Author Archives: Robin Wood
Bring a partner or the family
If you are thinking about coming but have a partner who doesn’t want to be left at home then why not bring them along. Here are some of the attractions Sheffield has to offer:
- Ponds Forge – International swimming pool and large kids pool with water slides and lazy river.
- Meadowhall – A shopping centre big enough to get lost in for a day.
- Valley Centertainment – Cinema, bowling, Monkey Business soft play centre and various chain restaurants.
- Kelham Island Brewery – An award-winning independent Sheffield brewery with tours, museum and of course an on-site pub.
- Indoor Climbing – Sheffield is one of the country’s centres for climbing with The Climbing Works (county’s largest bouldering wall), The Foundry (an old-school climbing Mecca) and Awesome Walls (bring your 50m rope for the huge routes).
- The Peak District – Walking, climbing and biking in stunning surroundings.
- Spa 1877 – Pamper yourself with all sorts of treatments for both men and women.
- Museums – Sheffield has museums and art galleries for all tastes.
- Magna – A great day out for kids of all ages, Magna is an interactive science attraction combining air, water, earth and wind.
If you want any more information on any of these, or want information on an other local attractions, please get in touch and we will see what we can do.
Speaker submissions get ticket option
As we are opening both ticket sales and the CFP on the same day we didn’t want people who wanted to submit a CFP worrying over whether to buy a ticket as well, just in case they aren’t selected. So, if you submit a valid CFP entry (we can spot fake ones) and don’t get picked, you’ll still get the chance to buy a ticket.
If you want any more information please get in touch.
Documentation Competition
I was working through some SteelCon paperwork and realised that we still have a training course donated by SecurityTube that was never given out during the conference. I was thinking of different ways to give this away and decided to have a documentation competition.
People like writing code and open source projects regularly get contributions from one line bug fixes to multi-file new features but what they don’t often get is documentation so this is an attempt to change that. The challenge for this competition is to pick a project, or two or three, and help them with their documentation. This can be done in many ways, examples include:
- Writing some for a project which doesn’t have any
- Bringing existing documents up-to-date
- Translating documents into other languages
- Fixing typos, grammar and improving readability
- Create tutorials or howtos
- Create an installation guide
Most projects that I know will happily accept submissions but check with them first, they may already have work in progress so no point duplicating effort. If you really want to work on something for a project which isn’t interested then we will accept work hosted elsewhere but please show your efforts in submitting it first, this is not just an opportunity to write a blog post for your own site. Submissions also have to be for open source projects, no commercial tools.
All submissions must be new work created between today and the end of November. Ideally your submission will be a reference to the new documentation in place on the project site but where this isn’t possible send us a copy and some evidence that you’ve submitted it, this could be a pull request from GitHub or just a copy of the email where you send it to the developers.
If you are a project maintainer and want to create something for your own project then that is fine, nothing wrong with documenting your own work and if this gives you the incentive needed then great.
The documents submitted can be at any level, a beginner writing a beginners guide is just as good as an expert documenting some obscure feature that only hard core users will ever understand.
The judging criteria are being kept deliberately loose and the winner will be the person who shows they’ve put in the most effort. This isn’t necessarily most words written or highest quality writing, just effort and enthusiasm. The judging panel will consist of SteelCon organisers along with a few, hand picked, experts. The competition closes on November 30th and we will try to pick a winner this side of Christmas.
Good luck everyone and go get writing.
Kids track kit handed over to local school
On Monday of this week Sam, Dalian and Robin met up with staff and governors at Greystones Primary School in Sheffield and handed over the equipment which was purchased for the kids track. With IT and computing now mandatory on the curriculum the school was grateful for the additional resources and also the help offered for setting them up.
We will hopefully have some more kit to give out in the upcoming months so will be reaching out to other schools who would benefit from a new technology bundle.
Big thanks to the BCS for sponsoring the track and helping to encourage the next generation of hackers.
Dates for 2015
Dates for your diary, next years SteelCon will be running from the 3rd to 5th July. We are staying at Hallam Uni but moving to a larger space to allow for even more people to come and enjoy our Northern hospitality.
This will be be main social area for the day
And for the evening party
Second round of speakers slides
Second round of slides from the day. At the moment these are being mixed in with the videos which hopefully will start coming out soon.
Keynote – Javvad and Girl Cynic – 7 steps to unleashing the creative hacker – Watch out, this is 1.3G, Javvad never does things by half!
Darren “infodox” Martyn – Python and process injection for everyone!
Arron “f1nux” Finon – Finux’s Historical Tour Of IDS Evasion, Insertions, and Other Oddities
George Nicolaou – Forensics automation
Steve Armstrong – Avoiding the Noob’s pitfalls of Incident Response
First set of slides released
We’ve asked all our speakers to send in copies of their slides and as they come in them we’ll publish them here.
Here is the first round:
Photos released
Chris did an amazing job taking photos on the day and has now processed them up and released them on our Flickr page.
If you have any photos you’d like to share, drop us a mail and a link to them and we will get them published.
Plan for Saturday
The plan for Saturday is…
Doors open 9:00 for registration
Welcome talk 9:45
Keynote 10:00
Talks through to lunch at 13:00
More talks through to 18:00
Closing with prizes, give-aways, other free stuff 18:00-18:30
Party venue opens 18:30 and closes 2:00
Friday and Sunday
The original plan for Friday night was to have a hacker film night in the university cinema but unfortunately, due to “issues”, we’ve not managed to arrange it. Instead I’m suggesting anyone around who wants to meet up come to the Roebuck Tavern (Map). They have a big beer garden, are kid friendly, have plenty of local ales and do food. I’ll be there from about 7.
Sunday morning I thought it would be good to get everyone away from the keyboard doing something nice and social. A few options were considered but the best turned out to be a couple of games of laser quest. I’ve booked two games at Quaser starting at 11, we’ve got exclusive use and it can take up to 28 people per game. The games are being generously sponsored by Xiphos Research Labs. There will be a sign up sheet for this on the registration desk on the Saturday. There is also a Pizza Hut just around the corner for anyone wanting food afterwards.