Lots of activity buzzing over here at BUG HQ over the next few weeks, as we continue our summer of workshops in the Test Kitchen. We’ll continue throughout August, with several classes aimed at beginner and intermediate-type folks interested in learning about open source, Linux, DIY, hackerism, and much much more. Each event takes place at Bug Labs’ SoHo office (598 Broadway @ Houston – near the 6, B, D, F, V, R and W), so you can also scope all the cool BUG stuff we’re working on behind the scenes.

Below’s a glimpse of what’s going on for the next two weeks. Check out each event page for more details:

Soft Circuits Class – July 22nd (tomorrow)
Learn soft circuits with conductive thread! We’ll be stitching up electrical designs in fabric. This class will be a beginner course, the core concepts of a circuit will be covered. No previous experience required.

Urban Farming Workshop – July 26th (Sunday)
Lee Mandell from Boswyck Farms will be teaching an inexpensive method for growing fruits and vegetables hydroponicallly indoors. This class will include a quick history of hydroponics along with an overview of some of the many hydroponic methods, and it’s appropriateness for different crops. Then Lee will lead the class in constructing their own water reservoirs and associated parts to maintain their own gardens at home.

Linux InstallFest – August 1st (Saturday)
Put Linux on your laptop! We will have a few distros of Linux to choose from. Be prepared by bringing your backed-up laptop. We will also have Ubuntu on a USB stick specially for your netbook. There will also be a demonstration of Poky Linux on a BUG from Bug Labs.

Hope to see you here!

On Monday, we were lucky to have the NY Java Meetup host their monthly meeting here at Bug Labs HQ. In addition to eating lots of pizza and drinking lots of beer (and playing lots of COD2 afterward), we managed to actually talk a thing or two about Java. Our friend Timothy Fagan gave a great detailed review of JavaOne 2009 (check out some of the slides here), and we tried a few Java Puzzlers from one of the sessions presented at the show. We even gave away a few cool door prizes, like a copy of IntelliJ.

The BUG team got plenty of inquiries from the attendees, and it seems like more and more software folks want to be hardware folks these days. That got us thinking of starting our very own meetup very soon, kinda like a BUG User Group (B.U.G. anyone?). Anyway, it was a great time and we hope to have the Java Meetup back again very soon.

Thanks to the support of the BUGCommunity, our BUG4Good project proposal has been selected as a top 10 finalist in the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge! The initiative, spearheaded by the UC Berkeley HRC and facilitated by NetSquared, is aimed at encouraging individuals and organizations to imagine uses of mobile technologies, such as cell phones, GPS devices and cameras (or a BUGbase and BUGmodules), to assist human rights supporters in collecting, analyzing and disseminating data in the field.

In short, BUG4Good is a BUG application targeted at journalists and researchers in need of a secure mobile device to gather, store and encrypt information such as audio, photos, video, sensor data and more. The challenges faced by many practitioners in the field is not so much the acquisition of this data, but ensuring that it “survives” the various challenges in areas of conflict, such as repressive authorities and the limitations of carrying several devices at once.

Bug Labs will present BUG4Good alongside nine other finalists in “The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media,” at UC Berkeley on May 4 and 5. There, a panel of judges will select three winners to implement their ideas. Over the next month, we look forward to working with the BUGcommunity to further flesh out this idea, and hopefully we’ll get to see BUG4Good come to fruition on May 5!

Today, we’re excited to announce a new project we’re kicking off with IDEO, a well known international design and innovation firm.  Taking cues from everything we’ve seen in the community, our own experiences with new and emerging interface technologies and your direct input, we hope to gather several new ideas on how we can re-envision user interaction with the BUGbase.  Essentially, we are going to build on the great work done to-date by our original design partner ECCO Design and explore an area of our product that we think has a ton of potential – the BUGbase user interface.

So, we want *your* feedback!  IDEO has agreed to do this project in the open, which is a new approach for them, and we’re hoping it leads to superior results for Bug Labs and the BUGcommunity.  We don’t have a fancy name (yet) for this process, and we’re still working on the specifics for collecting your input.  But since everything we do is based on community participation, we are big fans of the idea, and naturally open to all your suggestions.

Over the next two weeks both companies will be posting their ideas and reporting on progress, via this blog and BUGcommunity.com.  At every point in this cycle we would love to get your thoughts on the work-to-date, and at the end we will publish our findings, which again we welcome your thoughts on.

The whole point of this exercise is to continue to push the boundaries of how we innovate, not just on the BUGbase UI, but on all things related to BUG.  We take pride in thinking our designs are good, but we also know they are exponentially better when the community gets involved.

Thanks in advance for your participation in this fun new project, and stay tuned for updates!

