Update from FOSS.in
First of all, many people have asked for the slides of my presentations. You can get the keynote slides and the glofiish reverse engineering slides from the FOSS.in website now.
Giving the latter talk, I was really surprised that nobody in the audience raised their hands when I was asking who had ever done reverse engineering of any sort. I cannot really imagine any of my work, both in the FOSS community as well as professionally without using whatever means to discover how things (devices, drivers, software) work. Isn't it a most natural human trait? You discover something new, and you want to learn how it works. So you take it apart, learn about its components and understand how the individual parts play together.
I've been doing this with about everything I ever got, even as a kid. Stereo system, reel-to-reel tape recorder, my first 286 based PC, my first motorbike, car, etc. It's simply not acceptable to be in possession of some technical device without understanding how _exactly_ it works.
So anyway, I hope the talk was at least a bit inspirational and makes some people try. It is not so much important that you actually fully manage to reach the goal (like in my case getting a full-blown Linux implementation of all the drivers done, etc.). The importance is the process, and what you learn while doing it.
So today I was mostly busy preparing and holding that talk, later at night I was back to working on gsm-tvoid. I'll cover this in a separate post.