Bert JW Regeer

This year DefCon was once again set in the light of the LosT mystery challenge. That is what I spent my time on, it is what was the most fun to participate in, then again, I am not that great at lock picking or guitar hero so those two contests were out in the first place.

That being said, I really enjoyed DefCon this year, it was not as crazy as last year, and at the same time it was a lot more fun since I knew a lot more people. I was able to converse with some of the smartest people in the world on their own subject matter and research, which provided much enjoyment. There is nothing like asking the people whose research you have been reading questions regarding the subject of their research. You get better answers, and when you get an answer that goes over your head you can ask them to please explain in different terms.

This year was a success, next year I hope that I can make even better business contacts, and find myself a job either in the security industry or in the software programming industry. DefCon and or Black Hat are great events to go to meet people and learn from the professionals.

If I saw you this year at Black Hat, and or DefCon, hopefully I will see you again next year, for those of you who I missed, well, next year is another chance.

I drove up to Vegas on Thursday, got there, the next day I was up at 0800, and then I was on my hands and knees taping down network cables, power strips and other such things so that the trainers at Black Hat had their own networks to show their stuff. I was up till about midnight before I got to go to sleep. The next morning I had to be up at 0800 again, this time to put out fires, run a new network cable there where it is not working, and or fix power strips that did not provide power.

After that we have to stuff delegate bags. Delegate bags are Black Hat labeled bags which contain information, a CD with presentations and other things. We ended up stuffing 5000 delegate bags that same day. Chinese sweat shop style. We end the day at about 2000. I finally get to go to sleep at about 1100, after I find some dinner that does not cost an arm and a leg. Finally I get a break, Sunday I get second shift. Have to be up at around 1200. Straight to lunch duty (more about that later). Not much else goes on, we have to put certificates of course completion into black envelopes. Side note: Every single certificate is hand signed by Jeff Moss the creator of Black Hat. We all end up being let out early at around 1800, we head down to the bar to hang out and socialise. I end up leaving at around 2300 to head to bed. Next morning we have to be up at 0800, new people are coming in for training, this means that the instructors always have more issues than ever before, for some reason when new people come in they screw things up badly. A room that was perfectly fine 24 hours ago is now suddenly having 10 cables that don't work. Go figure. After putting out the fires we get some down time to just sit around, until lunch duty roles around again. It is a Monday, and I think back to the weekend I just spent running around like a mad man. That night the entire crew ends up at the Hofbrauhaus in Las Vegas. German beer, German food and German music. It was a great amount of fun. One of the guys is celebrating his birthday, so the waitress brings out a paddle with shots on it, and he then gets spanked. I got to sleep early, 2300. Tuesday is the last day of training, so we get up in the morning, put out any fires and once again put certificates in envelopes. I also get to help setting up the store, it is going to be open at around 1500 that day so we have to get all the swag sorted into different boxes, by size, and by what type of shirt it is. After that we have lunch duty. I end up being on store duty from 1400 till 1800. It is crazy, we have to in our head calculate the cost of each persons bag they want to purchase, and then either get cash from them, or hand it off to GuuWii for credit card processing. Then at the end of the day at around 1700 when classes let out, we have to go around to each room, untape any and all cables. That includes power, network and other. This takes us well until 2300. After that we need to run long network cables for Aruba networks access points so that people can get Wifi during Black Hat. This takes us until about midnight. I get to sleep at about 0100. And you guess right if you think I have to be up by 0800 the next morning. I am on store duty again, this means that once again it is a mad house trying to get people their shirts and products, calculating out numbers in my head and getting it all set up and good. I miss out on the Keynote, and on Dan Kaminsky's talk, which is the talk I wanted to go to. Grandma Kaminsky has once again made cookies and I miss out on them because I am working my ass off. Oh well, I am going to see him at DefCon this year. The store is almost out of all of it's product by the end of the day. Briefings went well, and I got to go to see the one on using Dtrace on Mac OS X for reverse engineering. Very cool. End of the day we end up doing what is going to be an annual tradition, the walk from Caesars to NYNY.

The year before, Joe Grand, AKA Kingpin had lost a bet and had to wear one of the shirts that the porn card pushers wear. The ones that say, "Girls direct to your room in 20 minutes" with a number. This year the same thing happened, except no bet was lost, however one of my friends, who has now been dubbed Pushpin looks very much like a younger Joe Grand. He was with us, and unbeknownst to him, we bought him a shirt and he too had to wear it. Pictures will be forthcoming. It is hilarious.

