The conference will be made of bite-size (15 minutes or shorter!) presentations by Tampa Bay techies and demos of capstone projects by Suncoast Developers Guild alums. Here’s the schedule, which is subject to update:
Time
Presentation
10:00 a.m.
Opening ceremony
(Suncoast Developers Guild)
Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!
(Jason L Perry)
Will it Scale?
(Robert Bieber)
11:00 a.m.
Demo: Smash Bros Combo
(Kento Kawakami)
Your Friendly Neighborhood Type System
(Dylan Sprague)
Demo: Evolution X
(Cody Banks & Abtahee Ali)
The Rubber Duck Pal Program
(Daniel Demerin)
12:00 p.m.
Furry Friends
(Colter Lena)
Demo
(Trent Costa)
Don’t Crash! CSS-Modules in React
(Dylan Attal)
How to start your own Coding Podcast 101
(Vincent Tang)
1:00 p.m.
Pull Requests, and the Developers Who Love Them
(Michele Cynowicz)
Demo: Rollerblade Buyers Guide
(Abe Eveland)
Post Bootcamp Reflections: Rebuilding my capstone in React Native
(Liz Tiller)
Create games, visual novels, and fast food dating sims (and learn programming) with Ren’Py!
(Joey deVilla)
2:00 p.m.
Demo
(Rob Mack)
“You do belong here” and other affirmations and ways to beat imposter syndrome.
(Michael Traverso)
A Taste Of Docs As Code
(Kat Batuigas)
Once again, it’s free-as-in-beer (and not free-as-in-mattress) to attend, and all you need is an internet connection! Register here.
In another life, I was a developer evangelist who travelled across North America and I saw tech scenes from Palo Alto to Peoria. I can tell you that one of the signs of a healthy tech community in a small- to medium-sized city is a coding school that acts as a social/technical/gathering place. If your city had one, things were looking up for local techies. If not, it was a safe bet that the place was experiencing a brain drain.
Here in Tampa Bay, Suncoast Developers Guild fills that vital role, and it does so spectacularly. They’re a key part of the heart and soul of tech in the area, and it shows in their efforts, such as events like this.
Thanks, Suncoast Developers Guild! I’ll see you on Saturday!
What: An online workshop where Tampa Bay’s best-known tech lawyer and IP attorney, Brent C.J. Britton, will talk about the intellectual property issues surrounding hackathons.
When: Tonight! As in Thursday, July 30th, 2020, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.
Let’s face it: The purpose of many (but not all) hackathons — even if it’s not the primary purpose — is to promote one or more tech company’s wares or services, or to act as a scouting exercise to find new talent. This is especially true when a hackathon is organized or sponsored by a for-profit company and especially when they encourage or require you to use one of their products, services, or APIs.
What if you participate in a hackathon held by a for-profit company and your idea is a really good one? Who owns it?
This workshop will be led by Brent C.J. Britton, local IP/techie lawyer, and generally the first guy I run to when I face some kind of intellectual property issue (and yes, I have, when a copyright troll was getting up in my business).
Check it out tonight!
Here’s Brent’s bio:
Brent Britton is the only graduate of the prestigious MIT Media Lab to become a lawyer. Brent holds degrees from the University of Maine, the The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University School of Law. He is Managing Partner for the Tampa office at De La Pena & Holiday LLP, where he advises companies on emerging business and technology law, intellectual property, complex commercial transactions.
Brent is the author of Ownability, How Intellectual Property Works and one of the most interesting and entertaining speakers in the Tampa Bay area on Startups, IP and related matters. He is recommended on Linkedin by a futurist as: “Visionary, pragmatic, insightful and full of life with a capital L”.
Here’s my daily view for seven hours a day for the next little while, as I’m part of the inaugural cohort of UC Baseline, the 5-week cybersecurity training program from Tampa bay’s security guild, The Undercroft:
Tap to see at full size.
