I am headed to Shmoocon, and looking forward to seeing my HacDC collegues there!  For those of you who might forget, I am giving my talk, "Hack the Genome, the age of Biomolecular Cryptology" tomorrow at noon in the "Break It" session.  Pam was not surprised at the choice of session - I don't know if I should be pleased or mad!  See you there!

"Wow!"  "Amazing!"  "I want to be involved!"  Just some of the comments that I heard during the HacDC RepRap Build-a-Thon yesterday and today.  Thanks to the participation of a range of very talented local (and not-so local!) folks, the event was a tremendous success.  In particular, thanks to the speakers, Zack "Hoeken" Smith and Adrian Bowyer (virtually, from the UK) as well as the breakout session leaders Adam Koepel and Brian Dolge.  Obviously, huge thanks to Nick Farr for organizing the space and activities, as well as to the many HacDC'ers who stayed up into the wee hours working on a Darwin RepRap machine!  Keep an eye out for more details on this blog and on the HacDC wiki here.  Carl Leonard was also very busy with his video cameras, so I am sure we can expect to see more more about this event on his amazing video blog, Robotcast.

Writing interactive fiction is a fun way to create a simulated environment that includes creating a game world with items, characters, and puzzles. The best part is that you don't need to learn complex graphics application programming interfaces (API). Using Inform 7, it is easy to write your own interactive fiction without knowing how to program.  That's right, you can create your own game world by writing natural language descriptions, that the Inform 7 compiler can use to build your game world. Inform 7 is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

... a Sign of Dark Matter or a Nearby Quasar? There is a really interesting article over on Ars Technica about a high-alitiude baloon flight in Antarctica has turned up very surprisng results.  Both of the main explanations are fascinating:

The straightforward explanation requires an unidentified astrophysical object spitting out high-energy electrons in our neighborhood. The more exotic solution suggests that dark matter particles enabled by the existence of extra dimensions may be annihilating nearby.

Have you been writing code for so long that you just can't stand to tell the compiler what it should already know? Do you want to learn how to free yourself from the semicolon, the brace, and the parentheses? Do you want to  extend your program, by adding new code, by extending objects and definitions, or by modifying the type system, all during program execution, and still have a valid Object Oriented programming model that's built into the language?

UPDATE: This training is going to be filmed for our members away from home this weekend. :) As you may know HacDC will be holding it's second training event. June 28, 2008 we are inviting Bow Sineath to HacDC to teach our members (and even non-members, bring your friends!) about the intricacies of reversing binaries using some of the latest tools in the field. The following is an abstract from the trainer:

Over the past few years, reverse engineering has become a highly marketable and valuable skill backed by a number of powerful tools.

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