro. Now, a full decade later, Intuit is ready to roll out its latest offering for Mac and PC. So, whether you’ve got an interest in accounting, own a small business, or just want to be in the same room with people interested in accounting or small business owners, this Saturday is for you. Hit www.haaug.org for more details.

With the October Geek Gathering falling on 38 (that’s 10-01-10 in binary), you’ll have to go five full weeks until you can gather with like-minded geeks again at the November installment of the Tech Bytes meetup. That is, unless you decide to attend the Houston Hacker Space open house this Friday night at the Caroline Collective, hosted by Tx/Rx labs. They’re the ones who were passing out stickers at the last Geek Gathering and they popped up on KPFT’s live journal earlier in the month. Tx/Rx labs is a project-based team of makers with backgrounds in the creative arts: electronic circuitry, music composition, 3D printing, computer science and security, screenprinting, fashion design and even haute cuisine. You are all welcome to attend their open house this Friday at 8:00 PM to visit with their members, share your own projects, enjoy some home cooking, or just hang out with a friendly crowd of technology and craft enthusiasts. The Caroline Collective is located at 4820 Caroline Street near the Museum of Fine Arts. Hit www.txrxlabs.org for info on the group and their Open House or carolinecollective.cc for a list of upcoming community events, not all of which are techy.

I’m going to abstain from my quasi-techy segueue and just jump to:

If you’re a Visual Basic programmer tired of being abused by your C-sharp counterparts, maybe you should ditch that crowd in favor of a pro-VB vibe at HAL-PC this Saturday at ten in the morning. The Visual Basic Special Interest Group is led by Tom Baehr and addresses all things related to the event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft. The language itself is very venerable, at least in computer years: VB 1.0 was released in May of 1991, and borrowed much of its syntax and style from the original BASIC desinged in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. A bit of trivia: does anyone remember what BASIC stands for? Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code! So if your only programming experience is: 10: Print “Hello”; 20: GOTO 10;”, leave your line numbers at home at home and go see what all this event-driven fuss is about at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, suite 200. Surf to www.hal-pc.org for driving directions and a full list of monthly meetings.

That’s it for your QB/VB CV and that’s that for BT.

Allright! Jay Lee is back after several weeks spent off continent, meaning that we’re back at full force and that Dwight is no longer grue bait. At least for now… Friend of the show, KD5, is also freshly back from a lengthy trip from iPadding it down-unda. Both travelers will be making one more trek this Friday night to the Coffee Groundz for the October installment of the Geek Gathering. If you’re interested in travelling light while still carrying enough tech to stay connected across multiple countries, these are the people to talk to.

We’ll have *another* traveler joining us this Friday, this one fresh in from Italia. While we’ve had many members of the Arduino family make appearances at Geek Gatherings past – the venerable Diecimila, the younger, faster Duemilanove, the much more pronounceable LillyPad and the Mighty Mega – the newest member of the family will be making a Houston appearance this Friday. That’s right – The Arduino Uno made its debut this past weekend at the Maker Faire: New York. We’ll be unboxing one (yeah – they actually come in boxes now!) this Friday before promptly plunging it into a pumpkin in an effort to make something scary for Halloween. From scooping out pumpkin guts to wiring up motion sensors and LEDs, we’re going to try to go from unopened box to finished project in the course of an evening. Things kick off
around seven in the evening and won’t end until the last Light Emitting Diode is lit. The Coffee Groundz serves coffee, tea, beer and wine in addition to a light menu. Free WiFi and a few available AC outlets complement the evening, as does the promise of a breezy back patio. Hit www.geekradio.com for details and directions.

Oh! We’ll also have a visitor from China – in the form of Seeed Studio’s ‘Film’, a flexible band containing a microprocessor and some supporting electronics. They can be joined together to do some interesting things with wearable computing. Unfortunately, I’m one film shy of having enough to go all the way around my wrist, so if you’re thin wristed, relatively free of Cheetoh dust from the elbow down, and have ever considered becoming a forearm model, we may require your services Friday night. I want to be clear that I’m not discriminating against my orange fingered bretheren out there – it’s just that the Seeed Film is orange, too, and we really do want it to show up in pictures.

