Where Scott Inserts Foot in Mouth at Notacon

So.. Preview night.. I am a little twitchy after previewing NoSpex without a slide stack.. There is a really off the wall preview for a presentation on "Building the Digital City" by er.. Some guy. I didn't catch the name; the premise is very 40,000 foot, and as a pragmatic hacker, I had no clue what he was getting at. There was, however, a question about why the flat encyclopedia model took over the digital media world.

So, I had two immediate ideas. The first was that "article content" is really low barrier to entry. Anyone who paid attention in English class knows how to compose paragraphs and express an idea in bare text. I sat on that one, defending ASCII text seemed like a losing proposition. So the other, which I thought would be sympathetic, was decrying the death of HyperCard, which was the first moderately successful rich authoring environment in my mind. (Doesn't hurt that there was an "Apple is Evil" comment earlier stuck in my head.)

It wasn't until the next day, in a conversation with Mark Schumann that I understood why the presenter gave me an odd look. Turns out he was Marc Canter, one of the bright minds from the original Macromedia. So.. Ahem.. Making friends at Notacon 7!

Where Scott Whines About SecDev Burnout..

So, I spent last 45 days spending all of my out-of-band coding time working on NoSpex -- a realtime graphing library for process display and analysis. That is my karmic punishment for jokingly suggesting "Hey, I could graph threads talking to each other in my recent reverse engineering project" for a proposal in response to Notacon 7.

The presentation was way too early for me, a west coaster in Ohio, and seemed too early for the con in general. I appreciate N7's staff for having me, I was not too friendly in the whole proposal process, so I deserved that "first slot on the first day" spot. That said, having spent 45 days working on something almost as complicated as the first rounds of Mosquito or IPAF to an audience of 20 was pretty disappointing.

I am going to dedicate my out-of-band time for the next month or two to game development; maybe a Seven Day Roguelike. It is not very well timed, with Blackhat and DefCon's Call for Papers windows opening up, but a little fun is in order.

Where Scott Creates a New Blog..

.. again. With my current work load at IOActive, it is obvious that I'm not going to have time to touch WaspVM for a while. This means that my usual outlet, WaspVM Developments has gone stale. I want to keep WaspDev focussed on improvments to WaspVM and MOSREF, so I have decided to create a new journal for my other projects and personal commentary.