Interview with John Horton,USM EE Student Turned Theatre Major: MadMapper, HTTPS Everywhere, Wireshark & WinPcap, Metasploit, Forrest M. Mims, Packet Radio – RRPG021

This week on Rich’s Random Podcast Generator, we’re joined by John Horton, a University of Southern Maine theatre major on the Gorham campus who’s involved in the technical aspects of theatre. John grew up in a hi-tech household. His dad was a MIT grad who worked as a design engineer for DEC, and later Intel. John was breadboarding basic circuits as a child – flip-flop, 555 timer IC, etc. – and picking up whatever else he could from Forrest M. Mims‘ instructional books originally sold by Radio Shack.

John talks about acquiring some old computers from dad’s work place and building a network environment with machines running Unix, Linux, Apache, Mac, and Windows. He learned how to get these machines to work together, and then learned about system vulnerabilities and pen-testing with Metasploit.

As we talk with John about Wireshark (and WinPcap), the subject of the Chrome and Firefox plugin HTTPS Everywhere comes up as a way to protect oneself against traffic sniffing. The discussion inevitably branches to the topic of antivirus/malware protection and security in general. HOSTS files rule!?

I did mention that John is a Theatre major involved in the tech side of things, didn’t I?  USM’s last play production of the year – Orlando – will feature scenery created with projection mapping. Instead of painting scenery forms to look like buildings, living rooms or what have you, the scene shop crew paints the forms with a special projection paint – an off-white paint with glass beads. Then the forms are illuminated by video projector(s) with scenery images or video. The video projectors are controlled by MadMapper, a program that maps the images or video to conform to the shape of the forms. This will be very exciting to see, and see it I will as I regularly attend opening nights of all USM plays.

-Rich

Rich’s RPG is a podcast hosted by Jim Collison and Rich O’Neil in Google+ Hangout. We talk tech with like-minded folks, covering stuff that’s interesting to us. No outlines, no agenda, no worries. And we welcome newcomers. Got your headset and a bit of free time? Join us on the show by contacting us at: podcast@theaverageguy.tv orrich@theaverageguy.tv

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