The day starts off with a Windows blue screen of death on the system that drives the main hall’s projection screens. Hmm. But, relax, it was just a visual prop for the first keynote address. Yay!
I have to take a taxi to the train station. Radio Cab advertises reservations over the web. But their site says that online reservations have to be made 24 hours in advance. Fail.
Dawn Nafus talked about technological challenges. Data sets, context, and social implications thereof. Adding data is seductive but sometimes meaningless. Data does not communicate in and of itself. Sam Ramji of Microsoft walked into the lion’s den and talked about Microsoft’s support of open-source. But if Microsoft really supported open-source, it wouldn’t send Sam here to say that it supports open-source. The IRC comment stream was very, very, very funny. As was the Q&A session’s IRC stream.
Tim Bray gave a great talk about programming language inflection points. “We are now emerging from the nuclear winter of language design caused by Java and .NET.” +1.Chris Shiflett talked about Web 2.0 site security issues. XSS vulnerability, just filter your inputs and escape your outputs. (Too much time was spent on this – it should have been just five minutes.) CSRF. Browser hijacking. Pronouns are sometimes used too freely in web security talks. “You,” “they,” and “it” need to be used carefully when discussing how a site can inject something into a request from my browser that attacks a third site. Especially when the talk is aimed at what “you” can do to protect “your” sites.
David Brewer‘s talk about Ubuntu configuration management was aimed a little too low (as in, beginner, simple) for my interests, but it was still a good talk. He likes AutomateIt for server maintenance and updates. But Joe likes Puppet, and Joe’s smart.
Seek Nuance 