hpr_transcripts/hpr1752.txt

Episode: 1752
Title: HPR1752: Penguicon 2015 Promo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1752/hpr1752.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:51:16

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This is an HBR episode 1,752 entitled, Penwik and 2015 promo.
It is hosted by AYUKA and is about 31 minutes long.
The summer is.
Penwik and 2015 happen on April 24-26, 2015 in Southfield, Michigan.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio.
And what I want to do today is something a little different.
It's not part of my series, but is instead a kind of a promotional thing.
I want to let people know about something called Pengwikon, which is coming up.
It is April 24-26 in Southfield, Michigan at the Weston Hotel.
This is kind of an interesting event and I've talked about it before here on Hacker Public Radio.
It is a combination of a technology event like a Linux Fest, although we go a little bit beyond just Linux.
But we do try and stay pretty much in the open source area.
And then it's combined with a science fiction convention.
And that means that you've got quite a variety of things going on.
There's going to be people in costumes and competitions involving costuming.
There's gaming, there's anime, there's literature, there's movies, there's music, food, lifestyle, all kinds of things going on.
So it really is quite a full weekend.
And my role in all of this is that I am the person who puts together what we call the tech track.
And that's really what I want to talk about because that's what I've been involved in putting together really over the course of the last year.
So I've been in the situation of being the director of the tech track really for the last 12 months.
And that's a good way of sort of building something and we're really trying to do that here.
Right now we're looking at roughly about 100 hours of tech programming over three days.
So it starts on Friday afternoon and then Saturday from early in the morning.
And I do mean early to fit in all the stuff we're doing.
We really have 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. talks going on here.
Running up through I think the the talks end about 10 p.m. and then coming back Sunday again starting early in the morning and running through till about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
So it's quite a full weekend of activities.
So what are some of the things that you might expect to do if you come to this?
So I'm going to start with our our guest of honor Bruce Schneier, the security person.
Bruce has a new book out called Data and Goliath.
And so he's a he's a long time friend of Pengwakan and has appeared a number of times.
And we're very happy to have him here again.
And since he has a new book to promote, I'm sure that's a lot of what he's going to be talking about.
And our con chair told me very proudly that he had talked to the publisher and had was going to have 25 books on hand to sell.
So I immediately said call the publisher back and double it.
Because a lot of people are going to want that.
And of course Bruce has always been very gracious about signing his books.
And I can tell you I will be in line to get my copy and get it signed.
One of the things that I'm very happy that I have right now in my collection is a signed copy of Schneier on security.
And those of you who have listened to my security and privacy series podcasts know that I have got some interest there.
I'm not the world's foremost authority by any means.
But it's something I do like to pay attention to.
And I'm a big fan of Bruce Schneier.
So that's a biggie for us.
We have several podcasts that are going to be recorded there.
One of them is called IT in the D, which is a Detroit area IT podcast.
And another one that may be more familiar to people in Hacker Public Radio is the Sunday Morning Linux Review
with Tony, Mary, and Matt.
And they have been recording a live show at Penguin Con pretty much since the podcast started.
So I think this is three.
This will be their third year recording their show there.
And it's not just the podcast though.
Each of the three hosts of Sunday Morning Linux Review is also going to be giving a talk.
So Tony is doing one on home networking with Linux.
And I was talking to him today and one of the things we were talking about is, you know,
how to set up a guest network so that you're not giving away the password to your home network to people who come by to visit.
So I think that might be one of the things he covers.
Mary, those of you who listen to the podcast know, is big on KDE.
So she's going to do a KDE talk called Swimming with Dolphin.
Then Matt is the overachiever of the group.
He is actually on tap now to do three talks that kind of lead one into the other.
So we've tried to set it up that they come in the appropriate order.
So he's going to start with an introduction to Bash.
Follow that up with a Bash 201.
And then finally, a session on Redgex and Grap where you can put some of that stuff to work.
So that's going to be a lot of fun there.