Now, if you know that you can wash off the Cheetoh dust, but you’re still worried that you don’t have the required fortitude of forearm for photos on Flickr, you’re probably not spending enough time in front of the command line. As with many things, it’s really about having the right equipment. So if the equipment in your DOS gym feels old and busted but you don’t want to ante up enough money for a new Mac Membership, you can always hit the free weights at the Linux gym to really pump up your pecks and hunts or to get those rock hard abs you’ve always wanted. That’s ABS as in the Arch Build System, the software package manager for Linux. That’s funny, because I bet you all thought I meant Advanced Bash Shell Scripting… Bazinga!

If you need a little help in getting motivated or you want to pick up enough Linux acronyms to make your own joke train wreck, you’ll want to attend the Linux 101 workshop at HAL-PC Headquarters Tuesday, October 5th at 7:00 PM. The Linux 101 special interest group at HAL-PC takes a look at Linux from the beginners point of view the first Tuesday of every month. And while there *is* a very powerful command line under the hood, if all your moves are mouse-centric, you’ll be just fine in Linux with KDE or Gnome. HAL-PC is located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, not too far from the West Loop and San Felipe. Linux 101 takes attendees through a three month progression before turning them out on their own or inviting them back to rinse and repeat. Actually, that’s the attendee’s choice, I don’t think you can actually flunk Linux. Well, SCO did, but that’s a different story. Hit www.haaug.org and then click on the SIG Calendar for a full description of the workshop.

And lastly, if all you do is stay at home, hanging out on FaceBook, maybe it’s time you get a life and go out to see a movie about FaceBook. The FaceBook movie, called The Social Network, opens this Friday and chronicles the founding of social media site. Depending on ticket availability after the Geek Gathering, there may be a late night trip to check our FaceBook status on the Big Screen… I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll play the Twitter short, but we’ll see how it goes…

That’s it for your forearm forewarning and that’s that for BarretTime.

This is the last BarretTime before the return of Jay Lee. Hopefully, we’ll be back to full force next week, but for now, Dwight is the only person here in the booth to take the brunt of BarretTime abuse. Again, sorry about the Grue last week; those things happen…

So, Dwight, when was the last time you ever Hi-5’d, Yak’d or Multiplied?

If you’ve ever Twittered, FaceBooked, Flickrd, MySpaced, Linked In, Friendstered, Multiplied, Hi5’ed, LiveJournaled, AIMed, Yak’d, ICQ’d, IRC’d, CompuServed, Prodigied, AOLed, GEnied or arguably even USENET’ed, you may want to take this moment to look down and find out who owns the shoulders on which you’re standing.

(Even if you don’t want to do this, it’s too late now…)

Any guesses as to the initials of the giant that made all of these activities possible before they were given cute monikers?

(beat)

That’s good, because that would have totally blown the rest of BarretTime out of the water…

What about the initials of his creation? BBS.

The first BBS or Bulletin Board System was born out of the Great Blizzard of 78, when five feet of snow fell on Chicago in a 24 hour period. Coded in just four weeks, the CBBS, or Computerized Bulletin Board System, was named after its cork board counterpart used in dormitory, offices, and apartments to exchange information and offers among its local community. The breakthrough idea is this: rather than trudging through five feet of snow to see if anyone is hocking Moon Boots or Space Heaters on the bulletin board at the end of te quad, you simply (Big Radio Air Quotes Here) “Dial In” to a computerized BBS with your phone line and modem, download any notes, postings, or messages, leave your own, then disconnect so the next user could walk up, sorry, “dial in”, to the Bulletin Board and conduct their own social business.

Things were still very local, as this was before the Internet had hit the home, and to reach a BBS in Detroit, you actually had to place a phone call to Detroit, incurring whatever long distance rates were in place at the time. And if you lived in a rural area, not only did you have long distance charges to contend with, but often something known as a party line.

Actually, we’ll take a quick DC to cover this… If you’ve ever had an annoying little sister or little brother pick up the phone while you were dialed into an online service, you can only imagine the frustration of having ten or twenty of those siblings all sharing the same common phone line. The idea is that its cheaper to string a single phone line between multiple rural homes than it is to run individual cables between the CO and each home. And if you lived anywhere as far removed as Conroe in the 80s, there’s a good chance you know what I’m talking about. It’s h3ll on downloads.

So getting us dialed back into BarretTime…

The creator of the first Bulletin Board System, the CBBS, was Ward Christensen, creator of XMODEM protocol, which can still be found lurking in corners of the Internet that only Grues and embedded systems developers dare still tread.

