I am a computer programmer and computational linguist. This academic year I am teaching at the University of Mary Washington. During the fall semester I will be teaching an introduction to operating systems class and a first year seminar on the remix culture. My current research centers on cyber terrorism. My recent programming projects have been in Flex and PHP.
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I was very fortunate to hear Pinetop Perkins at Antone’s. I was planning on going to his concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in September. But Antone’s is a small intimate blues club. (photoes by by Jack O’Diamonds). For those who don’t know Pinetop Perkins, he is a 95 yr. old blues piano player. He originally was a blues guitarist but early in his career he injured his arm due to a fight with a choir girl and he switched to piano. His official website lists him as “one of the last great Mississippi bluesmen”, but others consider him part of the Chicago school of blues. He played with the great Muddy Waters Band starting in 1969. That’s my short summary of his remarkable career. He was joined at Antone’s by other great names in blues including Willie “Big Eyes” Smith (played 18 yrs. with the Muddy Waters Band), bassist Bob Stroger (both, I believe in their 70s) and several other sidemen. I was totally blown away by this concert. They played the songs they made famous: Got my mojo working, Down in Mississippi, Take it easy baby, Big fat mama, and others. They clearly enjoyed playing with each other. I don’t know—blues players seem to smile and laugh a lot more than jazz players. They were rocking. The piano (an electric Yamaha of some older vintage) was not applified particularly well, but you could still hear Pinetop’s incredible playing. Willie Smith was singing, dancing, gyrating, and laying down some great blues harp lines. I feel so fortunate in hearing these guys. Check him out on YouTube (For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJnqcQmPAMo) The photos I have here are by Jack O’Diamonds on Flickr - Creative Commons License)
I just returned from the Defcon conference in Las Vegas. The conference deals with hacking and computer security (The organizers call it “real time social networking for ninjas” and Wired calls it the “world’s largest computer security convention.”) This year a federal judge prevented 3 MIT students from giving their talk on how to hack the smart cards used by the Boston subway system. Fortunately, their entire detailed presentation was included on the conference CD. I went to a number of talks dealing with penetration testing. Joe Cicero talked about hacking into the typical web applications used by universities. Nathan Hamiel and Shwn Moyer gave an excellent talk on attacking social networks. Most related to my work was a talk on breaking into SCADA systems and a talk on scanning for active ports on the internet.
The conference wireless network is described as follows on the conference webpage:
It would be fair to describe the network as “hostile”. It has been described as ‘the worlds most hostile network,’ but such descriptions are just attempts at flattery. It is recommended that if you want to connect to the DEFCON network pretend that you are sharing out your entire hard drive to 5000 hackers.
In this environment I learned something the hard way. Even if you use https to connect to gmail, people can still steal your cookie and read your email. This is a bug in google. Defcon tries to provide a secure wireless network–see this Wired post
I was in Vegas for a conference and went to both Cirque du Soleil’s Ka, and Stomp Out Loud. My tour book said something like the following. In a city which is all about technology, Ka is the most technological of all the Vegas shows. The show has a multiple part stage. Each part can raise and lower, be moved forward and backward, and tilt. At one moment the performers are on a flat stage, the stage starts tilting and it is as if the performers are climbing a hill. The stage finally is vertical and the performers are twirling acrobatically on a face of a cliff. It’s mind blowing and Vegas all the way. The last time I went to Las Vegas I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere. Ka is darker and less overtly athletic. The other show I went to this time was Stomp Out Loud at Planet Hollywood. This one was decidedly low tech making use of brooms, newspaper, barrels among other things to make rhythms. Pretty cool.