We've got a lot of Python stuff.
We have a Python buff.
We've got an introduction to Python, advanced Python, you know, Python in industry.
All kinds of good stuff going on there.
We have a theme.
And usually we try and have some kind of theme each year at PangourCon.
And make sure that we have at least a few prominent talks that reflect that theme.
And so the theme this year is the intersection of biology and medicine with technology.
And we're going to express that in a number of ways.
The first of all, there is a charity that we are cooperating with called enabling the future.
And this is about 3D printing of prosthetic hands for kids.
As I'm recording this, there was a viral video a couple of weeks ago of Robert Downey Jr. with a young boy.
And Robert Downey Jr. was there to basically present him with his prosthetic device.
And of course, Robert Downey Jr. is famous as being Iron Man.
And so the boy was just absolutely ecstatic at both at getting his new arm and at meeting Iron Man.
So this is an important thing.
And it's one of the ways in which technology I think is advancing medicine in some very important ways.
But not just that, we're going to look at biohacking.
And we've got some people coming out here to talk about biohacking.
And how that intersects in various ways with the maker movement.
And then we're going to have a possibility for people who wish to, as they put it, upgrade yourself.
I think that's a bit of a play on Dr. Who and the Cybermen.
But you can get an NFC or RFID chip implanted.
So that's going to be an interesting kind of thing.
And then we have a Dr. Cynthia Chestak, who is an engineer who is on the faculty of the medical school of the University of Michigan.
And as an engineer, she's involved in designing implanted devices, pacemakers, things like that.
I've seen her speak and she's very good.
I'm really looking forward to her participation in what we're doing here.
So we've got a number of these things going on.
We've got a group that we have in Detroit, but it's part of a larger movement called Free Geek.
And so we've got the Motor City Free Geek is going to come to Pentagon and talk about what they're doing.
And what they try and do is take older computer equipment that people don't need anymore
and recycle it into things that they can then pass on to people who need computer equipment.
So I think that's really good in a number of ways.
First of all, it expands access to technology to people who might not have access to it.
And the other thing is it takes potentially dangerous stuff out of the landfill stream.
We always have to be very cognizant of the fact that our modern electronics use a lot of metals
that can be poisonous in the environment.
And so we need to be real careful about that.
I think what they're doing is important, definitely worth supporting.
Then we're going to have some person from Docker, engineer Nathan LeClaire,
is going to come and talk about that.
And that's a big part of the cloud and virtualization and all of that kind of stuff.
We're going to find out about running games on line.
In particular, we're looking at one called Artemis.
And that's a project that has been affiliated with Pengwakan for a while.
Bio-sacking with the Raspberry Pi is one of them.
Then we're going to have Eric S. Raymond.
Eric Raymond is someone that has been a part of Pengwakan from the very beginning
and is here every year.
And you may know him as the author of the Cathedral in the Bazaar
and from the open source initiative and all of that kind of stuff.
So he's going to be here and he's going to do and ask me anything session.
He's also involved in a session called Building the Great Beast of Malvern.
And that was Eric needed a new computer.
And he wanted a very powerful monster machine and a group of people got together
to figure out how to do that.
And they did it without ever being in the same place at the same time.
So they're going to talk about just how they did it, which should be interesting.
One thing that I'm kind of interested in is that we got an inquiry.
A lady from Microsoft wrote to me and said, Microsoft is doing some open source stuff
working with open source.
Would you be interested in that? And I said yes.
I would very much be interested in that.
So her talk is called Cloud plus open source plus Microsoft equals Azure.
So she's going to talk about the fact that their Azure platform,
they're supporting Linux virtual machines, Node.js, PHP, Python, Android, iOS,
Hadoop, Chef, Puppet, and more.
So I think this is a very interesting thing.
I know some people in the open source community have some strong opinions about Microsoft.
But, you know, I'm going to give them a chance to speak their piece here
and listen with an open mind, see what they have to say.
