BSides St. John’s 2013 is happening on October 18th, and will consist of a single speaking track. Regular presentation slot lengths are a fixed duration of 45 minutes plus 15 minutes for Q&A if necessary. And for 2013, BSides St. John’s is also accepting submissions for Lightning Talks. They will be limited to 10-15 minutes in duration and typically consist of 2 to 3 presentation slides. We are hoping that this short presentation time will encourage those new to presenting to submit.
We are currently investigating our options but hope to live stream the event and record all presentations for later distribution. If the recording and live streaming of your presentation poses an issue for you then please contact us to discuss your concerns.
It is important to note that any presentations or talks deemed to be of a marketing or sales pitch nature will be politely rejected.
Submissions will be in plain text and should address the following points:
Your preferred email address
Are you are representing anyone (yourself, company name, group name)
The title and abstract for your presentation
Approximate length of your presentation
Additionally, your submission should answer the following questions:
Has this material been presented elsewhere? If so, where and when?
May we record and stream your presentation? If not, why?
Will you be traveling to the event? If so, from where?
Growing the Security Community in Newfoundland
Submissions must be emailed to BSidesStJohns@gmail.com. The CFP opens on June 27th and the deadline for submissions is October 4th. A confirmation of receipt of your submission will be sent within 48 hours. A follow-up email, if required, will be sent to you requesting further information or clarification.
Submissions will be reviewed as they are submitted. Submitter's will receive a personal response to their submission with our decision as to whether it has been accepted within two weeks of their submission date.
All submissions are greatly appreciated and we thank you in advance for your interest in BSides St. John’s 2013.
My talk included some back ground on my involvement with Open Source, my work with Savoir Technologies, and how the opportunity to write a book with Johan came to be (as described here).
Following the back story I provided a brief overview of what we use OSGi for, and then talked about what readers will find amongst the book's pages.
Before the close of the meeting night five copies of OSGi Starter were given away through door prize draws.
I'd like to thank StartUpNL and Common Grounds for the opportunity to show case Johan and my book before an awesomely engaging audience. I've copied in below some back ground information on these two organizations - they're really helping to shine a light on all of the neat things happening in the city.
About StartUpNL:
We are a community group of like minded tech entrepreneurs who want to share ideas and help each other grow. Our goal is to help you build your business; to help get your idea commercialized. This group is for both experienced entrepreneurs and new entrants. We will share knowledge, provide advice, find investment & the resources your business requires. The group will use our collective experience and expertise to build great enterprises. If you have a technology start up or are about to start one, we look forward to meeting you. Post on our contact group by emailing contact@startupnl.com or join our MeetUp group today!
Startup NL / Common Grounds giving entrepreneurs
opportunities to share ideas.
About Common Grounds:
Common Ground’s goal is to help unify the entrepreneurial community in St. John’s by opening the city’s first coworking space. We believe that the traditional way businesses work is broken, and we intend to change it. We want to help local entrepreneurs run their business, meet like-minded people, and find opportunities. We believe that communities empower and motivate individuals to achieve truly remarkable things. Right now, Common Ground is still just an idea and we need your help to make it a reality. If you want to change the way we work in St. John’s, join our community and get involved.
When ever I'm on the road I end up talking a lot about the province, and from time to time I'll post here some NL tourism videos.. this is another one of those posts - enjoy!
The Winter 2013 CS Singles programming competition took place last Friday night at Memorial University. Twenty students took part, trying their skills against the algorithmic conundrums the programming competition committee prepared as their set of three problems.
After 150 minutes the competition time expired and the judges prepared the results.
First, Second, and Third place prizes awaiting the results.
The volume of submissions for this competition was impressively high, at the end though three students emerged with top results; in third place was Mark Stacey, in second place was Ken Collingwood, and finally in first was Adam Murphy.
3rd place
2nd place
1st place
I'd like to thank all the students, volunteers, and the programming competition committee again for making this CS programming competition possible. We hope to have another round of competitions soon!
On Thursday January 31st, 2013 I'll be providing a guest talk at Memorial University for CS3718 Programming in the Small in room EN1051 from 12:00 to 12:50pm.
I usually use these opportunities to talk to computer science students about open source, building solid development practices, and answer questions about building their careers in the IT sector. If time permits I then dive into discussing my favorite projects, and introducing them to the joys of modular programming.
It's always a lot fun, can't wait to start the discussions.
"Goodwill Gaming is a non-profit organization that raises money for charity, but in a unique way—with video games. To date, we have raised over $7000 for different charitable organizations. We do gaming marathons that are streamed online which anyone can watch and chat with the players, as well as donate from the comfort of their own computer.
Besides marathons, we do public events, like appearing at St. John's Sci-Fi on the Rock. We have various events throughout the year that anyone can participate in. Stay tuned to the website, or check out our facebook page for all event information and coverage.
A small disclaimer; this site is not affiliated with Goodwill Gaming or its partner charities, however I think it's a novel way to help our community and wish GWG the best of luck with their marathon.
Web Services - Behind the scenes with server side Apache projects.
November 22, 2012. 7-8pm.
Memorial University of Newfoundland (EN-2022)
A lot of sites rely on highly scalable, robust services. In this talk, I will touch upon several Apache projects that are being used to provide web services, and how these projects can be mixed and matched to provide the infrastructure today's applications demand. This will be a high level talk aimed towards exposing developers and network admins to the Apache SOA technology stack. Projects that will be discussed include Apache CXF, ActiveMQ, Camel, Cassandra, Hadoop, Karaf, and Servicemix.
Usually I talk about various subjects including a brief introduction to the Apache Way, the projects I've worked on, my views on technology (locally grown and in general), and project management (specifically talking about Apache Karaf). This time around I'll also try to discuss modular programming, in specific OSGi.
My talk will be on November 9th, in room EN1051. If you're on or near campus please feel free to drop in - seating is limited however with priority given to the class's registered students.
When: Thursday, October 4, 2012 @ 6:30 PM Where: Memorial University, S.J Carew Engineering Building, EN-2022
Tim Oram will be giving a Git tutorial for beginners, introducing them to the version control system. The tutorial will cover the basics of Git including setup; staging; committing; adding remotes; and pushing/pulling to/from remotes. Half of this tutorial will be interactive.
The competition was close again this time, with the following results:
In Third Place: Zack Mullaly, Richard Bajona, and Whymarrh Whitby.
In Second Place: Gannon Lawlor, Megan O'Connor, and Ken Collingwood.
And Finally, in First Place: Mark Stacey, Adam Murphy, and Jonathan Wall
I'd like to thank all the students, volunteers, and the games committee again for making these Mun CS programming competitions possible. I hope to see everyone again in the new year when we have the next competition.
The Fall 2012 CS Teams Programming Competition (three CS students) are tentatively scheduled for Thursday September 27th, 2012, in room EN-2036 at 5pm to 7:30pm. There is a sign up sheet in the CS department head office, please contact them if you are interested in competing - seats are limited (CS students only).
Second
Third
I didn't have much time to pick up prizes for this round of competitions - so this time around I've kept things light: Third place consists of a supply of Chips, Air Duster, Hot chocolate, and Maximum PC magazine. Second place consists of Pringles, Air Duster, Teas, and Screen cleaning kit. Finally, first place receives a variety of coffees, teas, and an O'Reilly pocket reference book. All prize packs are collected in Mun branded reusable market bags.
Best luck to all the competitors and see you there!
Last year I volunteered with the local St John's Security BSides conference by providing blog coverage, and other help behind the scenes. This year I've submitted a talk covering the anatomy of an Apache vulnerability report and secure release management. UPDATE: My talk has been accepted!
If you're not familiar with the BSides conference series, here is a quote from their website: "Security BSides is a community-driven framework for building events for and by information security community members. The goal is to expand the spectrum of conversation beyond the traditional confines of space and time. It creates opportunities for individuals to both present and participate in an intimate atmosphere that encourages collaboration. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. It is where conversations for the next-big-thing are happening."
In my talk we'll discuss the procedure for reporting a security vulnerability to an Apache project, and what you as a reporter should expect to see happen as the project community validates the issue, and proceeds towards a resolution. After we have discussed the process we'll take a look at the content of a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report.
We'll then switch gears to talk about how users can validate that their Apache project downloads are in fact legitimate. This is one of the more important safety practices that I tend to show users - all Apache projects provide safety measures on their releases, here I'll show the audience how they too can verify that they have release artifacts from the project community.