The CBBS was first installed on a cobbled together S-100, the bus designed for the Altair 8800, arguably the first hobbyist microcomputer, and soon had Chicago users connecting, one at a time, to post to the very first forums. The SysOp or System Operator played the role of arbiter in what belonged on the board, or even who could post there. Most early boards were free, run by hobbyists, but boards soon popped up that required cash on the barrel head as a way to add additional phone lines and modems. File sharing also took off. Before BBSs, shareware was exchanged in person or by snail mail, but now, people could easily upload and download programs to their BBS without ever leaving the cold glow of their CRT. Power users frequenting more than one board would often aid in transferring these goods from one BBS to the next, and while funny lists and cute ascii art didn’t move at a viral speed, espcecially by today’s standards, they did crawl along at a microbial or fungian pace.

Of course, with the good comes the bad; it didn’t take long for BBSs dedicated to illegal file sharing to crop up. These were often fueled not by paid subscriptions, but by upload ratios: meaning that in order to download something good, you usually had to be the first to upload something better. They also had cooler sounding names than their credible cousins: The Tholian Web was a notorious 713 board used heavily for distributing games in the Gulf Coast area. Of course, all of the info for this BarretTime came from Wikipedia. Groove, can you remind me to hit up Wikipedia post-show and make sure that all of this stuff is actually in there?

BBS use grew fairly quickly through the 1980s and by 1993 there were tens of thousands of local BBSs around the world. A *few* of the dial-in boards made the move to the Internet, letting users connect via telnet or even packet radio, but the vast majority died with the widespread adoption of the Internet that really took hold this same year.

So, to Ward Christensen, I thank you, early shareware users thank you, anyone who has ever used open source software thanks you, social media users thank you, the RIAA has it’d doubts, but we’re all sorry for the scuff marks on your shoulders.

That’s it for this Brief BBS Debriefing and that’s that for BarretTime.

There’s a long weekend coming up, and while many of you may be out of town, the majority of the Tech Bytes crew will be holding things down in Houston at the Coffee Groundz this Friday. Things start a little after seven at 2503 Bagby at McGowan. WiFi and Geeky camraderie are free, but the coffee, beer and eatz will cost you. Parking violations and towing fees can also make a dent in your wallet, so be sure to not park along McGowan directly in front of the coffee shop if you do come out Friday night.

You can find more information about the Coffee Groundz, as well as a couple of pictures from our past Geek Gatherings on their main page at www.coffeegroundz.net. And of course, you can get always all the details at www.geekradio.com, along with some pictures of phliKtid the Coffee Groundz has yet to grok.

Now, even though the Geek Gathering is on for the weekend, pretty much everything else of a techy nature is off.

VB Programming at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
The Basic 101 Seminars at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
Samba and Network Administration? Cancelled.
And Monday’s Chief Architect Special Interest Group Meeting? Cancelled.

So what to do with all the extra time and no user group meeting to go to?

Well, you could always use the long weekend to improve your hacking skills. Gone are the days when a hacker was forged from equal parts curiosity, technical prowess and thousands of hours at the keyboard. With the advent of YouTube, you, too, could become an uber hacker in only a matter of minutes; just four minutes and twenty six seconds, if all you want to do is view other people’s IP addresses. That’s right, in just under five minutes, NextGenHacker101 will walk you through using the l33t hacker tool Tracer-T to see who’s connecting to a particular website, their IP addresses and their connection speeds.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you’re really missing out on some excellent mis-information. The joke is that Tracer-T doesn’t really do any of the things that NextGenHacker101 believes – it simply shows each piece of network routing equipment that sits between you and a particular host on the Internet. If you want to check out the tools that *really* get the job done, carve out some time this weekend to get familiar with the following current gen hacker toolkits:

Pin-G: Pin-G is installed by default on most modern operating systems as well as a few ancient ones. To use it, simply type in Pin-G, spelled p i n g, onto the command line followed by the IP address of the computer you’d like to hack. You’ll immediately see if that computer is reachable from your own, as well as a report on how much lag may exist between you and the target. You can even use Pin-G to build other more nefarious attacks like Smur-F or Floo-D.

OK, now that you’ve determined that your target exists, you’ll want to see what kinds of Internet Aware programs it may be running. To do that, we’ll need to reach for the next tool in our arsenal, Inma-P.