Because from where I'm sitting, it seems like there've been some interesting changes there
since such an Adele took over.
And so I want to see where they're going with that.
Continuous delivery, make software configuration and deployment quick and painless.
So that might be something interesting.
Oh, crypto party, we did this last year.
Susan Sons, who is a security person from a university, is going to come out.
And this was oriented really towards people who wanted to get started with things like encryption
and email and stuff like that.
Susan does a great job with that.
So we're really happy to have her back.
And she says, absolute beginners are welcome.
We'll have volunteers on hand.
In fact, Eric Raymond was one of the people on hand to help people last year.
So that should be interesting.
Designing industrial control systems to resist cyber attack.
Very, very pertinent right out of the headlines kind of thing.
So a lot of industrial control systems are vulnerable.
People worry about the power grid and all of these things.
So that should be interesting.
How to structure a nonprofit using open source technology.
I think that should be a very interesting one as well.
And then we're going to be doing stop action movie making with open shot.
And droid TK.
Friend of mine, Cliff Flint is really big on tickle TK.
And he's going to talk about how you can do some of that stuff now on an Android tablet or phone.
So I think that should be fun.
Firewalls with PF Sense.
Tom Lawrence is going to come and do that.
I'm very much looking forward to that.
Getting involved in the open source community.
And I am going to be the moderator for that one.
And we've got Tom Callaway and Ruth Ceeley from Red Hat.
And some of the hacker public radio people might remember that Ruth Ceeley was also one of the keynote speakers at Ohio Linux Fest.
And I was able to upload her talk to hacker public radio.
So if you remember that talk, you know just how awesome she is.
Tom Callaway is great.
And then the third person on the panel, I've got Emily Garnier from the Gennome project.
And you know the whole idea is to try and just open up all of the things that people can do that are going to give you a chance to get involved with open source.
And people at hacker public radio may recall a few years ago I did a series of shows about all the ways you could contribute to open source.
And it's more than just writing code.
And so I think we're going to get some really good discussion going with all of that.
Getting started with Beaglebone is another session for those people that are into the small form factor hardware.
Beaglebone is very interesting.
Getting things done under Linux.
Now getting things done was a popular methodology by David Allen.
And Craig Maloney is going to come in and talk about using Linux and open source tools to implement getting things done.
Hacking outside the box, the Internet of Things.
Hacking your writing and editing tool box.
You know if you're a writer that might be something to be interested.
We got a session on the Invisible Internet Project.
How to get and keep a tech job.
Introduction to Zenos.
So we have someone coming to talk about that.
Introduction to Kanban boards.
And introduction to machine learning with Python.
Then a session on IPv6.
Then George Castro and Mark Ram from Canonical.
We're going to be talking about Juju.
We're going to have a key signing party.
So anyone who wants to get their GPG or OpenPGP key signed can come.
So you want to come with an ID.
And if you can, bring it a laptop computer or something that will probably make things a little easier.
Then another one of our keynote talks here.
Errol Balkan is talking about corporate surveillance and the cost of free software.
Errol is a founder of IND.ie.
So I think that he's going to be talking about tracing tracking activities like AT&T and Verizon.
He's leading floss projects with a developer from MIT named Ed Platt.
It should be interesting.
MariaDB and the Ubuntu Cloud.
So we have a fellow Colin Campbell from the MariaDB project who's coming to talk.
And so we had him on the schedule to do a MariaDB talk.
And then George Castro from Canonical posted something on Google Plus that I saw about how MariaDB and Ubuntu's Cloud solution are now working together.
So I called up George and said George, you know, you and Colin need to do something together here.
So we're going to have them do a joint presentation in addition to Colin's presentation on MariaDB.
We're going to have a session on Neil Stevenson's Metaverse.
Is it science fiction or near reality?
Then notes from the DHS Industrial Control System Cybersecurity.
DHS being our Department of Homeland Security here in the United States.