Last week was devoted entirely to the “Hardware 101” part of the program. Here’s a video summary of what happened that week, and Yours Truly’s in a fair bit of it:
This week is “Networking 101”, which is all about how the bits gets transferred across wires and air to our hardware.
One of the exercises is making our own Ethernet cables. I can do it — just, very, very slowly…
Tap to see at full size.
We spent a good chunk of time setting up virtual LANs on our individually-assigned Cisco Catalyst 3750 programmable 48-port switches (alas, we don’t get to keep them), hooking up our Raspberry Pi 4 boxes (which we do get to keep) to them, and wiring our VLANs together via trunks:
Tap to see at full size.
It’s a strange world, where IOS doesn’t Apple’s refer to “iPhone Operating System” — part of my usual stomping grounds as a developer — but in the world of network administration, it’s Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System:
Tap to see at full size.
This is way outside my normal experience with networking, which I do at the application level, where I deal with data structures like arrays, dictionaries, base64-encoded data, and maybe the occasional data stream. This is the world of packets, frames, switching, and routing. I would still probably ruin a server room if left in charge of it, but after this course, I’d ruin it less.
I do have a refreshed generalized concept of what happens at the lower levels of the network, and that’s the important thing for me and the sort of work that I do.
It’s Monday, July 27th, which means that I’ve completed the Hardware 101 portion of the 5-week UC Baseline cybersecurity training program offered by Tampa Bay’s security guild, The Undercroft! Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve posted so far about my experiences…
Day 4 of the Hardware 101 component of the UC Baseline cybersecurity program was all about security for the enterprise, which naturally included topics such as servers. Not everyone in the class has had the opportunity to tour a server room or data center, and this was their chance to see these machines up close.
Unlike the previous days, we did not attempt to dismantle and then reassemble the servers — this was a “look, but don’t touch” sort of lesson.
We also had a guest lecturer who gave us a pretty thorough walkthrough of the sorts of things involved in an enterprise server/data center setup, some of which went way over my head. I don’t see a sysadmin/system architect role in my future, but it might not hurt for me to do some supplementary reading on this topic.
Day 5 was the final day of Hardware 101 and started with something that I’ve always been terrible at: Making networking cables.
Arrrrgh.
We also spent some time looking over all sorts of intrusion devices, such as the incredibly cute “Pwnagotchi”, a Raspberry Pi Zero-based device that “listens” to wifi chatter to feed its machine learning program in order to figure out wifi passwords.
It uses an e-paper screen, which is quite legible and consumes little power.
It’s incredibly small:
Here’s a Pwnagotchi beside a U.S. quarter for size reference:
A great way to steal information to gain access to people’s accounts and systems is to set up a fake wifi hotspot at a place that offers free wifi, such as Starbucks. That’s what the Wifi Pineapple is for — people connect to it, thinking they’re connecting to Starbucks wifi. You route their signals through to the real Starbucks wifi, but you’re the go-between, and can “see” everything that your marks are sending on the internet: the data they’re passing back and forth, including stuff like user IDs and passwords:
It sends out a signal that causes devices currently connected to wifi to disconnect. You could use it in tandem with a Wifi Pineapple to force people to disconnect from the real wifi and then connect to the Pineapple instead, enabling you to read their internet communications.
If you really want to “sniff” all the wifi traffic in the room, you’ll want one of these — a high-gain antenna system hooked to a network interface controller (NIC) that reads signals in “promiscuous mode”, a capability that’s disabled in most NICs. In promiscuous mode, you can capture all wifi traffic instead of the bits of data that you’re authorized to receive. It’s a good network diagnostics tool — and it’s also useful for getting up to no good:
And finally, the Shark Jack. Plug it into someone’s network, either via the ethernet jack or USB, and it will execute scripts to get a map of the network or even deliver a payload somewhere onto the system:
It’s basically a real-world version of the device that Tony Stark slipped onto the command console of the SHIELD helicarrier in the first Avengers movie (it’s at the 0:44 mark):
I may have to invest in one of those bad boys. For research purposes, you understand.