Inma-P is a free network security scanner that can do things like list the open ports of a particular computer on the Net or even detect the operating system of a remote host. All in all, it’s a very robust and powerful tool. Inma-P comes installed by default on many Unix based operating systems, and is available for download for Windows, Mac and other Operating Systems at n m a p . org. To use Inma-P, type n m a p onto the command line followed by the IP address we used in our previous example. Using it like this, in its most simple form, will yeild a list of open ports on the target computer.

So, Now that you know what kind of services are running on your target, you may want to capture some of that traffic to see what’s really going on.

We’re getting away from the command line now and going graphical. After all, the Internet is a series of tubes and you’re going to need to crawl up a couple of them if you’re truly going to make the metamorphosis into a l33t haxor. And as all hackers know, the command line is not for crawlers: we’re going GUI on this one.

The last tool of the evening is called Wireshar-K. It’s a packet capture tool that will allow you to save and inspect the individual packets traveling over your local network segment. If nothing else, use of this tool will scare you into using end-to-end encryption whenever possible. That means using https instead of http in your URLs and using products such as PGP or GPG to encrypt email and attachments.

Of course, all of these next gen hacker tools have real world counterparts. Ping, nmap and Wireshark all all great network diagnostic tools with legitimate uses: they can give an experienced network admin quite a bit of detail about what’s actually happening on their network at the packet level. If you do spend some time with them this weekend, be sure not to direct your next gen attacks at anyone other than yourself, as many servers run Network Intrusion Detection Systems and don’t appreciate being scanned.

That’s it for this NextGenHacker Fourty One One and that’s that for BarretTime.

So, it’s no secret that what has developed into the finely polished production that is Technology Bytes got its start some fifteen years ago, managing to keep pace with the explosive growth of the Internet, all the while helping to inform and protect you from all the drama that comes with said connectivity. Arguably, the growth of the Internet and the new found need to ‘get online’ has brought more people to computing than any other factor. For instance, you could organize your recipes on a microcomputer back in
1980, but it wasn’t until you could share recipes online that the computer came into the kitchen. So, to celebrate our own fifteenth birthday this month, we’ll take a quick, self-indulgent tour of some of the more compelling reasons to get online during the
first ten years of the show.

As far as birthdays go, Tech Bytes is in good company. The online bookstore Amazon.com was launched fifteen years ago. And, in parallel with this show’s history, Amazon’s current moniker was not it’s first.

Any guesses as to what Amazon began life as? Cadabra.com

And TechBytes was originally conceived under the name Radiodrome (later Radio X).

Just one month later, in August of 1995, the Dotcom Boom starts in ernest.

This is also the month that Internet Explorer was released as part of Windows 95.

In September, the online auction site eBay was founded, but not as eBay. Anyone know the original name? Auctionweb. The first item sold? A broken laser pointer for $13.83.

In December, the first *multilingual* search engine is launched. Guesses? This is December of 1995… Alta Vista.

Fourteen years ago, on Independence Day, Hotmail launches in the US. This is also the day that Jeff Goldblum uses a mac to upload a virus into an alien mothership en route to Area 51, thus saving all humanity from certain destruction. Well, all of Humanity except the Houstonians that got nuked midway through the movie. Some of these saved humans became the first cyber squatters, fueled by the sale of the domain name business.com for $150,000.00 in March of ’97.

Others go on to follow in the footsteps of web commentator Jorn Barger, who coined the term ‘weblog’ in December of that same year. Weblog, of course, was later shortened to ‘blog’, giving birth to what are now known as bloggers.

’97 was also the year that the Dotcom Boom became a Bubble, as people threw money at anything with a commercial TLD registration attached to it.

In March of ’98, Kozmo.com launches, promising delivery of anything in under one hour, and in that September, two Stanford post-grad students open Google’s first office in a garage in California.

By October of ’98, the first blogger community launches in the form of Open Diary, EverQuest and Napster come online in 1999, and the original MySpace website launches… anyone know as what? As a file sharing service. Seriously. They were shut down in 2001 and then re-opened their doors in 2003 as a social networking site.

In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launches the first mobile Internet service called i-Mode. Its only available in Japan, doing nothing for the healing city of Houston.

In January of 2000, after countless patched CoBOL systems lumbered on with very few hitches, the Dotcom Bubble reaches its peak when the Dow Jones Industrial Average tops out at record levels seen neither before nor since, and in February of that year, several notable websites, including Amazon, CNN and Yahoo are defaced or crippled by hackers who had no doubt watched the Movie Independence Day just four years earlier.