I get back to the Hotel at around 2300, hang out at the bar for a little bit. Just socialise, introduce myself to people in the security industry. Next morning, same drill, up at 0800. I work the store until lunch, and then I am once again down stairs in the heat. Last day, that means that I get some down time, until the talks break at 1800. We have to rip up all of the cables that we put down for the speakers and the wireless AP's. We also have to make sure that all of the BlackHat equipment is out of all of the rooms and everything is properly packed up. We then have to put it all on pallets, and shrink wrap it. After this is all done, I head over to the Riveria to get our room all set up. Pushpin had made the reservations. We head over to the Peppermill for some dinner, and then to the EFF Summit in the Penthouse to raise some money for the EFF.

During the day Black Hat provides lunch to the attendees, meaning I have to stand outside in the sun making sure that only people with badges come in to eat lunch, and if anyone asks what is going on I have to let them know it is a private event.

This is everyday, and trust me, being on your feet for 12+ hours a day is no pleasure at all. The amount of time there was to slack off and sit down was almost zero.

This is at Caesars Palace in Vegas, one side of the hotels conference area to the other side of the conference area. The amount of walking involved was insane, every part of my body was hurting. Even now, that I am sitting at DefCon my feet still hurt from the abuse I gave them.

There, a really descriptive title for my first blog post in July. My life has been very busy and filled with awesomeness, sadness, pain and a whole bunch of other things. I am not entirely sure where I want to start with everything, so I guess I will start with the sadness:

I spent some time with my family in The Netherlands, just a week, I was there to watch my youngest half-sister get baptised. Truth be told, I don't feel much of a connection with her, even-though she is supposed to be my sister. Maybe I missed the memo or something along the lines. The sadness that comes is because I was there for only a week. I enjoy spending time with my cousins, my grandparents and being in The Netherlands in general. Different country entirely, different people, different atmosphere, it was good to get out of Arizona.

The pain is the amount of Kung Fu I have been doing lately. I have been attempting to the fully be able to do the the 5 animals form, and the long fist form. During Kung Fu class at school I pulled an inner thigh muscle and sprained my ankle. No matter it hurting a whole lot, I decided yesterday (Saturday) to practice Kung Fu when I woke up in the morning. I did 4 parts of the 9 times power chi gong exercises, then I tried to go through the 5 animals form. Lets just say that my ankle disagreed, the pain was tremendous. I took some Aleve and went back to sleep. It was not pleasant though. As of right now my ankle still hurts. I am wearing my boots because it gives me more support than normal shoes.

The awesomeness is that finally the parts came in for Near Space so we have started building all the different parts, started writing code and in general have started working on getting this thing ready to launch. There is still a lot that needs to be done, but at least it is moving in the right direction.

More awesomeness is the fact that I finally sorted out some issues internally, emotional baggage that I was carrying around. Most of that stems from the fact that I have a major crush on one girl that goes to UAT, and crushes on two others. Yes, that is three total. Not only that, but someone I thought I was done and everything was over with walked back into my life in a major way. I waste too many brain cycles thinking about what-ifs. I have dreams about the girl I have a major crush on, not entirely sure what that means. Then again some of the dreams I have are really out there in terms of what is viable and what is not.

Other things that I have been doing, I have learned how to use a sewing machine, so I have been clothes hacking. I moved some pockets from the front of some shirts to the arm, I had multiple shirts in different colours, so I took a grey shirt and moved the pocket to a black shirt's sleeve and stitched it on there with some white thread. The seam looks awesome. I am also kind of proud of myself, I learned a new skill.

I am not sure how many of you guys are interested in near space balloon launches, however the class I am in has come together and started throwing together a Wiki containing the information we have gathered so far, as well as other interesting pieces. Hopefully as the project moves along the Wiki will be fleshed out more and more so that the next time the class is run we won't run into the same troubles again.

Visit the UAT near space Wiki for a peek at what we have been up to. Hopefully we can get some pictures of the build, and throw them up on the Wiki as well.

Since I have an ADC membership I figured i'd log in, and grab the latest Safari 4.0 Developer Preview. I wanted to see what improvements if any they had made over the 3.x series of Safari.

Normally, when I install an update from Apple everything seems the same, until you start testing. JavaScript performance is better in this version, and pages seem to load even faster than before. It still eats RAM like there is enough of it in the world to go around. I very much like the speed improvements, they are very welcome to Safari.