We also had a guest lecturer who delivered a very thorough and informative presentation on getting started in cybersecurity. I’ll have to post notes on it later:
For the benefit of my classmates in the UC Baseline program (see this earlier post to find out what it’s about), I’m posting a regular series of notes here on Global Nerdy to supplement the class material. As our instructor Tremere said, what’s covered in the class merely scratches the surface, and that we should use it as a launching point for our own independent study.
The “binary numbers” portion of day 1 at UC Baseline. Tap to see at full size.
There was a lot of introductory material to cover on day one of the Hardware 101 portion of the program, and there’s one bit of basic but important material that I think deserves a closer look, especially for my fellow classmates who’ve never had to deal with it before: How binary and hexadecimal numbers are related.
The problem with binary
(for humans, anyway)
Consider the population of Florida. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on July 1, 2019, that number was estimated to be 21,477,737 in base 10, a.k.a. the decimal system.
Here’s the same number, expressed in base 2, a.k.a. the binary system: 1010001111011100101101001.
That’s the problem with binary numbers: Because they use only two digits, 0 and 1, they grow in length extremely quickly, which makes them hard for humans to read. Can you tell the difference between 100000000000000000000000 and 1000000000000000000000000? Be careful, because those two numbers are significantly different — one is twice the size of the other!
(Think about it: In the decimal system, you make a number ten times as large by tacking a 0 onto the end. For the exact same reason, tacking a 0 onto the end of binary number doubles that number.)
Hexadecimal is an easier way to write binary numbers
Once again, the problem is that:
Binary numbers, because they use only two digits — 0 and 1 — get really long really quickly, and
Decimal numbers don’t convert easily to binary.
What we need is a numerical system that:
Can represent really big numbers with relatively few characters, and
Converts easily to binary.
Luckily for us, there’s a numerical system that fits this description: Hexadecimal. The root words for hexadecimal are hexa (Greek for “six”) and decimal (from Latin for “ten”), and it means base 16.
Using 4 binary digits, you can represent the numbers 0 through 15:
Decimal
Binary
0
0000
1
0001
2
0010
3
0011
4
0100
5
0101
6
0110
7
0111
8
1000
9
1001
10
1010
11
1011
12
1100
13
1101
14
1110
15
1111
Hexadecimal is the answer to the question “What if we had a set of digits that represented the 16 numbers of 0 through 15?”
Let’s repeat the above table, this time with hexadecimal digits:
Decimal
Binary
Hexadecimal
0
0000
0
1
0001
1
2
0010
2
3
0011
3
4
0100
4
5
0101
5
6
0110
6
7
0111
7
8
1000
8
9
1001
9
10
1010
A
11
1011
B
12
1100
C
13
1101
D
14
1110
E
15
1111
F
Hexadecimal gives us easier-to-read numbers where each digit represents a group of 4 binary digits. Because of this, it’s easy to convert back and forth between binary and hexadecimal.
Since we’re creatures of base 10, we have the single characters to represent the digits 0 through 9, but no single character to represent 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, which are digits in hexadecimal. To work around this problem, hexadecimal uses the first 6 letters from the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, and F.
That’s a hard number to read, and if you had to manually enter it, the odds are pretty good that you’d make a mistake. Let’s convert it to its hexadecimal equivalent.
