I was recently made aware that our very own Nick Farr did a interview for a new podcast called Exotic Liability.

In the podcast he describes hackerspaces while playing with tigers at the Bronx Zoo in NYC.

From the site.

Sat, 18 April 2009

Exotic Liability 6: Nick Farr Interview

In this episode:
Tiger enrichment
Hackers on A Plane
Hacker spaces
Survive DC update
Security stereotypes
Denver area events
Boston College is out to get you!

Direct download: Exotic_Liability_6.mp3

-E.

For those that can make it to Paris for this battle of wits and protocols, it sure seems to be a rousing good time.

Here are some of the details.

******

“We are pleased to announce that the /tmp/lab  will be organizing a Spring Wireless OpenWRT Mesh Contest called “Wireless Battle Mesh” during 2 days (April 11-12th) with the goal of building 3 wireless mesh networks based on embedded hardware running OpenWRT and different concurrent mesh routing protocols.

The targeted architecture will be 3 networks of 25nodes + 1 wireless managment networks (10-20 nodes) to achieve realistic size of nodes number, data traffic, configuration problems. The architecture will be set-up indoor and outdoor around the building of the /tmp/lab.

OpenWRT will be the selected for the BoardSupportPackage running on the different hardware nodes and a core network configuration will be built on Linux servers with user-friendly features such as :
*VLANs
*Captive portal
*Authentication
*Admin portal

Concerning the mesh-protocols, selected targeted protocols are :

*OLSR : IP-based mesh routing platform (http://olsr.org and openWRT package available)

*BATMAN : Layer2-based mesh protocol (http://open-mesh.org) and available as a kernel module for Linux and packaged in OpenWRT

*BABEL : Layer-3 mesh protocol developed by University Paris 6, available for Linux and soon to be packaged for OpenWRT (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/)

Concerning the hardware node, we are looking for hardware sponsors that could enjoy this “real-case” contest by providing 50-100 nodes……….. More after the jump.

******

Looks to be quite a good time for packet heads and people with a lot of time with Yagi’s.

-E.

I’m Josh Krueger. *waves*

I feel intimidated as my “credentials” don’t sound anywhere near as impressive as our friend Brendan. Oh well… I’m a software developer for a startup in Chicago, I can manage to play with electronics without poppin caps, I used to be an art kid, I thoroughly enjoy spinning electro and I generally have a lot of poorly thought-out ideas that will never come to fruition. If I inspire at least one person here, perfect.

As you can see, I have already made a few changes to the blog design that I hope are appreciated. I hope to make this easier to read for everyone. Enjoy it.

<3 Josh

*******

And with that auspicious post from Josh we welcome him with open arms onto the hackerspaces.org/blog team.

-E.