This wednesday night (July 4th), the Newfoundland Web Developers group will be hosting a meeting on Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) and ZendSkeletonApplication.
Time: 7pm, July 4, 2012
Location: Computer Science Seminar room (EN-2022), Engineering building, Memorial University, St John's.
Abstract: "I'll be giving a brief rundown of the current state of Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) and it's associated skeleton application, ZendSkeletonApplication. I will be focusing primarily on the new MVC layer of ZF2 as well as practical examples of using and extending ZendSkeletonApplication, as our current website (www.nlwebdevs.ca) is based on it. All are welcome!"
For more information, please visit the event page:
The first IGDA Newfoundland Chapter Game Jam started this evening, at the Trinity room of the St John's Holiday Inn.
The participants, working in small teams, are attempting to build a complete video game in under essentially a day's worth of time. Once the time allowed has elapsed they will share their creations with the crowd for review.
Talking with the event organizers, the game jam is not a competition - there are no prizes. The purpose for the event is to allow people to join groups of other game developers, designers, artists, and enthusiasts and spend a weekend building a game. Of course they are not just building games, they are making new friends, industry contacts, and learning many of the crucial skills it takes to work in the team oriented environment that is modern video game development.
It's great to see an event like this happening in St John's - I can't wait to see some of the results of the games, and to see if this will become an annual event for the local game development community.
Go Beyond Pixels: A one-day conference for designers and developers.
HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Mobile & App Development, UI, UX, Design, and More!
When: May 25th, 2012,
Where: St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
The Go Beyond Pixels Conference will take place in the oldest English-founded city in North America. The venue for the conference will be the Bruneau Centre for Research and Innovation, Memorial University.
Some recent events locally got me thinking about the importance of coffee shop wifi and open source development.
A few years back my friend Jon Anstey and I started working in our spare time on Apache projects - Jon on Apache Camel, and I on Apache Servicemix. We'd meet up on Water Street (downtown St John's) at Hava Java, a small coffee shop with free wifi, and pick an issue each from the project Jiras and hack away at them until we had patches ready to submit for review. This continued for quite some time, eventually we both received invitations to our respective projects to join in as committers, the rest is history. The important part here is that we could spend hours and hours at local coffee shops using resources off the web while working on submitting patches. Those hacking sessions were instrumental in starting us off on the path to being contributing members of the Apache community. If no programmer space was available I'd have to wonder if either of us would have stuck as close to working open source projects as we did.
Today when I hear that a particular coffee shop (not Hava Java - they're awesome) may try to restrict the length of stay for those of us using coffee shop space for laptops and books I wonder how many good efforts could be impacted. Shoot, I wonder how much of Jon's book, Camel in Action, was written sitting down in a coffee shop? For that matter, how many Apache Karaf releases were kicked off while I've sat in a coffee shop?
Even though my early days as a new contributor with Apache are now behind me I still enjoy being able to meet up with other new contributors at coffee shops and be able to give them the benefit of having coding session with someone that can help show them the way. Take away these kind of informal environments and I fear the opportunities to expand our local open source community begins to fade away.
Update:
The story aired on the local CBC news. The impart of social media can be felt in a small town like St John's.
Enjoying Humble Pie
As mentioned in the comments, and the CBC report, the coffee shop offered up "Humble Pie" to students for two weeks in apology for the treatment a few experienced.
To be fare, I was there during an off hour, but I could see why people would enjoy the comfortable seating and large tables for spreading out their notes & laptops. As long as people treat the establishment with respect and not take up space for an inappropriate length of time (for the sake of argument, well past the time it takes you to enjoy a cup of coffee and slice of pie) than incidents like this should not occur again.
So, talking of Coffee Shops with free wi-fi - which coffee shops in town do you frequent when you want to get a little coding done?
I've collected all the information I could regarding the up coming Game Jam being held by the International Game Developers Association Newfoundland Chapter. Please visit the event link for more details.
From the IGDA-NL Game Jam event page:
"Times still need to be confirmed [tentatively Friday, 20 April 2012 at 18:00 until Sunday, 22 April 2012 at 16:00], but time is running for almost 48 hours. Bring your computer setup (laptops recommended), power bar and get ready to make games over the weekend. Collaborate with your neighbours and you'll be amazed at what you can make!"
