[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: App Inventor Toolkit, Linux Security

Paul Nijjar paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca
Sat Apr 30 05:47:09 EDT 2011


They laughed at me. They all laughed. Delusions of grandeur, they called
it. They saw just another spindly-armed computer klutz, fighting for half
an hour to figure out how to exit vim and get back on the command
line, and they laughed. 

Little did they know. I was watching, and learning. Fernando Duran's
KWLUG presentation on Linux security started me up the path to
watching for their vulnerabilities, for thinking like an attacker.
Brian Nickle's presentation on the Google App Inventor Toolkit opened
my eyes to a world of drag-and-drop programming, of building programs
for mobile devices without needing to wrestle with a command-line text
editor. 

>From May's FLOSS Fund nominee[0], it dawned on me that a phone didn't
need to stay a phone, that code and creativity could transform a phone
into a remote control. It did not to me until later that remotes
could control the ones pressing the buttons, too. But I learned.
Steadily, I learned.

The Saturday earlier I installed Ubuntu 11.04 [1], had Narwhal cake,
and played FLOSS LAN games. Frivolous? That's what they thought. I
needed to bike to the KWLUG meeting [2] to work off the Narwhal
cake, but that only made me stronger. They don't laugh at me any more. 

- Paul

[0] http://www.gmote.org/
[1] http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/814/detail/
[2] http://kwlug.org/locations
-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org 




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