So, actually, the first five years of the show heralded in alien viruses, bloggers, cyber squatters, financial irresponsibility, black hat hacking and MySpace. Yeah. I blame Goldblum…

Hang in there… Things do turn around. On One Eleven Oh-One, Podcasting is born via a Greatful Dead track and four days later, Jimmy Wales founds Wikipedia.

In April 2003, right about the time that MySpace was reinventing itself, the Apple iTunes store goes online. One month later, the first Flash Mob assembles. Any guesses as to where? Sorry, Steve, it didn’t happen at the Apple Store, but rather in the rug department of a Manhattan department store. A little over 100 people assembled.

The date on this next one is a bit of a tip-off if you do the math. On February 5th, 2004, *this* becomes the most searched for image in web history.

Careful on the phrasing as we don’t want any microphone malfunctions in the studio tonight… That’s right – Janet Jackson’s Wardrobe Malfunction during the 2004 Superbowl half-time show.

In November of that same year, the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser is launched, heralding in a new age of browser wars. A 1.0 party was thrown here in Houston at the original location of the St. Arnold’s Brewery.

And video sharing site YouTube comes online in February ’05 and the web experiences more growth this year than it did during the entire Dotcom Boom.

So, the good news is that we’ll leave the last five years for you to chat about this Friday night at the Technology Bytes Fifteen Year Anniversary Party, happening at the Houston House of Blues in the Foundation Room from seven until close.

Now, the bad news is that Will Smith has signed on to make another TWO Independence Day movies, which means that we could be in for another technological downturn should Goldblum take another Mac along for an extra-atmospheric jaunt. All of the havoc he wreaked before was done on OS9, so there’s no telling what 10.8,
Star Leopard, will be capable of.

That’s it for the early days of your inter-life flashing before you eyes and that’s that for BarretTime. See you Friday!

All right. The Future is now. Well, almost now. Two days from now to be exact. Houston’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference, ApolloCon, will get started this Friday, June 25th, at The DoubleTree Houston Intercontinental Airport Hotel.

Not everything is purely sci-fi this year. On Friday night, a panel titled, “Con Season is in the Air: When a Young Fan’s Mind Turns to Flirtation” will be discussing fun, flirtation and the possibility of making a lasting connection at the con. The Panelists state that “anyone who says geeks don’t get any love has certainly never been to a convention!”

And for any con-goers who found a little romance six to ten years ago, there is now an ApolloKids track with everything from Oragami to Krav Maga for Kids. For those not in the know, Krav Maga is an eclectic hand-to-hand combat system developed in Israel which involves wrestling, grappling and striking techniques. It’s mostly known for its extremely efficient and brutal counter-attacks and is taught to elite special forces around the world. I’m assuming that they’re teaching it to the kids, and not to parents for use on the kids, though after having been in more than a few airports recently, I’d probably be up for attending a class on the latter.

For the politically aware KPFT listener, there is a talk entitled, “Deepwater Horizon: Beyond the Spill” in which panelists will discuss the spill, the realities of offshore oil production and how future environmental catastrohphes can be prevented. “Greening the Future by Recovering the Past” will discuss the concept that recycling isn’t just for aluminum cans and plastic bottles. The greenest solution may be to renovate, reuse, and recycle. And for those in posession of a hand-crank radio, you can continue your emergency preparedness education by attending “Hurricane Preparedness 201: The Post-Ike Lessons Learned Story”.

Also talking about the tangible future will be our own David Brummel, known on IRC and at Geek Gatherings as KD5, with a talk and Q&A session on the Future of the Space Industry. This is just one of several panels and workshops that KD5 will be on during the three day con, several of which add some extremely techy fare to the already dense sci-fi and fantasy content.

If you can only attend for a day and have a yearning for Mobile Computing or Open Source Hardware in your heart, then Saturday is your day. At noon, KD5 and I will be sitting in on a panel called “There’s an App for That” – I’ll be the Android advocate and KD5 will be representing his vast stable of Apple gear. On the heels of that, we’ll be giving an Introduction to Open Source Hardware talk that gives attendees a survey of currently available hobbyist micro-controllers, with some extra time spent on the Arduino platform, both hardware and software.