Now, normally an upgrade does not break any part of my work flow, however in Safari 4.0 they have made a change that I can not appreciate, and will be complaining about loudly. That is, when you open a new tab, instead of just opening a blank page, and putting your cursor in the title bar, they open up your homepage. While that would be all fine and dandy, my homepage is my Google.com/ig account. Which means that the cursor moves from the address bar, to the search box. Thereby negating any typing I have already done.

For example, a common workflow for me is to:

open a window
click address bar
digg.com
Apple + T
slashdot.org
Apple + T
telegraaf.nl

Thereby opening up three websites that I care about, and I am able to do it in quick succession without having to touch the mouse. However, with this new improved new tab opens up homepage feature it breaks that work flow, and I have to go for my mouse, and double click the address bar, to then enter the address I want to visit. They have slowed down my work flow considerably.

It is hard to break a force of habit, especially when this works across multiple browsers and platforms. I see two ways this can be fixed, one is to not move the focus of the cursor to the input box when a new tab is opened, but instead leave it in the address bar to replace whatever is in the address bar, or go back to the old style of displaying a white page until the user entered an address and hit enter.

Update:

Filled a bug with Apple, bug report number #6026993

Yesterday morning (Saturday) I woke up early in the morning to drive to a friend who would be leaving to go to Baltimore, he is starting his work at the NSA on the 9th of June.

It was hard, to say good-bye. He had just graduated from UAT, and it will be different without him around every so often, his smile, his jokes, everything. He was there the first semester I came to UAT. At one point I got food poisoning, and not knowing who to call, I called him. He was there in the hospital with me, while I was hallucinating. For the whole time that I was on the IV.

He is an absolutely awesome guy, and I will miss him. There are so many good memories. DefCon, and his math skills, ToorCon and his leadership, student government, Maker Faire and other conferences.

It was his time to move on to bigger and better things, and I am really happy for him, his new job and the new life he is starting. I am also really happy for his girlfriend, who is moving with him. But I will miss them both something fierce. They were both really good friends of mine.

I understand that people need to move on, and that people have new things in life to attend, but the feeling that I am losing someone I am really close to hurts. The happiness I feel for them is greater than the sadness of them leaving.

My good friend may you have a pleasant journey ahead, to enjoy the new life you will be building and enjoy working at the NSA. I am sad to see you go, and will miss you very much!

When you are around, the world is perfect
nothing can do me harm
When you are gone, I feel alone
and my heart aches
Till the next day, when I see your smile
then everything is calm for a little while

I tell you.

This semester I am taking 18 credits worth of classes, that is 6 classes. This is what my schedule current looks like:

CHN101 - Level I Chinese
     The first class of Chinese. Yes, Chinese. 中文！ It is going to be a lot of fun. I have wanted to learn an asian language. Chinese seems like a good fit because new products are coming from there all the time, and software engineering and embedded systems are going to be big in the future and they are all going to be manufactured in China.

HUM110 - Korean Language I - Intro to Korean
     The first class of Korean, another Asian language. This one is taught by Ryan Clarke, and I wanted to take it since the Korean language intrigued me, and Ryan always spoke highly of it. It has a alphabet with a limited amount of characters, and is not that hard to pick up. Yet another language to add to my belt.

LAW370 - Legal Issues in Technology
     Required class, not looking forward to it too much, the stuff that is going to be taught in the class is not entirely relevant to me, and the instructor is not that great either.

MGT310 - Project Management in a Technology Environment
     Another required class. This one is going to be okay, it is going to be a lot of teamwork though, and I generally don't enjoy working with other people. Tough it out, I shall. The class has started out pretty boring, hopefully it gets better as we go along.

RBT421 - Robotics Project
     In this class we are allowed to build anything we want, and everything we want. As long as it is robotics related, or has some sort of uController on it. I am currently working on a hard drive based clock. More to come on that later.

SCI388 - Special Topics in Science: Near Space
     Launching a near space (90,000 ft) weather balloon with payload into near space, to do tests, and get pictures and other cool stuff. This is very much a project based class, and will take up much of my time over the next coming weeks to get started, and to build it. I am really looking forward to this class.