And so they're going to we have some people who attended this session in February.
And they're going to tell us about what happened.
We're going to have a discussion of open BSD.
We have a fellow who's going to be talking about how to do RPM packaging.
And so he's going to do a session on sort of the theory of all of it and then do a packathon where people can actually create packages if they bring a notebook running Linux.
And he'll help you do all of that.
Securing back office business processes with open VPN.
Something on podcasting.
I don't I think for most hacker public radio people that's old hat.
Social engineering for fun and profit.
Always something you got to pay attention to.
Tickle on Raspberry Pi.
So we're not only going to be looking at it on droid.
We got someone talking about tickle on Raspberry Pi.
Then teaching open source in schools.
So we got someone who's going to talk about how he's been able to bring that into the classroom and get that used in in our schools.
Test driven development to write less code.
The cloud is your free hobby computer.
The electric library libraries in the 21st century and fellow doing that is a librarian.
So that should be pretty good.
The IT road warrior.
I think that's going to be very similar to on hacker public radio.
A lot of those what's in my bag.
You know, what are the things you need to do to be effective road warrior.
So it'll probably be more than just a hardware, but talk about a number of aspects of that security onion.
Friend of mine is a professional.
He does forensics for a major bank in their security department.
And so he's going to be talking about security onion.
Tom Calloway, who I mentioned before, as part of our panel on getting involved in open source is also doing a talk about the state of Fedora.
We've always had a Ubuntu well represented at PenguinCon because we have several canonical employees that live here in Michigan.
When I had a couple of red hat people lined up to come here, I said, hey, I want to hear about Fedora.
You guys need to give us a little bit of a presentation here.
Tips and tricks using ASP MVC 5.
I'm not even sure I know what that means, but it sounds highly technical.
We got a session on tour session on trouble shooting and tech health and beyond.
The Ubuntu release party because Ubuntu 1504 is released just a few days before PenguinCon.
Understanding and protecting your privacy online.
Virtual Reality headset demo from Game Face Labs.
Weaponized malware, the future of cyber warfare.
That should be very interesting.
And my friend Chris, who is doing the security onion, is going to be on the panel there for that.
What do your users really think?
If you've ever been involved in user interfaces and human factors engineering, this could be a very interesting one.
That's something that interests me.
Then we have what's new in KDE 5.
Then we're going to have a talk about modern recording called Why Can't Ashley Sing.
We're going to talk about the difference between the sound musicians make live and what you hear in recordings.
And finally, we're going to have a women in STEM meetup.
All the stuff I've talked about is just a tech track.
As I said, there's about 100 hours worth of stuff here.
In addition to that, I'm not going to go through all of it, but we have games.
We have a science.
Actually, I'm going to be on a panel that's actually part of the science track called Creative Destruction.
That's going to draw on my past career as a professor of economics.
I'm going to bring some of that in.
We're going to have people talking about steampunk and various kinds of literature topics, costumes.
In fact, Ruth Ceeley from Red Hat is really big on costumes.
If you were listening to the talk she did for Ohio Linux Fest, she's a maker.
She likes to do things with her hand. She likes to make stuff.
And costumes is one of the things she makes.
I seem to recall last year she actually won a prize for Best Costum at PenguinCon.
This is the only place in the world where you could have people from Red Hat come and talk about technology
and then put on a costume.
That's the kind of event that we have here.
Because there's so much stuff going on, if you were in a relationship, let us say, with someone who is not particularly a geek,
this might be one of those weekends where you could both go and have a good time, even if you weren't going to the same sessions,
because there's so many things going on.
There's lifestyle tracks, there's food, there's gaming, there's anime, movies, just so much going on.
So, I hope that this will wet your appetite and I'm going to just remind you again that this is April 24th through 26th.
I will make sure that in the show notes I put the information of the website so you can make your plans.
And I hope to see some of you there.
So, this is Hookah signing off from Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as always to support Free Software.
Bye-bye.
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