bjepson (Brian Jepson)
Interests
About Me
I got my start in IT as an undergrad doing desktop support and application development for the URI Memorial Union. At the time, I did all my development with FoxPro, which turned out to be really hot on Wall Street. So that led me to a brief career in New York where I managed to move into Perl, SQL, and HTML development (there's a good chance that the web app I worked on was one of JP Morgan's first Intranet applications--a Smalltalk to Perl/SQL/Netscape Enterprise server conversion). But my heart's always been here in RI, so in all of my out of state jobs, I managed to eventually arrange a telecommuting setup.
Writing a series of books led me to my current job, as an editor for O'Reilly Media's Make Magazine, where I head up Make's book publishing program, covering everything from the O'Reilly Hacks series to books about Astronomy, microcontrollers, and more.
Even when I've wandered as far away as NYC or the DC metro area, the tether that kept me connected to Rhode Island has been AS220. I was one of the people who built AS220's first web sites, and have always worked hard to make sure technology helps the staff and volunteers there get their jobs done. Now, along with several other people, I volunteer to keep AS220.org running, which is home to the AS220 web pages as well as web sites for many local artists and arts organizations.
Since co-founding Providence Geeks with Jack Templin, I've become even more energized about my home state, and have realized that this community will do something amazing with info tech, digital media, and art... on a level that has never been seen anywhere, any time.
Recent Content
Tom Sgouros does this awesome play called Judy -or- What Is It Like To Be A Robot that has gotten rave reviews, including very kind words from Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach"). He brought his play to Maker Faire Bay Area 2008, and it was a real hit, especially with kids. I wasn't able to see much of the play because I was so busy (75,000 attendees will do that to you), but when I saw a swarm of kids rush the stage at the end, I had to shoot this video. I love the curiosity and sense of wonder he's inspired.
ITP is having their annual Spring show (open to the public, no RSVP needed), and thanks to the magic of antibiotics, I'm on schedule for being well enough to go down there. The show is really neat: if you like things such as Arduino, or dig any kind of art that communicates with humans, you should check this out. AS220 Labs founder Shawn Wallace will be joining me, and I think we're going to hit both nights of the show. If you caught Paul Badger's Providence Geeks presentation, there will be a lot of stuff like his work. Post a comment if you're thinking of checking this out; it would be great to meet some Providence folks for drinks or whatever just before or after the show.
ITP Spring Show, A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound, and physical objects by the student artists of ITP.
Kipp totally kicks butt (and saved mine at Maker Faire). At this last Faire, we unveiled version 2.0 of the Maker Store... Maker Shed, and I had a lot going on: several authors and a dozen independent kit makers doing demos and Q&A, and a workshop area where people could go and build the kits.
I was responsible for these things, and we had an unexpected lack of coverage in the workshop area: we had advertised that people could come and learn how to build the MintyBoost and MiniPOV, neither of which is self-explanatory, and both of which require a lot of soldering. I didn't need to engage in any arm-twisting with Kipp, because he loves this stuff, and spent over an hour working with kids showing them how to assemble these kits. (Long-time Providence Geeks will remember that Kipp and I demoed something similar to the MintyBoost at a Geek Dinner way back when we were still on Wordpress.com).
Here's a video of Kipp doing his thing.
Bert came to Maker Faire as an invited speaker--our goal at Make was to get the word out that there is a model for creating sustainable spaces where anything goes (AS220 has been running for over 20 years and is now getting seriously into technology now that Shawn Wallace has switched from his role as Managing Director to head of AS220 Labs).
This is cool; I'm always getting questions about whether we'll do more conferences on the east coast, and the Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York in September. The CFP is open, and I know there's no shortage of Web 2.0 hackers here in RI, so submit some cool proposals:
We're Coming to NYC! Web 2.0 Expo CFP is Open
"We started the Web 2.0 Expo to meet the demand that we saw in our conferences. The inaugural Web 2.0 Expo in 2007 was a huge success (and one that we are hoping to repeat in late April). It's a conference for people building websites, marketing them, and making money from them. It's also a conference with West Coast roots and as we have taken the conference around the world (Berlin and Tokyo) it's been modified for the region.
This September we are bringing the conference to New York. It will be just as big and just as long (September 16-19th at Javits Center)."
Keith Hopper at the January 2008 XO laptop meetup
We had our first XO laptop meetup at AS220 on Tuesday January 15. It was a small crew, only about seven people, some with XO laptops, some without. For those of you who aren't familiar with the XO, it's that little green laptop formerly known as the $100 laptop. Between November and December of 2007, you could donate to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation and receive a laptop of your own. For $400, you got a $200 tax deduction, a laptop was sent to a child somewhere in the world, and you got a laptop of your own. On top of that, T- Mobile kicked in one year of free access to their Wi-Fi hotspots.
The XO laptop is Linux-powered, so it's a lot of fun to hack. At the meetup, attendees poked around and explored everything from simple hacks like activity sharing and changing their ID, on up to using Tom Hoffman's xochat.org (a public ejabberd server that allows users to chat and collaborate with XO laptop owners from all over the world).
We're aiming to have another meetup soon, and expect to continue exploring the capabilities of these fascinating little machines!
Further reading:
- Geek.com: Hacking the XO laptop
- Hackszine.com entries on XO laptop hacks
- More information about the XO laptop
- XO laptop wiki
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Recent Comments
This is really cool, Charlie. What kind of bandwidth do you get with this set up? I've always wondered whether mesh networks suffer the same problem as Wi-Fi repeaters (halving the bandwidth for each hop). Still, you're replacing CDPD (19.2 kbps), so this is going to work great for your purposes. But if bandwidth does decay as you get out to the edges, I think that's another reason to not open this to the public, as business and home users continue to use bandwidth-hungry apps more and more.
Richard,
There's no way what you're describing is intentional censorship, it's clearly a bug of some sort.
This site is new, and many things are still be shaken out. The tags feature here has always been slightly confusing to me, but it's a small team working on this site, and they are building new features while fixing bugs. They'll look into it, and I'm sure they'll get it fixed.
- Brian
I looked at the San Francisco pricing, and a conference-only pass w/early bird discount is about $1000; expo hall+keynotes only pass is $100.
The group discount is 10%, and there are discounts for academic (25-50%), non-profit (40%), students (65%), and government (10%) folks. I always encourage people I know to submit a proposal because it not only gets them in for free, but it makes them rock stars :-)
Thanks, Jack. There doesn't seem to be a track that's a good fit. But considering there's interest in a mobile blogging talk, perhaps NewBCamp should add a track for that? I could probably do a few short talks on mobile stuff: