Ruxcon 2011 and GOAT-Plugs

This weekend has been totally crazy.  I loved it.  Oh, why you ask?  Ummmmmm..... Ruxcon 2011.  Great conference, lots of fantastic talks.  And just hanging out and making friends.  I must give a shout-out to all the Ruxcon crew for accepting my talk, and letting me speak, and putting together an awesome con!  The after parties were great too!  My discourse on GCC plugins, I think, went well.  Sorry for the pretty poor structure here in this post, but I think information was conveyed.  Weekend (including Friday) was awesome.

And now a shameless plug.  The slides for my talk are here:
http://users.757.org/~enferex/enferex_ruxcon2011.pdf

And the source code for GOAT-Plugs are here (GCC Obfuscation Augmentation Tools).  Sweet capra aegagrus hircus Batman! What?!  This is a set of GCC plugins (primarily proof of concept and example code I wrote so people can play with plugins).  The site has more information on what the individual plugins can do.
https://github.com/enferex/GOAT-Plugs

-Matt

Syntax 2011 Demoscene Party

Last night I, with some Ruxcon friends, ventured to the Melbourne High School in South Yarra (near the Lamborghini dealership) where the Syntax 2011 demoscene party was being hosted.  It is awesome to see the scene still fertile, even though I had never really gotten into demos when I was younger.  On the note of the High School, I will mention that this event was no where affiliated with a high school, other than it was just a place to host the geek-out.  The high school, which apparently is pretty posh was like a prison!  I'm not sure if the high wall and barbed wire is to keep kids out or crazies out.  But it doesn't help when the buildings look like guard shacks in a penitentiary.  The art and music at the show was great.  Chiptunes, ansi art, demos, oh my!  Not to mention ... I saw someone rocking some QBasic.

-Matt

Kernel and vDSO cookery...

A while back, I wrote an article on how to create a "virtual dynamic shared object" in the Linux kernel.  Anyways, I sent this to LinuxJournal, and they accepted it.  The November 2011 edition has the article "Creating a vDSO: the Colonel's Other Chicken"

-Matt

I just got bit....

... by the Noam Chomsky.  Yes! Father of CNF (Chomsky Normal Form) and linguistics guru, was speaking here at the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Center.  The Professor gave a wonderful lecture titled "Changing Contours of Global Order" in which he discussed global power, primarily driven by politics and finances.  It was so warming to hear someone, with such a down-to-earth non-conspiracy-theory tone, talk on this topic and not be a sensationalist.  He then gave a brief question and answer session.  This bad boy can speak!  For 2.5 hours!  It was way awesome.  I have been Chomskyinated.  And the tickets were gone in one day, 5000 seats!  So, how did me, el Matto, score such awesomesauce?  Well, my mega awesome friend Dale scored 'em!  I suppose if you email the wizard personally he has contacts that can get tickets, and that is what Dale did, email the Chom.

-Matt

Hawking makes you go hmmmmmmmmmmmm....

Greetings faithful readers!  Guess, what?!  I got a library card to the wondrous Moreland library system.  After doing such, and meeting the very nice lady who spent a few years in Maine, I decided to walk.... no strut... naw, I pimp'd-out with some Stephen Hawking action.  That's right fellow physics nerds, I picked-up/checked-out/ and read Hawking and Molidnow's The Grand Design.  And I must say, that book is fantabulous!  Marvelous ideas on the birth of the universe.  But what really bakes my brain is the mention that time is just a variant of space.  Wha, wha, wha?! you say?!  Sure, Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity introduced space-time, but for some reason, I never thought of time as being a weird space-like thing.  But, the aforementioned book by H&M (I guess I can call 'em that) mentioned that time is just space but only in one direction. Hmmmmm, crikey! I think they are right!  Sweet sassy molassy, that's mega-badassery.  Anyways, hope you all enjoy that nugget of knowledge.  That's it for now.  Much love and eat babies.

-Matt

LWN and GCC Plugins

I wrote an article a while back on how to create a GCC plugin. I have been working with Linux Weekly News: http://www.lwn.net on getting it published. I must say, the team there of Jake Edge and Jonathan Corbet were great to work with. This article was originally published 2 weeks ago, but for subscribers only. It is now available for free here:
An Introduction to Creating GCC Plugins: http://lwn.net/Articles/459982/

-Matt

Much awesomeness...

I saw Blind Guardian (from Germany) last night with two Australian acts, Eyefear and Black Majesty at Billboard. The show was amazing. I also caught up with some friends. Much fun. MORRRRRRRRDORRRRRRRRRRRRRRR MORDDDDDDDDOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRR!

Ohhh yea, pics or it didn't happen right? (This doesn't do it justice but still). Also, the process of ticket acrual is unusual. For those who have print-out tickets, myself included in that subset, we give away our entire ticket upon entry into the venue. After the show, tickets (as seen here) are provided for free! That way, if you are plastered out of your mind, you still can remember where you went.

-Matt