Those are my classes, out of them, CHN101, HUM110, RBT421, and SCI388 are the ones I will enjoy the most. Korean lessons have already started and it is extremely hard already. I am a very visual learner, put something on the board and then put sound with it, and I will remember it. Ryan tends to sit in front of the class and just talk to us in Korean making it harder for me to remember it, but at the same time my brain has been working overtime to process all the new stuff coming in. I feel like I am doing more thinking this way. It frustrates me, but mentally tires me out as well. Chinese has not yet started, officially, but I have also been practising with Ryan, so I have a head start on the rest of the class, which is awesome.

Those are my classes this semester. Now all I need to do is graduate on time, but that is a story for another post, and another day!

I just got back from Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. I went with a whole group of students, in the UAT van and drove from Phoenix to San Francisco in 14 hours. 10 of us, packed into a tight space for 14 hours, it was a blast. Most of us slept on the way there, trying to catch up on the sleep we had not had because of finals week. When we finally got to San Mateo we went to our hotel, a dump, to say the least. The Hillsdale Inn sucks. We got there and the lady at the registration had clearly been drinking, and kept walking away from the front desk to the bar. At the same time our leader LostboY (Ryan) was trying to get things sorted, as the lady said we had not paid for the rooms yet, when clearly she had the credit card data on file, AND the credit card showed that it had been charged. She tried to run the card again, but since it was a duplicate charge, american express denied the charge. Eventually she gave us the keys after recording all of the people who would stay in the Hotel rooms ID's.

We unpack the van, and get ourselves situated. We locate a restaurant and head out to go eat dinner. We end up failing to follow the GPS, and we end up at a Denny's, not everyone was too happy, but at least it was food. Sarah one of my room mates who is also on the trip ends up getting sick. We drive back to the Hotel so she can go to bed, as we all have to be up early in the morning to get to the Faire in time. When we get back to the Hotel we find that they have locked us out of the rooms, our stuff is still inside. Ryan goes to the front desk and calmly asks them to unlock the rooms, and asks why they were locked in the first place. At this point someone who was at the bar comes out, and wants to start a fight with Ryan. It is at this point that the front desk lady gives us a few minutes to grab our stuff and get the hell out of there. She is swearing, and at this time heavily intoxicated. We quickly grab our stuff, and throw it all back into the van. At this point the lady threatens to call the police, so we preempt her, and do exactly that. We end up waiting outside in the cold of the night at 0130 in the morning until the San Mateo police arrive so that we could tell them what happened, and to be able to double check both rooms to make sure we did not leave anything behind, and also get the names and numbers of the people involved. Ryan decides to not press charges.

We start looking for new Hotels almost immediately, using the GPS that Ryan brought with him, we find a Best Western right across the highway, and they have two rooms available. So after wrapping up the business with the police, we head over there. We walk in, the lady is extremely nice, gives us our cards to the rooms, and we finally are able to get to a nice hotel room. No identification required, no threats, no problems what so ever. She even gives us a discount when we tell her our horror story about what we just went through. It was a nice change from what had happened.

We finally got situated in our hotel rooms by 0230 in the morning, and we did not fall asleep until 0300 or later. Ryan and I got up at 0600 in the morning, took a shower and left for Maker Faire at around 0700 to help Jon and John from EFX Tek set up their booth (Ryan is part of their company). Ryan had told me much about the two of them, and it was awesome to finally get to meet them in person. They exceeded the expectations that Ryan had set by just talking about them. They are extremely awesome and knowledgeable guys, who have amazing pasts, and really interesting hobbies. They have one of the most awesome booth designs I have ever seen. It came out of two large shipping crates, was made out of solid wood and was panelling that all fit together in an organised fashion. This was a well thought out and perfectly engineered booth.

We finished setting up at around 0930 in the morning. I had been running on 3 hours of sleep, and I was not yet feeling tired at all. Maker Faire just opened for the day, and people are slowly starting to trickle in, as I walk around I already see some very amazing projects in motion, or being worked on. At around 1000 or so the others finally head over to the Faire from the hotel. It is at this time that I start looking at things. The amazing projects people have worked on to show case. Everywhere I go with Ryan people recognise him, or he recognises someone. There are even several people from Defcon there to check things out and they all come over and greet Ryan, mostly to ask him about his Mystery Challenge. What was most interesting is that people were protesting fossil fuels by burning fossil fuels. Beautiful irony, damn hippies. I did get to meet Johnny Lee of Wiimote hacking fame, with the tracking of the pens using the infrared camera in the Wiimotes. Sean and I had worked on replicating one of his many set ups using very simple parts, just to see if we could and it was really cool to meet the person who started it all. Day 1 for the rest was rather uneventful, mostly because I was getting way to tired to enjoy walking around. My feet really hurt, mainly because I had been standing all day, and with very little sleep. At night Abney Park would be playing, I ended up not going to their show mainly because I was too tired and I really did not want to be on my feet any longer. We went out to TGIF for dinner, and then I went straight back to the Hotel. I don't remember much of the rest of the night, other than that I fell asleep!

