divisionbyzero

I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2008 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Due to some rather depressing news on the home front, I was only able to attend Saturday’s track and the Event Dinner. Everything was awesome as usual. I was even surprised to learn new things in the Advanced Pattern Matching talk.

My talk was titled Network Introspection with Open Source Tools and was an overhaul of the presentation that I did at LinuxWorld earlier this year. I took the feedback of the audience and tuned the talk to a Perl centric audience. I wasn’t heckled badly on IRC, which is the ultimate gauge of success.

I’d like to thank the organizers, CMU, sponsors, and The Perl Foundation for another successful year of the Work Shop. Next year, Pittsburgh is hosting YAPC::NA, and will not be hosting the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. I look forward to being able to drive to YAPC!

If you saw the talk and want to rant about it, feel free to do so here.

I had the privilege of speaking at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco this year. It was a lot of fun and I certainly enjoyed the discussions with folks after my talk. My talk was on “Network Introspection with Open Source Tools” and I threatened to post updates on my progress here.

I’ve been working on packaging the code that I have into something that might be useful to the general public. I’ll post another blog entry when I have a rough cut version of the package available for testing/breaking.

I’ve attended 4 Perl Conferences in the past 2 years.  This year’s Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is the first that I’ve presented at.  My talk was titled Security through Detection, Prevention, and Introspection. I have slides available.

I originally wanted to present a bunch of code, but I couldn’t really find a way to make the code very interesting.  I wanted to teach people that security is part of all of their jobs.  I made it a point to reveal some of the idiocy of the Federal Government Mandates in relation to IT Security.  I also gave an overview of the security system I’m building with Perl at work.

There were laughs, smiles, and a lot of people woke up.  All in all, I’d say it went very well.  I’d like to refine the presentation and possibly resubmit for YAPC::NA this year.  Bigger audience, and an opportunity for me to conquer a large slice of my stage fright.

If anyone out there reading this saw the presentation and has feedback, please comment on this post!

UPDATE: If you enjoyed the content of my talk on security, please check out these articles I’ve written:

• Trust – Paradoxical Structure of Trust in Employers
• Eating Your Own Dog Food – Hypocritical IT Security Policies In the Real World
• Full Disk Encryption – In Theory and Practice
• Is Security Theatre Good Enough? Frustrating observations into poor Risk Analysis in the general populace.