We do this by first breaking that binary number into groups of 4 bits (remember, a single hexadecimal number represents 4 bits, and “bit” is a portmanteau for “binary digit”):
1100 0010 1010 1001
Now let’s use the table above to look up the hexadecimal digit for each of those groups of 4:
1100 0010 1010 1001
C 2 A 9
There you have it:
The decimal representation of the number is 49,833,
How to indicate if you’re writing a number in decimal, binary, or hexadecimal form
Because we’re base 10 creatures, we simply write decimal numbers as-is:
49,833
To indicate that a number is in binary, we prefix it with the number zero followed by a lowercase b:
0b1100001010101001
This is a convention used in many programming languages. Try it for yourself in JavaScript:
# This will print "49833" in the console
console.log(0b1100001010101001)
Or if you prefer, Python:
# This will print "49833" in the console
print(0b1100001010101001)
To indicate that a number is in hexadecimal, we prefix it with the number zero followed by a lowercase x:
oxC2A9
Once again, try it for yourself in JavaScript:
# This will print "49833" in the console
print(0xc2a9)
print(0xC2A9)
Or Python:
# Both of these will print "49833" in the console
print(0xc2a9)
print(0xC2A9)
Common grouping of binary numbers and hexadecimal
4 bits: A half-byte, tetrade, or nybble
A single hexadecimal digit represents 4 bits, and my favorite term for a group of 4 bits is nybble. The 4 bits that make up a nybble can represent the numbers 0 through 15.
“Nybble” is one of those computer science-y jokes that’s based on the fact that a group of 8 bits is called a byte. I’ve seen the terms half-byte and tetrade also used.
8 bits: A byte
Two hexadecimal digits represent 8 bits, and a group of 8 bits is called a byte. The 8 bits that make up a byte can represent the numbers 0 through 255, or the numbers -128 through 127.
In the era of the first general-purpose microprocessors, the data bus was 8 bits wide, and so byte was the standard unit of data. Every character in the ASCII character set can be expressed in a single byte. Each of the 4 numbers in an IPv4 address is a byte.
16 bits: A word
Four hexadecimal digits represent 16 bits, and a group of 16 bits is most often called a word. The 16 bits that make up a word can represent the numbers 0 through 65,535 (a number sometimes referred to as “64K”), or the numbers -32,768 through 32,767.
If you were computing in the late ’80s or early ’90s — the era covered by Windows 1 through 3 or Macs in the classic chassis — you were using a 16-bit machine. That meant that it stored data a word at a time.
32 bits: A double word or DWORD
Eight hexadecimal digits represent 32 bits, and a group of 32 bits is often called a double word or DWORD; I’ve also heard the unimaginative term “32-bit word”. The 32 bits that make up a word can represent the numbers 0 through 4,294,967,295 (a number sometimes referred to as “4 gigs”), or the numbers −2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647.
32-bit operating systems and computers came about in the mid-1990s. Some are still in use today, although they’d now be considered older or “legacy” systems.
The IPv4 address system uses 32 bits, which means that it can represent a maximum of 4,294,967,29 internet addresses. That’s fewer addresses than there are people on earth, and as you might expect, we’re running out of these addresses. There are all manner of workarounds, but the real solution is for everyone to switch to IPv6, which uses 128 bits, which allows for over 3 × 1038 addresses — enough to assign 100 addresses to every atom on the surface of the earth.
64 bits: A quadruple word or QWORD
16 hexadecimal digits represent 64 bits, and a group of 64 bits is often called a quadruple word, quad word, or QWORD; I’ve also heard the unimaginative term “64-bit word”. The 64 bits that make up a word can represent the numbers 0 through 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (about 18.4 quintillion), or the numbers -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (minus 9.2 quintillion through 9.2 quintillion).
If you have a Mac and it dates from 2007 or later, it’s probably a 64-bit machine. macOS has supported 32- and 64-bit applications, but from macOS Catalina (which came out in 2019) onward, it’s 64-bit only. As for Windows-based machines, if your processor is an Intel Core 2/i3/i5/i7/i9 or AMD Athlon 64/Opteron/Sempron/Turion 64/Phenom/Athlon II/Phenom II/FX/Ryzen/Epyc, you have a 64-bit processor.
Need more explanation?
The Khan Academy has a pretty good explainer of the decimal, binary, and hexadecimal number systems:
