you want to start something?

There are a lot of disconnected pathways in Northern Ireland. It’s plain we don’t talk enough and even when we do, we don’t spend enough time listening. In the Digital Media and Technology space, this means you can have weeks with nothing on and weeks where every day has something on it and in many cases, more than one thing. There’s been much talk about developing some sort of ‘open’ calendar platform that will allow people to book events from within iCal or Outlook or even by just sending an email to an address to try and minimise the number of conflicts – but that development requires investment from someone who’s passionate about it. (I’m passionate about it, I just don’t have the cash!).

So, I’m kinda staking my claim on a few days and letting you know what others are doing to the best of my knowledge. You can find a lot of this information on the NICreatives Calendar and some more on the Digital Circle calendar. Some of the things going on are going to be of interest to Creatives, some to technologists, some to creative technologists, some to other sectors as we find ways to extend skills in social and digital media creation, management and distribution into other non-traditional sectors.

Just remember these for April and you’ll not go wrong:

20th April: Refresh Belfast
23rd April: iPhone Dev Day Dublin
24th April: iPhone Dev Day Belfast
25th April: BarCampBelfast

May is also bringing us more xCake goodness, a Leadership Summit in Connected Health and a Geeks Meet Meds-type ICT event for Connected Health. They’ll be appearing on the Digital Circle calendar in the next few days. For this latter event, I’m looking for ‘clinicians’ (doctors, psychiatrists, whatever) who have an interest in what technology can do for healthcare. This isn’t about £10 million budgets, this is about small people, small devices, small changes and big impacts.

Tags: BarCamp by mj
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Okay, this one left me scratching my head.

When I arrived at BarCamp, we were allocated two IP addresses on the QUB network and I set about using one of them to provide a public network and the other to provide a Private network for the Webcasts or whatever and to act as a failover. Things were fine at first until people started to arrive. We might have had ten to fifteen laptops on the network when the WiFi just started playing up.

Using iStumbler, we determined that there was some sort of issue with the network. WiFi channels 1, 6 and 13 were stuffed with ambient traffic so we repositioned to avoid those and still we were getting this problem. In our WiFi network scans we were seeing multiple instances of our networks, though the second one was encrypted. Attempts to join our unencrypted networks would fail silently and the only stable network we could manage was the Ad-hoc one provided by my Macbook Pro – which not everyone could join (the Nokia N800s and Vista laptops mainly).

The theory went:

There was some sort of Trojan effect going on, either automatically or malevolently (and presumably from an attendee). When you put up a network, it would spawn a copy of the network which had a WiFi password. This would cause your attempts to join our network to fail – it was like it was jammed. If you put up an encrypted network, then you had a 50% chance of latching onto the wrong network and entering your WiFi password. This would make WiFi password harvesting to be very quick. They theory continued that the malevolent presence would then join your encrypted network using the harvested password details and start to sniff for passwords on the WiFi.

Bastard, eh?

I would really hate to think this was an attendee acting malevolently but then I’ve seen worse from humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a trojan on someone’s machine because someone definitely had an unpatched Windows machine on the network, the “Free Public Wifi” ad-hoc network that appears nearly everywhere there’s a collection of Windows machines.

See

The puzzling phenomenon of seeing “Free Public Wi-Fi” that you can’t connect to when you’re searching for free public wi-fi has been solved. It’s “Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement.”
From a Nomad Research Centre Advisory:
This advisory documents an anomaly involving Microsoft’s Wireless Network Connection. If a laptop connects to an ad-hoc network it can later start beaconing the ad-hoc network’s SSID as its own ad-hoc network without the laptop owner’s knowledge. This can allow an attacker to attach to the laptop as a prelude to further attack.

Not recent and not unpatched. But there it was.

This post explains something else:

At Emerging Tech 4-5 years ago, someone had set up an ad hoc network with the same name as the real one. It was interfering with the real one, so the organizers repeatedly asked whoever had set up the ad hoc network to shut it down. The culprit turned out to be …. me. But I knew that I had not set up an ad hoc network, much less set one up and name it the same as the conference network. All I did was open my laptop and click on one of the ones that had the official conference name … which must have been an ad hoc network someone else set up. I then became the “carrier.” Ack.

That’s just brilliant. So it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t malevolent and wasn’t a clever Trojan/Worm but rather was just the way Windows works.

If this is the case, an extra special thanks to everyone who uses an unpatched version of Windows. I loved missing talks because I was troubleshooting why the WiFi was screwy.

Tags: Annoyances, BarCamp, Bedouin, Commentary, Wireless by mj
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Things that interested me most…

Emma Persky’s Feature Recognition. Although challenged by being opposite Brian O’Neill’s freelancer talk (and let’s face it, what geek doesn’t dream of sticking it to the man and going ronin!). Best idea – move it to another time slot and that really worked I think. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it gave me ideas for five, six, seven more applications that I don’t have the skill (yet) or the resources to build (again, yet). The possibilities with pattern recognition are fascinating and though this technology has been studied for a while, it takes a good demo to move it from ‘yeah, sure’ to ‘oh, that’s cool’. Good job Emma!

