The idea has been discussed before, but as a final for my English 15 class, I put together a working "model" of what an online, ID-card based electronic ticket system would look like. It doesn't utilize any fancy PHP or MySQL database technology, as it's not really necessary for a simplistic model such as this one. It's more of a conceptual depiction of the logistics of said system, and not so much a technical demonstration. Nevertheless, this idea has the potential to be fleshed-out into a full-fledged, working ticket management system.

Have a look.

And now, some screenshots:

That, and I won an IST mug and shirt! This is great.

It's still under construction, I'm going to be fleshing out a few of the sections, as well as probably adding a few more.

Nevertheless, I think it's a good start for a place to refer a potential employer to learn a bit more about me. Feel free to check it out.

Needless to say, I'm excited about this opportunity. It should be a good leadership experience to add to my resume, and, the two credits of IST 296 as compensation are nice, too.

From the iCTF website:

The contest, (known as "Capture The Flag") is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of students from both the attack and defense viewpoints. This is the 6th edition of the security exercise, and its largest version.

Each team is given an Internet server that provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included by the contest organizers.

The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase, by finding the vulnerabilities and fixing them in their own copy of the server. The teams will also leverage the vulnerabilities they found to compromise other teams' servers.

During the contest, an automated scoring system keeps track, for each team, of what services are available, and which services have been compromised (that is, "who is hacking who"). Points are assigned to the teams according to their ability to defend their systems and successfully compromise the systems of other teams.

At approximately 9 AM EST, we arrived at the apartment we were competing at. The server image was made available at 11 AM, and "open fire" at 1 PM. Unfortunately, it took us far longer to decrypt and install the image than we had hoped. And then, for reasons quite unbeknownst to myself, we had some difficulties in connecting our server to the competition VPN, thus making it impossible to attack other machines. Nevertheless, we had a great deal of the offensive and defensive teams working furiously to get it up, while the research team poked and prodded at the image to attempt to find vulnerabilities for when we finally got it operational.

Which, unfortunately, never happened. I did learn a lot, however, particularly in some areas pertaining to encryption technologies, Python, and WEP cracking. I look forward to what else I can learn in the IA Club, as well as next year's competition.

And now, some pictures (warning, crappy cell phone pics):

The offense side of the room.

The research team's setup.

Although I'm not an honors student, I'm extraordinarily grateful to have had the opportunity to take this class. The low student-teacher ratio made learning extremely engaging and interactive, and facilitated a great deal of in-class discussion. I also feel like I know everyone in the class, at least, to some degree, unlike almost all of my other classes. Honestly, if all honors courses are structured in such a way, I'm going to be absolutely certain to explore what opportunities could be available to me through the Schreyer Honors College.

As for my group, well, simply put, it was great. None of us knowing each other prior to this class, we shared an excellent group dynamic, and had some great banter at project meetings. Altogether, we worked well, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to have met, and worked with my group. You guys rock.

My first semester here at Penn State has been absolutely fantastic. I've met so many new people, established so many new friendships, and had an unprecedented level of opportunities to take advantage of to further enrich my education. In just my first semester here, I've met former FBI agent and author Joseph Koletar, had lunch with FBI director Robert S. Mueller, heard a speech given by the illustrious Dr. Elie Wiesel, met Senator Rick Santorum, heard a lecture on Dell's direct-sales model from Americas President Paul Bell, discussed internships and intelligence analysis in a meeting with NSA analysts, made the IST IA Club's competition team, and gotten involved in more clubs and student organizations than I can list. And this is just the beginning.

So, Penn State, IST, bring it on. I can't wait to see what's around the corner.

I chose to explore the latter.

A "places" search for "Library" yielded the Information & Communications Technology Library. Their website can be found here.

The facade of the library.

The library's interior.

Some of the scripts this library offers.

The primary purpose of this location is to provide a resource for information regarding Second Life. Custom scripts are available, as well as a book entitled "The Top 20 Educational Spots in Second Life". Among these are Harvard Law School, and Info Island, which is where the ICT library itself is located. Another interesting bit of information is "RL in SL", a list of real-life entities that have Second Life presences.

The library itself doesn't stand to gain much, it's a not-for-profit endeavor funded by contributions from users. While it may be limited, it certainly is an interesting place to explore.

The frame of our creation.

Me applying a texture to one of our walls.

Us posing in front of our completed creation.

Walking through the tunnel, one can see, in chronological order, a brief history of the School and College of IST through pictures. Upon clicking these pictures, one is presented with a notecard item that gives a detailed description of that particular point in history.

