HR Geeks

Today is Matt’s last day here on the top of the world. From everybody at HRGeeks, 757 Labs, and the 2600 Crew, have a safe trip!
(And make sure your place has enough sleep space for a bunch of us to crash!).

I know a large number of the HR Geeks community are involved in IT-related work for the Department of Defense, so I figured I’d share this.

Coming up soon, AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association) and USJFCOM (United States Joint Forces Command) are sponsoring the Joint Warfighting Conference at the Virginia Beach Convention Center on May 11-13th. Conference registration is free (and appears to be open to the public). Two highlights will be luncheon keynotes with Adm. Mike Mullen (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Gen. David Petraeus (Commander, US Central Command).

A few of the panels (such as “How do we fight through a digital meltdown?” with VADM Browne should be quite interesting. Lunch and dessert are provided each day by a sponsor.

Be sure to come out to 757 Labs tomorrow night for the first ever 757 Python Users Group meetup. Over a dozen local pythonistas have already RSVP’d (don’t worry, it’s not necessary, you can still show up!). The talks and conversation should be quite interesting!

What: 757 PUG Kick-Off Meeting
When: Wed. April 21 at 7:00PM
Where: 757 Labs (233 W. Bute St., in Norfolk)

Thanks to Jeff Self for putting this together!

This was a talk I gave at the HRGeeks ][ meeting, Thursday. You can grab the PDF [4.1MB] as well.

I learned something interesting today – you can get access to a bunch of logs from your iPhone, without jailbreaking it!  There are number of SQLite databases stored in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
on your OS X machine that the iPhone syncs with.
The filenames are SHA1 sums of their location on the iPhone [src]. Through trial and error, I’ve figured out the following files that should be common to every iPhone:

992df473bbb9e132f4b3b6e4d33f72171e97bc7a.mddata Voicemail list
ff1324e6b949111b2fb449ecddb50c89c3699a78.mddata Call log
3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata SMS Log
740b7eaf93d6ea5d305e88bb349c8e9643f48c3b.mddata Notes database
31bb7ba8914766d4ba40d6dfb6113c8b614be442.mddata Contact List

The schema for most of these can be found here: http://damon.durandfamily.org/archives/000487.html (although he references their on-phone location, and talks about jailbroken phones, these SQLite DB files are accessible on your desktop machine, and are updated in place every time you sync your phone.

In addition to these, a few interesting DBs I found that are specific to apps installed on my phone are:
6639cb6a02f32e0203851f25465ffb89ca8ae3fa.mddata Facebook friends list
970922f2258c5a5a6d449f85b186315a1b9614e9.mddata Flightstats
5ad81c93601ac423bc635c7936963ae13177147b.mddata Daily Burn food log


Each of these database can be accessed via the sqlite3 command line tool for interactive use. For bulk processing and playing with stuff in a spreadsheet or other DB, you can dump whole tables to CSV easily with sqlite3
sqlite3 -csv -separator , 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata "select * from message" > smshistory.csv
you can dump your SMS history to a CSV file.

I’m writing a few scripts to generate ‘top talkers’ and some other statistics, and will post those later.

Norfolk Technical Center is competing in this year’s US FIRST Robotics Challenge. A few HRGeeks members have been mentoring the students – assisting with software design / development, networking, and robot construction and electrical connections.
After 5 long weeks, the robot is moving under it’s own power, being remotely driven via joystick.

NTC FIRST Team’s Robot takes it’s ‘first’ steps! from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

Click through for a higher resolution view of the video.

I’ve added 2 new users groups to the side bar:

• Hampton Roads Solid Works User Group (run by Jason McCrory)
• 757 Objective C / Cocoa-heads (run by Ken Collins)

Be sure to give them a look, and go to the meetings if they’re in your area of interest!

If you’re local to the 757 (Southside would probably be best, but it’s up to you), shoot me an email if you’re interested in helping out a local group of high school kids in building their FIRST robot for competition. Work begins in January, for competition later in the spring.

In addition to his previously mentioned 2600 Magazine publication, Matt has been published in the (arguably more prestigious) Dr. Dobb’s Journal. You can find his article, detailing a multi-threaded PRNG implementation, here.

Congrats!

Here’s a taste of what you missed if you weren’t at the meetup last week!  Brian brought the robot he is entering into the BattleBots contest in California, and gave us a quick (it was freezing out) parking lot demo of the thing in action.  Everything on the chassis (except the motors, I think) is custom built by Brian and his classmate, even the dual-motor gear box.  Very impressive!

Good luck with the contest Brian – we’d love to see it again with the end effector in place

Landstown Highschool Robot from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

(It’s dark because it was about 10:30PM at night in the mall parking lot.  Sorry – better video next time!)