The next day we all woke up at around 1000 or so, we went out to breakfast at Denny's, had a big breakfast and then headed out to Maker Faire at around 0100 or so, we go there and the parking lot was full, but we all had special badges we had acquired, so we talked our way past the security guard. And guess who was waiting to get in, but the security guard not knowing who he was would not let him in. Adam Savage from MythBusters. The guard did not know who he was and would not let him in, and he needed to be on stage in the next 20 minutes to give a presentation. Eventually Ryan talked the security guard into letting Adam and his wife and kids into the parking lot, at the same time handing over his business card. We park the van and start walking in when we notice that Adam has parked and has the badge he requires, so we let him know what gate he should use to enter, and when Ryan mentions he has a bunch of his students with him, Adam tips his hat in our direction. We all nod, in return as an acknowledgement. Adam's presentation was about his Maltese Falcon and the story behind how he got started making things, building models and everything along those lines. His work has been featured in many movies, including Star Wars, AI, and many others. It is really cool to see some of the work he has done, and how he obsesses over the smallest details. Afterwards Ryan and I head over to tech shop to get our laptops laser etched. He has his Asus eeePC with him, and I have my MacBook Pro. At first I am hesitant to get it engraved, but when the engraver reassures me that Apple never gave him problems over his engraved iPhone or engraved MacBook Pro I go ahead and do it. My MacBook Pro has now been engraved with my nickname (X-Istence) and the following short program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
printf("%c", 0x58);

return 0;

}

Re-sale value be damned, this looks fantastic on my laptop. It took off such a small tiny miniscule layer that you are unable to feel it at all when you run your hands across it. If Apple gives me any crap for it, I will just slap some stickers over top of it, as I had stickers on my laptop the last time, and they were not a problem at all. There was another cool design I could have etched instead, but I did not feel that it spoke to me, it did not feel personal enough, hence the small program and my nickname. It makes my laptop mine. At this point it is already 1740 and the Maker Faire is starting to shut down. They want everyone that is not a "Maker" out of the Fairgrounds as soon as 1800 so that they can start packing up and cleaning the place up. We students all end up standing at the EFX Tek booth listening to John talk about his earlier days working for several major companies, and the state of credit card security, and the security of credit card devices. I wish we could have spent more time with both John and Jon since they both have very different and interesting backgrounds. For example, John is certified to nuclear soldering standards. What this means is that he knows the procedures and steps to solder a joint in such a way that it will be guaranteed good for the next 10 years as the human body can only withstand so much radiation. So much knowledge, way too little time.

Hopefully they will be able to make it out to UAT for Tech Forum to talk about their experiences. It is a Sunday and being the last day we all head out to Maccaroni Grill for dinner. Jon goes with us, unfortunately John had to leave. Dinner with a bunch of college students is always fun, so there are jokes, there is talking, laughing. It is an all around good time. We end up going back to the hotel and falling asleep. Ryan and I both wake up at around 0800 in the morning, we start getting ready, packing things back up into suitcases, taking showers and going for the free continental breakfast Best Western serves. We get everyone else up, so that we can leave to head home. We all climb into the van and head home at 1015. Just over 12 hours later, we get to UAT at 2250. On the trip back home many of us are not feeling too great, mainly because of the amount of fast food we have been eating on the trip, combined with the bad road conditions and the amount of sleep we did not get. We get home without any issues what so ever though.

The weekend was awesome. I really enjoyed myself and would like to thank Ryan for driving there, and back. I am surprised he is still sane after that trip. I would like to thank UAT for paying for the hotel rooms, the gas, and the tickets into Maker Faire. I am glad that I did go after all, at first I was not really sure if I wanted to go since I am not into most of what was shown. However the people I met, the cool things I saw, have planted a few seeds here and there as to what I could do, and who knows what the future holds, maybe someday I will be standing at Maker Faire showing off my cool projects.