Creating this project, I was tasked with uploading the necessary images to make textures for the tunnel. This was my responsibility because uploading images costs $10 Linden, and, I happen to be the only one with any money. Once the textures were uploaded, I applied them to prim objects that I had sufficient permissions to modify. Altogether, the process was a lot less painful than I initially expected it to be.

Be sure to check it out, and see Steve's Blog for a more elaborate writeup on the process of creating this work of art.

And boy, what an exciting few days it's been. I was present for the prostitute onslaught, I witnessed a cursing naked potato man running around with an M60 machine gun, and I've stumbled across, and even gotten kicked out of a few locales that wouldn't be entirely appropriate to mention here.

However, I digress.

One of the more.. kosher areas I stumbled upon was through a link found right in Istania itself. I had heard interesting things about Dell's Dell Island, and, I was certainly eager to check out their Second Life presence.

Upon teleporting to the island, I was struck by the imposing Dell logo atop a rather futuristic-looking bit of architecture.

Rather intrigued, I fly my way in the front door. Strangely, it's eerily empty here. I figured there'd be more people building ridiculous $5,000 Quad-Core QX6850 Core 2 Extreme-based computers. Honestly, I think Second Life could still manage to bring such a rig to its knees.

I wasted no time in hopping on one of their customization stations.. I was able to pick all the components of a PC to build, and watch as it assembled itself to my left. It was rather cool, and, after it was all complete, it offers to take you to a website where you can purchase said configuration.

All in all, this is certainly a unique business angle. It'd be fascinating to find out exactly how many of these Second Life-to-website click-throughs result in actual sales. This may very well become a very large avenue for generation of real-life sales for not just computers, but perhaps automobiles, and other consumer goods. The ability to try something out/view it in a virtual, three-dimensional environment could be instrumental in making such a purchase decision. I find it difficult to criticize Dell's environment simply because of the sheer innovation factor here.

I then meandered on over to IBM's Second Life presence. A search for "IBM" yields tons of results, so, I headed on over to the one simply entitled "IBM", which seems to be an online conference center of sorts, rather than a direct attempt at sales. This is indeed an intriguing prospect, however, it's disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a better means of navigating the island, or an introduction to what the island offers. This could be very helpful.

They've even got this neat little scale-model of the surrounding area.

And, over here, we've got IBM's massive, almost Death-Star-like "Theatre I". This leads me to believe that there are more. Wow.

There are seats there that one can sit in, so, presumably, this is a delivery area for lectures and seminars. I've yet to see anyone, but, then again, I don't imagine most companies would do business in such an area at 11:06 PM.

I find that I'm simply unable to explore the vastness of the IBM complex, let alone a sizable portion of Second Life. While it may be laggy, slow, and inefficient, to be this successful and huge, they must be doing something right. I do prefer Dell's environment simply because of the sheer coolness factor of assembling a virtual 3D representation of a consumer item, then being presented with the opportunity to purchase said item in real life. The most important element here I think is examining these sort of business "experiments" being conducted by these two companies. Whether it's Dell attempting to adapt its direct-sell model to online virtual environments, or IBM attempting to provide a venue for online business meetings, you've got to hand it to these guys for being pioneers. For trying something new. For making that first step forward.

And, now it's time to let my video card cool down. Second Life is making it throw a fit.

First, some background:

Jonathan Harris is a computer scientist and digital artist. He has a penchant for using these talents to attempt to make some sense of the seemingly infinite personal data that exists on the internet. Two of these projects are Universe and We Feel Fine.

Universe traverses the current spectrum of news stories, and attempts to assemble a snapshot full of entity-relationships and all sorts of other fun stuff in order to help make sense of the collective consciousness of society.

We Feel Fine performs a similar task, but, perhaps more relevantly, it scours the blogosphere to attempt to gain a barometric reading of sorts of writers' feelings, and popular writing subjects. With direct linking ability to blog posts and images contained within these particular blogs, the power of such a graphical representation is not to be underestimated.

It's simply amazing what the result can be when such distinctly different skillsets (art and computer science) come together. With this sort of graphical analysis, one can very easily evaluate the current feelings of a group of people, which, most likely, reflects on society as a whole.

Check this out.

I assembled this schedule using Lionschedules. Lionschedules is a pretty nifty application. It uses Penn State's online scheduling system to gather the information it needs to graphically lay out one's schedule, simply by entering course numbers. It then organizes this information chronologically and graphically, allowing one to have a more detailed view of course information simply by mousing over the course entries in the schedule. I'd certainly be interested in learning more in regards to what technologies this site utilizes, which, unfortunately, isn't readily available on the site.

Long live Lionschedules.

