Schemers is a study group for those interested in exploring Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programming (SICP), an introductory Computer Science textbook used by MIT. Not only is the entire textbook available online for free, but it has some rather zealous fanboys and fangirls.

From Stack Overflow:

SICP, however, is in a different league. It is a book that will enlighten you. It will evoke in you a passion for writing beautiful programs. Moreover, it will teach you to recognize and appreciate that very beauty. It will leave you with a state of awe and an unquenchable thirst to learn more. Other books may make you a better programmer; this book will make you a programmer.

Our study group will be going through the book and meeting every other Tuesday at 7:30pm starting next week Tuesday, May 22. For the first meeting, we will be setting up testing environments and discussing Section 1.1. You should read the section and take a stab at the exercises before the meeting. Check out the Meetup event for more details and to sign up!

Check out Hacking To Byzantium: The Attempt To Build An Alternate Internet (above) from NPR Intern Edition! You can also listen to the entire broadcast here.

If that’s not enticing enough for you, HARC will also include Frank Hunleth and Bill Babson presenting on their Nerves project, which they host using a BeagleBone. What is Nerves, you ask? Nerves is an embedded Linux based environment for running Erlang, a programming language highly suited for communications applications requiring high availability. Their talk will explore uses in ham radio applications.

The meeting will begin at 7:30pm at HacDC. HARC encourages you to RSVP to the event on Meetup if you know you’re going to attend.

The HacDC booth demonstrated a variety of gadgets including a 3D Printer, the chassis of Spaceblimp 5 (or, “This lunchbox has been to space!”), a montage of beautiful Spaceblimp photos, a pen plotter writing portraits of people, various LED hacks, and a tank of water with a bubble ring generator.

A picture of our booth at the fest in case you missed it. Not quite the same, but we try.

I asked the volunteers and festival attendees to tell me about things they saw that they found particularly interesting:

• Baby hacking, or in other words, how babies learn to distinguish speech sounds that are present within the language of their environment.
• Ever want your own personal submarine? (Only if it comes with a periscope, right? Same here.) The Personal Submersibles Organization has one that is light enough that it can be carried on a trailer and lowered into the water on a ramp.
• Extracting Banana DNA and wearing it on a necklace was a highlight.
• As one member said, “There was probably something for every kind of geek.”

It sounds like everyone had a great time and we’re looking forward to attending more festivals in the future!

To submit a talk topic proposal, please email hidden; JavaScript is required with a title and brief description.

Why would you want to do a lightning talk?

• To show off a project
• Let people know what you’re into
• Get feedback on an idea
• Practice talking about a particular topic
• Practice public speaking in a nonthreatening way
• Find project contributors/volunteers/members

We’ll have a projector, microphone, and speakers set up. You’re welcome to use (or eschew) any visual aids, including slides and physical objects. We would like to record (video and still photography) talks when speakers are amenable, but if you’d rather not
have your talk recorded, you may opt out and give an off-the-record talk.

HacDC’s Amateur Radio Club announces its first speaker, Jim Cross. Cross is the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Maryland-District of Columbia Section Manager, and he will make a presentation on the ARRL and amateur radio communications in emergency response. The presentation will take place Wednesday, April 11 at 7:30pm at HacDC.

The ARRL is the largest membership association of amateur radio enthusiasts in the USA. ARRL is a non-profit organization, and is almost a hundred years old. The ARRL represents the interests of amateur radio operators before federal regulatory bodies, provides technical advice and assistance to amateur radio enthusiasts, supports a number of educational programs and sponsors emergency communications service throughout the country.

Amateur radio has consistently been the most reliable means of communications when other systems fail or are overloaded.  Jim will discuss the training, preparations and organizations in amateur emergency communications and how to get involved.

For more details, check out the event on Meetup.

As usual we start at 8pm on Friday at HacDC and we return the next day at noonish to commence the hardcore geekery.

Pizza Friday night. Get there before 8pm if you want to have a say in toppings

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to finally learn how to program? If you did, or if you think you should’ve, Code Academy launched a free Javascript learning experience: Code Year.

Code Year is different from learning from a book. Each lesson requires you to write a bit of code, and you can’t move on to the next lesson until your code is correct. Hints are available if you get stuck, and if you get really stuck you can ask questions in the forums. It’s fast paced enough that you feel like you’re actually learning something, but there’s no so much work that you can’t get it done on the side of your full time job.

Each week, you’ll get an email reminding you to go through that week’s lesson. You can also join the , or even better, head to HacDC and work on the lessons at {S,Th}oftware Thursdays.

ANNOUNCING BYZANTIUM LINUX V0.1a (Scarab)
Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED

Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC, is proud to announce the release of v0.1 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux designed to fulfill a crucial role in the evolution of the Internet. That role is a rapidly deployable ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Unlike other mesh networking projects Byzantium was designed to be run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is just over 300 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user’s data and software. Byzantium Linux will then act as a node within the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for WiFi-enabled mobile devices.

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE! Do NOT expect Byzantium to be perfect. Some features are not ready yet, others need work. Things are going to break in weird ways and we need to know what those ways are so we can fix them. Please, for the love of LOLcats, do not deploy Byzantium in situations where lives are at stake.

FEATURES:

• Binary compatible with Slackware v13.37, so existing packages can be converted with a single command.
• Able to act as a gateway to the Internet if a link is available.
• Linux kernel v2.6.38.8
• Drivers for dozens of wireless chipsets
• KDE v3.5
• LXDE (2010 release of all components)
• Mplayer
• GCC v4.5.2
• Perl v5.12.3
• Python v2.6.6
• Firefox v4.0.1
• X.org v7.4 (? – hard to tell because each module has its own release code)
• Custom web-based control panel

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (to use)

• Minimum of 512MB of RAM
• i586 CPU or better
• CD- or DVD-ROM drive
• BIOS must boot removable media
• At least one (1) 802.11 a/b/g/n interface

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (for persistent changes)

• The above requirements to use Byzantium
• 2+GB of free space on thumbdrive or harddrive

WHAT WE NEED:

• Developers.
• Developers!
• DEVELOPERS!
• No more Bill Ballmer impersonations.
• People downloading and running Byzantium to find bugs and tell us where the problems are so we can fix them.
• People filing bug reports on our Github page. We can’t fix what we don’t know about!
• People submitting patches.
• People booting Byzantium and setting up small meshes (2-5 clients) to tell us how well it works for you with your hardware. We have a hardware compatibility list on our wiki that needs to be expanded.
• People who can help us translate the user interface. We especially need people fluent in dialects of Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.
• People to help us write and translate documentation.

Homepage (website coming soon)
Download sites
Edit: Removed CC notice. The Byzantium Project is free and open source and to relieve any confusion the CC copyright notice for this document has been removed.