Hi BLUGgers,

I would still need one speaker or alternatively three lightning talks for our monthly meeting on August 10th. So, if anyone of you has an interesting topic related to Linux of FOSS in general to talk about, please do not hesitate to contact me. A standard presentation should take 30 minutes, while lightning talks are at maximum 10 minutes (better 5) each with no more than 10 slides.

I would especially like to encourage our young members to step forward and presenting the great projects you work on. During your career you will certainly reach a point where you find yourself giving professional presentations frequently. Talking at the BLUG is a perfect way to get prepared for that. NOTE: Presentation language must be English.

My e-mail address is 'peter.junge |at| beijinglug.org', but you can also reply here on the forum.

Best regards,
Peter

lightning talks sounds very interesting!!

xuedi wrote:
lightning talks sounds very interesting!!
So? Are you volunteering?

peter13j wrote:
xuedi wrote:
lightning talks sounds very interesting!!
So? Are you volunteering?

I am thinking about that topic that would interest people, not sure if i have anything interesting

xuedi

If necessary, I could give a general talk on how to go about reverse engineering various data formats. It's not specifically open source related, but it is an important step in getting open source to be compatible with competing commercial products.

But two weeks is kind of tight to pull that together ... Maybe it would be better in September?

Obviously this cannot be a lightning talk.

I'm quickly playing out my hand. If I give a talk on my pet project for manipulating video game binaries, I won't be able to do any more BLUG talks without repeating myself

Edit: If you want it for August, I think I can pull it together in time. However, I am not doing another OpenOffice.org presentation. That thing is an absolute chunk of shit, and I would prefer to lend my support to a piece of functioning software like Evince or Eye of Gnome.

I'd prefer to just make a PDF of all the frames and flip through them during the presentation. Also, being able to demo breaking down and identifying patterns would be helpful. Does anyone know of a Linux program that will allow you to physically draw lines on the screen (e.g. with a tablet) or would I need to create a ton of slides and just point to stuff?

With most Linux software using open formats, this more concerns RE of closed formats on Windows, Mac and other systems to create a way to work with them – open source or otherwise.

Anyone who knows the platform's assembler can probably figure out a format if they know how to use a debugger. However, sometimes that is not terribly legal because you would have to first crack binary protections to even get in with a debugger and that violates the US DMCA and similar laws in the EU. In other cases you have a format itself but the executable that interacts with it is lost or the platform itself is dead (physically or by lack of emulation).

Basically, what I would like to introduce are approaches to figuring out a file format when you have some guess as to what the file contains.

There are a few examples of what I'm talking about here, but I would also get into console graphic formats in the discussion.

@dsobodash: sounds like a great talk, i would love to listen to that!

dsobodash wrote:
... If you want it for August, I think I can pull it together in time. ...
Would be great, if you can hold this presentation in August. From September on, I have several candidates who would like to talk to the BLUG, so autumn should be much easier to get the program for the monthly meetings up-and-running.

Peter

Will push at it. I think my wife canceled the plans for a mini-vacation this weekend so I should be able to pull something together.

Where can I find the exact rules for presentations? Things like which software must be used, etc. I want to make sure that any demo plans don't offend the BLUG.

dsobodash wrote:
I want to make sure that any demo plans don't offend the BLUG.

Why would the BLUG be offended? Normal netiquette and NOT Linux Bashing and everything will be fine ...
In point of common law and the twist of reverse engineering, i think we are 'always' speaking about ROMS and software that people gave up the right by not maintaining / selling it any more You can say at the beginning that you just show how to work on your 'own' software that should be ok then.

For the presentation, i don't think people will be offended it you blend shortly an windows example in ...

Cheers
xuedi

Well, I think ROM stuff would be a very small part. Maybe only when I talk about graphics. May try to use PC stuff for other examples.

But yeah, for practical purposes it may be necessary to do the presentation from a Windows computer or something ... I don't quite know yet. Should have a better idea next week.

The main idea will just be to give a general talk how to go about exploring binaries short of full on code-stepping or disassembly. I plan to concentrate mainly on file formats, and that would be a segway to text/graphic/map/struct storage.

A lesson on how to go about cracking your own software to run it under Wine would be an entirely different talk (and god bless nop 0x90).

dsobodash wrote:
Where can I find the exact rules for presentations? Things like which software must be used, etc. I want to make sure that any demo plans don't offend the BLUG.
Rules? Nothing particular in that regard.

dsobodash wrote:
... But yeah, for practical purposes it may be necessary to do the presentation from a Windows computer or something ... I don't quite know yet. Should have a better idea next week.
If there's a good reason, why not.

[...]

Derrick, would be great, if you could me an abstract of your talk in a couple of days.

Peter