Assigning myself the role of "Digital Expert" at the beginning of this class, I sort of spearheaded the more technical aspects of this project. I took the initiative for acquiring the necessary materials for filming, and took primary responsibility for the editing of said project, using my prior knowledge of video editing to assist the group in collectively assembling the travesty you see above.

Enjoy.

Utilizing a unique .FLV video container, it allows for the upload of video files in a high-efficiency, modern video codec, with a Flash frontend ensuring excellent cross-platform compatibility with no compatibility concerns for the end user. Its wild success is widely attributed to simplicity and universality of use, undoubtedly lending to its immense amount of sophisticated, artistic material.

On a vein connecting to our previous unit, YouTube also contains a number of social networking features, consolidating all of one's video creations on a profile page, as well as providing for video commenting, and "video responses".

The next site is more than a simple video hosting site, but it has a somewhat dubious reputation about it. eBaum's World has been involved in a number of disputes between online communities, one notably being YTMND. Eric Bauman, owner of eBaum's World, has been accused of stealing original materials from other sites on the internet, slapping an eBaum's World watermark on, and hosting it on his own site, thus directly profiting from others' work. This then prompted a backlash from a number of online communities. Despite its dubious nature, eBaum's World continues to be extremely popular, most likely frequented by those who aren't aware of the controversy surrounding the site. It contains a variety of materials, including viral images and games as well as video content. It features very few networking features, limited mainly to commenting on posted items.

JibJab is an entirely different type of site altogether. Responsible for a number of wildly famous political Flash videos, they themselves strive to remain politically neutral in an attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. While their videos are purely Flash in nature, they too have found their way to YouTube.

Naturally, due to the videos' political basis, they always see a surge in popularity around election time. JibJab does not merely limit itself to political videos anymore, though, it's undeniable that it's what made them famous.

Though all these sites do contain videos, they're all extremely different in nature. You've got YouTube, for content creators, eBaum's World, for content consumers, and JibJab, for those of us who want a lighthearted, fun look at the current political atmosphere.

Of all these, personally, I find Facebook the most appealing. For the past few years of its existence, the more professional-looking interface, the much cleaner layout drew me to it over Myspace. Wow, I hated Myspace. I couldn't go to any of my friends' profiles without being bombarded by a cacophony of simultaneous auto-playing embedded music combined with the latest flash games and "funnny must seee" YouTube videos. My eyes are, at the same time, being assaulted by a misshapen, overly-compressed JPEG image as a background, with a font face and color that proves to be entirely unreadable. That's alright, though. Anything important would have undoubtedly been in big flashing GIF images.

This is changing, however. With the somewhat-recent launch of Facebook's application API, it has somewhat opened the door for the Myspace-ization of the site. People can not only already add music, videos, and old NES video games to their profiles, but one can also, just like on Myspace, show the world the friends they like most. Clutter is great.

The functionality of Myspace and Facebook are largely the same, and undoubtedly, the forerunners of the social networking craze. When someone says "social networking", Myspace and Facebook are what immediately come to mind. Built for networking first, and blogging/photos/sending virtual alcoholic beverages second, these represent social networking in its purest, most unadulterated form.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure how anyone navigates Myspace. Even if you can somehow stumble through the clashing, cluttered layout, nobody enters any real information about themselves into their profiles, so finding people in a directory search is nigh impossible. This is actually manageable with Facebook, though. Facebook has extremely strong and useful search features, which is another reason why I actually care to use the site.

Livejournal is... different. A community not founded on ranking friends in order of preference, or reposting the same "SEND THIS 2 ALL UR FRIENDS OR U WILL DIE TOMORROW THSI IS NOT A JOKE" bulletin, it represents what I believe is a slightly less active community, but one that retains a much greater sense of dignity, and maturity.

They are, essentially, blogs. With a friends list. One puts far more thought into a blog post than a Myspace bulletin. They're far more permanent. One "networks" through subscribing to other blogs, which aggregate in an RSS-like fashion in a "friends" page.

One interesting thing I've found in my limited, but nevertheless existent Livejournal experience is that it has a much higher occurrence of networks of friends in where few members actually know others in real life. Livejournal friend networks frequently stem from a common interest, or thread, where online friendships are built, offering others insight into their lives through their blog postings. Fascinating. I know.

This may seem like a lot of praise for Livejournal, though, it never really caught on with me. Perhaps it was the simple lack of my friends using it (thus necessitating finding people I don't even know and will never meet to network with), or just the dead silence and sterility of it, but I, sadly, abandoned my Livejournal not long after creating it. Years later, it sits quietly, stagnant but resolute, faithfully awaiting my return, which most likely will never occur.

...I don't have the heart to delete it.