We’ve spent a lot of time watching the discussions on our forums, and have seen some wonderful conversations about future BUGmodules (like here and here). We really want to capture all this data in a way to be (1) useful for our planning purposes, and (2) engaging to you, our community. It’s our feeling that while the forums here are great for in-depth conversations, Q&A, and quick polling, it’s not the ideal setup for what we want to accomplish.

Our goal is to have the voice of the community at large play a loud part in our product planning. This means we’d like to know how the ideas you are all sharing really rank with each other. One person’s all-important laser range finder module is another person’s worst. idea. ever. And the forums don’t really let you express that very easily. Enter IdeaScale.

IdeaScale is similar to the Starbucks and Dell “idea crowdsourcing” systems. Basically anyone can come to the site, and vote or comment on existing ideas, or create their own suggestion. We’ve organized the site to have 4 categories for your feedback:

1. BUGmodules – suggest a module for us to build
2. BUGbase – suggest a technology or other aspect of how you’d like to see a future BUGbase be configured
3. BUG+ – suggest a location for us to come have an event
4. BUG+EDU – suggest a school or program to do with an educational facility

Please come check out the site. At present, no registration is required for basic participation (voting), and we are hoping to create a single-signon process so your BUGnet or forums ID will work across both sites in the future. Also, please feel free to use the forums (here) to give any feedback on IdeaScale itself, how it could be improved, if there are other categories we should add, etc.

A few Bug Labs team members have gotten the ball rolling (myself included), but really this is about the community. Hoping to see you there soon, the very future of the world might just depend on it. Well, that may be a bit of a stretch.

When I was an early teen, the issue of security was of paramount concern to me.  Not computer, social, national, or even homeland security.  No, it was Room Security.  My room.  The one in the basement.  The mostly unfinished basement that smelled like concrete and pine 2×4’s.  I wanted to build an early detection system for parents.  I called it S.H.A.R.K..  It began simply enough with some parts from Radio Shack:  Some infrared diodes, a relay or two, and a piezo electric speaker.  I had a lot of time for this project, and naturally the system requirements exploded.  I didn’t really see it that way at the time (thankfully), but I ended up drawing master plans for a general purpose computer.  While not yet introduced to Alan’s machines, I knew S.H.A.R.K. needed memory and some sort of execution system.  I envisioned a tape with rows, each where a hole could be cut.  Through a hole light would cause a relay to trip, closing some circuit that was paramount to Room Security and the prevention of unannounced parental intrusion (UPI).  See the tape allowed me to have a modular, dynamic approach to security.  Swap in a fresh roll and have a brand new security strategy.  Brilliant.  Kind of like programming, or modular hardware, or..well BUG.  Sadly my imaginations never actually worked in practice, but I had a bunch of wires in a shoebox and it did something.

This week I have the honor of speaking on Bug’s behalf at Maker Faire.  I’m a huge fan of the publication and when reading it get the same stimulating, awesome feeling of creating that I did when S.H.A.R.K. was fresh in my mind.  I’m really looking forward to seeing all the freaky cool things people are doing, and hope BUG makes a few people smile.

So Peter and crew will be in Austin next week for SXSW 2008, and even though it’s our first year at the festival, we know it’s going to be hectic. But we thought we’d pop the question – if we threw a BUG+Austin, would you attend? We’d love to get to know the Austin community, and share battle scars with SXSW first-timers and veterans alike.

Let us know by leaving a comment below, sending a self addressed stamped envelope, or pinging us on Twitter or Jaiku. If we get enough responses by this Thursday morning, we’ll pick a place and time and let you know by later this week.

Regardless, if you see us among the rabble, feel free to stop us and say hey.

Just a quick reminder: Bug Labs has been nominated as "Product of the Year" by Linux Journal for its 2008 Readers’ Choice Survey. Take a look at the contenders, and you’ll see why we’re excited to be selected among such a great list of nominees.

As always, we’re looking to the Linux and OSS community to help us spread the word about BUG. So head on over, show your support for Bug Labs (question #36), and vote for other notable for Linux/OSS contributions. Voting ends tomorrow, February 14.

Lots being said about this Fortune article regarding Microsoft taking the gloves off in its battle with FOSS.  But who exactly is the enemy?  It looks like it’s their own customers. 

I’m no history expert, but to draw a gross analogy, it would seem that when governments start to treat their citizens as the enemy it doesn’t take too long before a revolution erupts.

And revolutions are funny things.  They bring out the best in people with the most to gain and the absolute worst in those with everything to lose.  I truly hope the battle is never seriously joined.  It’s not hard to imagine a Patent Dark Ages, which would be a disaster for everyone, especially customers.