I am pursuing a degree in Computer Science and working as a web designer and technology consultant in the greater Portland, Oregon area. My passion is in the intersection of technology and design in education and access to information. To that end, I work with the Open Source Education Lab, partake (and ran, for a while) the local Linux User Group and in general preach the good word of Open Source wherever it can make life easier.

One Laptop Per Child

Initial work with the One Laptop Per Child focused on helping other developers, namely the Open Source Lab, to get involved in what I felt was an exciting and innovative idea. This led to completion of the Abiword port to the XO (or “$100 laptop”), which has since become the basis for the core Write activity. Early success with Abirword, along with a system hosting project of 10 initial alpha test motherboards encouraged other groups on Oregon State’s campus to follow suite. Members of the Linux User Group and the CS 411 (”Special Topics: Open Source”) development class contributing time to the OLPC project.

This kind of evangelism–sharing with others the exciting ideas behind an ambitious education project–quickly became a passion of mine. Since the Fall of 2006, I have given presentations (both ad hoc and planned) about OLPC to technical and non-technical groups alike throughout the state of Oregon. This includes technology-minded high school students, forward-thinking state representatives, incoming college freshman and prospective students, and business executives.

Through this work inside and outside of the core OLPC group, I was able to help foster a relationship with Real Media that led to a substantial gift to the OSL. This gift is allowing the Lab to develop a media player framework to be used on the XO machines, along with other rich multimedia applications for children’s use.

Involvement with OLPC reached a new high when I was selected as a Google Summer of Code Student for 2007 as a developer for them. Although I submitted a proposal to write the E-mail acitivity but have instead worked on assisting the security team develop the Rainbow security subsystem.

My continuing work includes hobbyist development, software testing and outreach to members of the community on what the One Laptop project along Oregon State University are doing for education with Open Source.

Snort

Extending my work for Oregon State University’s Network Engineering Team, I adopted the (deprecated) snort_stat.pl script. This script is ran against the Snort Alert text output and formulates a report to be sent to administrators. The report contains statistics on the number of attacks made from a given host (biggest offender), how many attacks are made toward a given host (worst victim) and what attacks are most prevalent on the network. My work on the script includes fixing functionality, optimizing existing code and adding support for the Snort Unified binary format.