Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

Day 1 - Training

Today was every so slightly frustrating. While the training was good, the VMs for the class were created on windows. Not only that, but somehow the paths were hard coded, so one of the VMs was referencing C:\blahblah and would not open. After about an hour of hacking away, I could not get it to run. This ticks me off, because VMs should be agnostic, which is the whole point, so you can only take the error so many times on linux before you want to throw a brick at the windows users in the room.
It is very apparent that my skills in security have greatly increased over the past year, mainly due to running Linux full time, and having to concentrate on server side operations. I like being in the top 25% of the class as far as understanding the content.
A couple notes. I need to keep up my documentation for open ports on servers. Documentation seems to be where I need to focus, even though I have been over the past year, I need to step it up.

owasp.org for web vulnerabilities, a nice little site I need to investigate more.

More to come…

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Sometimes, I teach

Several years ago, we had several interns right out of high school, heading to college, work with us to learn the ins and outs of networking. One of them, who by now is well on his way to being an engineer, told me that following christmas that when he went to college, he felt like the people in northern Virginia had an advantage over the kids here in southern VA because of the multitude of advance computing classes offered. Since that discussion, I’ve been going into the high schools here every year for one or two days to teach Seniors about Linux and Advanced computing concepts. Here is the article that was written up this year.

http://cte.mcpsweb.net/chad-wollenberg-visits-pvhs

The interesting thing is, the kids are very receptive to linux. I was surprised at how much they didn’t really care about what their operating system is, as long as they can do what the love. Which, from the polls I’ve been taking are, Instant messaging (pidgeon), browsing (firefox), illegal downloads (any torrent program), and itunes (amarok, or others, though this is probably the most lacking feature). That is actually in the order of popularity, and yes, the kids in high school are that candid with me that they say limewire almost every time I ask for programs they use on a daily basis.

The other features that they really found intersting, was of course, the repositories, and instant download and install. Many students had not even heard of open office, and were shocked to learn they did not need to spend money on office when they go to college.

I talk about many things with them, particularly the concept of not being weighed down by the limitations of proprietary software, and how there are low barriers of entry to learn open source languages. I also perked their ears when I talk about the thousands of developers that work on my website on a daily basis, and I don’t even have to pay them.

And of course, after all that, they are stoked about linux. So then, I show them compiz-fusion right at the end. Their heads pop off. Kids love bling. That converts the two or three stragglers, and the class immediately begins cheering Linus Torvald’s name and throwing penguins at their teachers. Exaggerated? not by much.

The young adult mind is not inhibited by our gerneration X and WHY preconceptions. They do not know the concept of not having a cell phone and not being able to text their friends. They don’t care about if their computer boots up to windows, linux, or OSX. As long as they can do what they want. As services move more and more to the web, as Google continues to prove can be done, these future minds of America very quickly picked up on the irrelevance of the underlying operating system, and the value of open source.

With the push of the OLPC and Asus EEE pc (which I also showed them, refer to the article above), and as countries all over the world continue to adopt Linux, rather then Windows, as their platform of choice, you begin to wonder if our children are going to be left behind when the rest of the world realizes that we do not have to be chained to proprietary software, drm, and long lived copyright. I’ve touched a few lives this year and truly sparked their thoughts in the right direction. Whether they go on to become a windows programer, linux programer, or hermit in the mountains, that is up to them. But at least now, they know they have a choice.

Don’t our kids at least deserve that?

The conference

So unfortunately, there is not as much technology driven presentations as I had expected. This is interesting, being that much of the content in the sesions is based on instructional methods. Now I do agree that instruction and technology need to mix to become the new educational system, but it seems like the technology specialists are being ousted in this conference. One of the most intersting sessions I was at was how to be involved with the lambda rails… there were only 15 people in the session. This is crazy to me. Why wouldn’t people in educational technology be interested in fiber access across the country.

I’ll report more tomorrow, and will do my presentation.