All of that talk is theory. If you want to get your hands on some actual hardware, we’ll be putting on a two hour workshop in which participants will build their own functioning Arduino clone from the ground up. We’ll be using cool looking translucent solderless breadboards. The key word there being “solderless”, meaning that no harm will come to your hands during the construction of these mini micro-controllers, only your pocketbook, as we’re passing on the cost of the kits to the participants. You’ll also need a laptop running Linux, OS Ten or Windows along with a functioning USB port.

While you’re able to attend all the panels with just a basic Con Badge, you may need to sign up in advance for any of the workshops requiring materials. You can get details on Apollocon Panels, workshops and ApolloKids activities by surfing to www.apollocon.org. Both three day and single day passes are available.

That’s it for this Sci-Fi and Fantasy Four One One and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right. We’re finally free of those awkward moments where you were either squirming around in your chair or stepping up to support KPFT. I, for one, am extremely glad its over. For those of you who are now helping keep KPFT on the air, we thank you. For the squirmers: There’s always a second chance. Assuming we keep meeting our goals.

So, not due to any shortcomings in listener support, but rather in order to take a bit of a breather before the big plunge, we will *not* be holding the monthly Geek Gathering this Friday in anticipation of the 15th Anniversary Party at the Foundation Room at the Houston House of Blues in July. This is going to be big. Given the potential light levels, I’m sure we’ll be doing something with a lot of LEDs and Arduinos. And if you’d like to get in on some of the action rather than being a casual bystander mesmerized by all the blinky lights, then you may want to make plans to attend the 2010 edition of Apollocon, Houston’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference. Aside from the usual goings-on, friend of KD5 and I will be putting on a presentation on Arduino and Open Source Hardware along with a workshop in which participants can build their own arduino and get some lights blinking in anticipation of the big 15. The weekend of June 26th is the one you’ll want to keep free. Details on the con can be found at www.apollocon.org, with details about the Arduino panel and workshop once they’re nailed down. But for now, back to being excited about our party.

I think we have the venue until 2:00 AM, so you may not be getting up very early the next morning. Which could be a problem, because it’s often been said that you have to wake up pretty early in the morning to get a jump on the crew of Technology Bytes in terms of pure troubleshooting prowess. Given, we were probably the ones saying it, but until now we have never mentioned an exact time. And the time is… Drum Roll… Huh. 9:30 AM. I really thought it would be earlier. Well, you may have to get up closer to 8:30, depending on traffic between you and the PC Upgrade and Troubleshooting SIG at the HAL-PC Headquarters, which is located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive. That’s just off the West Loop and San Felipe, conveniently close to corporate coffee in case 9:30 AM really does come early for you. The SIG happens every Friday morning from 9:30 to 11:30, so, actually it’s: You have to get to work pretty late to get a jump on the crew of technology bytes. How’s that for a catch-phrase?

The PC Upgrade & Troubleshooting Workshop specializes in helping HAL-PC members get their misbehaving computers back in good working order. You’re free to come watch the HAL-PC members help others in distress, but you’ll have to be a member to get your computer looked at. Even then, you need to make an appointment with the HAL-PC Front Desk and most of the six available slots fill up by Tuesday. Suddenly our on-hold times don’t seem so bad. That would be the equivalent of Richard on LINE 2 having had to have called in last Sunday night. That’s not a dig at HAL-PC, just something for the squirmers to think about until next time.

Other opportunities to up your technical game exist at HAL-PC. This Saturday, June 5th, the Samba & Network Administration SIG meets at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters. Samba is the free software program that allows Linux and Unix based computers to join MS Workgroups and Domains and even host Windows file shares. Rick Archibald will be leading the group through Samba 3 by Example while also tackling hybrid and open source networking. And just like the Wednesday Linux Workshop, its always free to attend.

The Linux Workshop meets from six to eight every Wednesday night at the HAL-PC HQ, and, unlike the PC Upgrade and Troubleshooting Workshop, you don’t have to book anything in advance or even be a member, though membership is generally encouraged. Wether you’re looking to hone your existing Linux skills or if you’re a complete noob and you would like to have every detail of Linux’s history played out for your ears, the Linux workshop is for you. If you get this explanation unsolicited, you can always ask them a Windows question under the guise of running Win4Lin, WINE, or some other Linux emulation package. The cons are low on this one and the Pros include not having to get up early, probably not having to miss any work, and definitely not missing any Technology Bytes.

You can find more information on these and several other Special Interest Groups by surfing to www.hal-pc.org and checking out the SIG calendar.

That’s it for me for the next two weeks and that’s that for BarretTime.