hypatia dot ca

Gr8 Designs Microcontroller Workshop

I promised the girls in my workshop sessions today that I would post some links to various resources on the Arduino microcontroller and some of the awesome projects I showed off. Here goes!

Places to get Arduinos and other electronic components in Toronto:

• Creatron has good prices on the Lilypad and regular Arduino, as well as a very friendly and helpful proprietor.  It’s on College just East of Spadina.
• Honson is just West of Spadina; they have a wider selection of things like LEDs, but don’t stock Arduinos.
• Active Surplus on Queen West is also worth a look, though their selection of components varies.

Project inspiration, resources, and other links:

• The Arduino homepage is probably a good place to start.
• LadyAda has awesome projects.
• MakeZine posts new things all the time.
• The High-Low Tech group at MIT, where Leah Buechley (creator of the Lilypad) is a professor, has really inspirational work.
• My bookmarks for Gr8 Girls have some more random projects.

I hope everyone has fun learning more about electronics and microcontrollers than what little I talked about in the workshops, and please feel free to email me if you have any questions – my address is leigh (at) hypatia.ca .

-Leigh

U of T Library Bookmarklet

U of T has off-campus access to research papers and other resources. This is obviously super useful. There are a couple of ways of logging into their web-based proxy service, and they are all annoying. So I made a bookmarklet:

UTL Proxy

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar, then go to a restricted URL like the one I’m currently reading and click it – you’ll be directed to U of T’s central web login page if you’re not cookied already from something like UTORmail.

Once you’re cookied you’ll be able to do this until your session goes idle.

The javascript is pretty basic, but due credit is owed to the University of Manitoba.

meshU 2009 – writing (more) secure software

Today at the meshU conference I gave a talk about secure programming, with a focus on the web.  There were 2 token slides for the C and C++ devs out there, which ended up working perfectly because there were only two people in the room who wrote C/C++ :)

I mostly touched on stuff from OWASP‘s vast collection of resources,specifically their top ten principles of secure programming, and their top ten web application vulnerabilities.  Slides are after the jump, but I wanted to include some related links to things which came up during the talk:

• SANS says to have good, visible security contact info
• Some more web app hacking learning resources from RSnake

Enjoy the slides!  Slideshare messed up the formatting of the additional notes, so for full effect I’d download them from here.

(more…)

Owen broke the internets

I had the following exchange a bit ago on twitter:

and the reverse:

The line-dancing totally makes the second one.

And now back to your irregularly scheduled program which will not contain random videos too often, I promise. These were just too awesome not to share :)

-Leigh

Xelerance Google Summer of Code

I’m pleased to announce that I’m working with Xelerance this summer to mentor students participating in the Google Summer of Code program.  We have a bunch of interesting ideas up and have been talking with potential participants on IRC (#xelerance-gsoc on irc.freenode.net).  We are mentoring three sets of projects, related to openswan, DNSSEC tools, and Off-The-Record Messaging.   If you’re interested in participating as either a student or mentor in any of these, I’m reachable at leigh at hypatia dot ca, and of course on freenode under the username hypa7ia.

This is the first year Xelerance (and I) have participated in the program.  I’ve been reading lots of the collected wisdom from previous years on the mentor email list and around the web.  I’ve really enjoyed talking with students so far and can’t wait to read the applications as they come in.

-Leigh