Tracy Dempseys Life Wheel/Spokes demo – I’d not really thought about my priorities that way. I have therefore resolved to work on the areas most deficient (quality time with my kids, general day to day job satisfaction) and not worry about the areas I’m happy with (how current I am with technology etc, money). The interesting thing is not thinking about how much effort you put into these things but how happy you are with the results. For those areas where I want more – I’m going to work on them with the theory that you get out what you put in. It’s funny, I’ve been results oriented (and passionate and loudmouthed about achieving them) for years in my ‘professional’ life.

Gerard McBreen’s Digital Circle. I wasn’t interested in the Adobe FLEX/AIR stuff anywhere near as much but Digital Circle is like a taster-for-10 of some ideas I’ve had for years (and the reason I tried to start Infurious). I’d still like Infurious to be a ‘publisher’ for a small group of developers but don’t know how to approach it just yet. I need to think on that but would encourage anyone creating any sort of digital content (software, eBook, movies, animations) to join Digital Circle.

And the rest?
All of the others were good though not especially relevant to me (Ruby scales? Whoodathunkit?) and next time round I’d like to hear Richard’s presentation on webcasting. Nick’s talk on the New Music Economy was an alternative path to my promotion of ‘1000 fans’ but as he said on the day – there isn’t just ‘one way’. As an homage to the existing model of music economy, I bought ‘Feel Good Lost’, by Broken Social Scene last night from iTunes after a short listen to a track during BarCamp. I’ve not bought much new music recently so that was nice.

Best Bits- conversations in the corridors and between talks – finding out how people got into their line of work, why they made their choices and also discovering some pleasant feedback on things I’ve done (or could be about to release). I do need to talk to Will King about his OpenGeo data but that can wait for a little bit. Mix that in with a little WiMax and you’ve got a spicy meatball!

Worst Bits – the WiFi disaster. Something was definitely rotten in Kislev. I’m blogging about this concurrently but it flummoxed me and Paul Dundas and in the end to supply two rooms with intermittent WiFi, we ended up having to use three infrastructure access points and one ad-hoc access point. The latter was my laptop which effectively kept me from vegging out and using it which was probably a good thing.

Next steps?

OCC BBQ is on the 16th July down in Terryglass, County Tipperary (about 200 miles away from where I’m sitting as I type this). I’m driving down and will be sorting out some accommodation in the next day or so. Current thinking is to trip down on Tuesday afternoon (arriving before closing time at the pub), enjoy the BBQ throughout the Wednesday and then trip back on the Friday. That would mean two nights accommodation though.

I also want to continue that chat with Andy McMillan, Andrew Gribben and Matt Keenan about Co-working that we started right at the end when I was packing up. David Rice should also be involved but only if he can find a ‘first name twin’ like the rest of us. I’m joking, David. Mostly.

There was also some talk of doing another ‘event’ in six months? Maybe a TechLudd? (Go on, call it TechNorn or something). I’m up for helping get this going – I’d wanted to start an ‘Expo’ for tech companies for years!

Fabulous stuff today. My only regret was that I didn’t talk! I’m going to remedy that at OCC BBQ by the way as well as talking to some interesting people I’ve wanted to chat with for ages.

Tags: BarCamp, Bedouin, CoWorking, Commentary, Cool, Social, Startup, Wireless by mj
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The motion was made for one party to attend the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ being held in Terryglass, in Tipperary on the 16th July 2008. Surprisingly, the other party did not wince or shout or laugh but immediately began assisting with preparations for the trip. Preparations are underway.

Which is pretty much how it went down when I asked HerIndoors about going to it. So I’m a little gobsmacked.

The event starts at 11 am which means probably driving down the night before(Tuesday), staying over and then attending the day (Wednesday), crawling back to the accommodation for a second night and then driving back next morning (Thursday) – though as a non-drinker I have entertained the idea of driving back after the BBQ ends.

That’s a long drive but I’ll have my TomTom and my wits.

Tags: BarCamp, Bedouin, CoWorking, Cool, Social, Startup, Wireless by mj
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Ian Robinson writes about Northern Ireland Cocoa Developers

Some of us from Northern Ireland, who were at WWDC, are thinking of setting up a local Cocoa developers group to met and discuss development and technologies related to the Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod touch platform. It is envisioned that there will be periodic meetings, a mailing list, a web page, possibly guest speakers, etc. All this is still to be determined. The following 5 domains have been registered for the group to use:

nicocoadev (.org, .net, .com, .co.uk)

nicod.org

Earlier this week, we took John Kennedy’s idea for XCake.org and launched a wiki. Two years ago I’d attempted to get Cocoaheads Northern Ireland started up but attendance was pretty low. I’m happy to say that there are a lot more people interested now…

[EDIT: This would be a nice topic at BarCamp?]

Tags: BarCamp, Commentary, Made me laugh, cocoa by mj
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