Like any geek, I’ve got about a dozen things happening at once. Some of my bigger projects include:

KhanFu

In 2009, I got my first iPhone (a hand-me-down 1st generaton phone from my little brother, in fact). Three weeks later, I was heading to DEF CON, and I thought, I can put the DEF CON schedule on my phone! I built some simple HTML pages, using the iUI Framework, stuck them on my web server, and set it out there for people to use.

Coincidentally, Jedi was building a similar capability as a native iPhone app. So after the con, merged our efforts and produced KhanFu (blame Jedi for the silly name, and me for the dorky logo).

Since then, we’ve supported over 30 different conference events, and continue to slowly improve the service and app (whenever we find time, which sometimes isn’t too frequent an occurrence.) But I generally try to ensure the conferences I go to are in there, as well as the big names in Vegas each year: ShmooCon, Black Hat, BSidesLV, DEF CON, and DerbyCon are all well represented in the system. I’ll also try to put in other cons on demand, as best as I can.

If you’re going to a security conference, check it out!

ShmooCon Tickets

When I joined Intrepidus Group in the summer of 2010, we had apparently just volunteered to rewrite the ticket system for ShmooCon. Since our lead Phish Me developer was overwhelmed with “normal” work at the time, I sort of took over the project and had a great time designing and builidng something to handle the regular crush of con ticket buyers. Well, a great time, up until the first round went live, when their web server got totally crushed under the load (to be fair, the failure happened before even a single line of my code got reached).

We re-architected the backend (with the famous Moose Cluster), continued some tweaks with advice from 3ric Johanson, and finally went live. The system worked pretty well that year, but in 2011, we improved some of the hardware and the limits to my system became…er…more apparent. So Ben Laurie stepped in with a total re-write of just the ticket-reservation code, and it’s been running well ever since. Which isn’t to say that I don’t still get really stressed with each sales round…

Even with the stress, and inevitable problems, managing this system and running the sales each year is still a tremendous amount of fun, and I’m forever grateful for the opportuntiy to keep at it (and continuing to do my best to make the system more useful to Heidi each year).

Fun Things

Beyond those two big projects, there are lots of little things that occupy my time. Among these are:

• AppleTV Hacking
• Crypto Puzzles and Contests
• Geocaching

And hopefully soon, some arduino and hardware hacking. Not to mention all the ch allenges of raising three kids. :)