Houston Perl Mongers

p5hack 🔗 1492732800

April 2017

Topic: p5hack

Presenter: Todd Rinaldo

Todd Rinaldo discussed the p5hack hack-a-thon this year in Amsterdam. He described the purpose of the meeting and some of the decisions that came out of the meeting.

Maintaining Developer Mental and Physical Health 🔗 1490054400

March 2017

Topic: Maintaining Developer Mental and Physical Health

Presenter: Various

Jim Bacon, Robert Stone, and Jocelyn Kirby gave short presentations on health topics that can apply to developers.

Homophonic Substitution Cipher: Cracking the Code of a Killer 🔗 1487635200

February 2017

Topic: Homophonic Substitution Cipher: Cracking the Code of a Killer

Presenter: Robert Stone

Robert Stone delves into the cipher used by the Zodiac Killer in his newspaper announcements. He describes substitution ciphers and then shows how a homophonic substitution cipher fixes many of its problems. He ends by describing how the Zodiac Killer's cipher was solved.

cperl 🔗 1484956800

January 2017

Topic: cperl

Presenter: Reini Urban

Reini Urban gave a presentation highlighting several of the features of the cperl fork of the perl programming language.

How Functional Programming Made Me Better at Perl 🔗 1477008000

October 2016

Topic: How Functional Programming Made Me Better at Perl

Presenter: Mark Allen

Mark Allen discusses the way doing functional programming in Erlang has changed how he approaches problems. He then introduced how to use some of this insight in Perl.

The Read Copy Update Pattern in the Linux Kernel 🔗 1474416000

September 2016

Topic: The Read Copy Update Pattern in the Linux Kernel

Presenter: Julian Brown

Continuing with the lock-free architecture topic Julian introduced at an earlier meeting, he covered the Read-Copy-Update strategy.

A Set of Short Talks 🔗 1471737600

August 2016

Topic: A Set of Short Talks

Presenter: Various

This month's meeting features a group of 4 short talks by some of our long-time members. Robert Stone discusses connecting objects by reference versus indirectly by some ID. Julian Brown talked about lock-free architectures. J. D. Lightsey demonstrated another SQL injection attack using sqlmap. And, Todd Rinaldo rounds out the talks with a discussion of a Perl vulnerability related to @INC.

Reconstructing an SQL injection from its fix 🔗 1466467200

June 2016

Topic: Reconstructing an SQL injection from its fix

Presenter: John Lightsey

John Lightsey shows how to use a diff of changes made to fix an SQL injection attack to create an attack against the unpatched code. He shows the use of the sqlmap tool to automatically generate useful attacks.

Binary Tree Serialization Techniques 🔗 1463788800

May 2016

Topic: Binary Tree Serialization Techniques

Presenter: Chris Mevissen

Chris Mevissen gave a report on the research he has been doing on serializable binary trees. He describes the basics of binary tree data structures and descibes a basic implementation in Perl. He works his way through showing how a binary tree can be serialized in a form that can be easily reloaded.

FlexSC: Exception-Less System Calls 🔗 1461196800

April 2016

Topic: FlexSC: Exception-Less System Calls

Presenter: Julian Brown

Julian Brown covered a presentation describing a method for doing system calls while reducing context switching overhead. The paper the presentation was based on covered an academic project to implement this method and the research showing its effectiveness.

Algorithmic Complexity Made Simple 🔗 1458518400

March

Topic: Algorithmic Complexity Made Simple

Presenter: G. Wade Johnson

G. Wade Johnson introduced the idea that analyzing the complexity of algorithms is more than just an academic exercise. He shows how to do relatively simple analysis for quick wins.

Solving Wordbrain 🔗 1456012800

February 2016

Topic: Solving Wordbrain

Presenter: Robert Stone

Wordbrain is a puzzle game that involves using letters presented in a clue to created words. Robert Stone describes creating a solver for this game and explores techniques for improving the performance of the solver.

Adding Forks to Your Perly Tableware 🔗 1453334400

January 2016

Topic: Adding Forks to Your Perly Tableware

Presenter: Julian Brown

Julian Brown used a presentation written by Steven Lembark. The presentation covered unpack and forking in Perl. Julian described a problem that he had been trying to solve and how the information in this talk would have been helpful.

Show and Tell with Role::Tiny and CGI::Application::DispatchUTF-8 and Perl 🔗 1445385600

October 2015

Topic: Show and Tell with Role::Tiny and CGI::Application::Dispatch

Presenter: Jim Bacon

Jim Bacon gave a remote presentation describing how he used applied Roles to adapt a CGI::Application-based webapp to support a versioned API.

Topic: UTF-8 and Perl

Presenter: Todd Rinaldo

Todd Rinaldo followed this with a presentation describing what Pelr programmers should know about UTF-8 including information about various gotchas.

Time Progressions with string and DateTimeFrom YAPC::EU@Houston.pm 🔗 1442793600

September 2015

Topic: Time Progressions with string and DateTime

Presenter: Julian Brown

Julian Brown showed how he summarizes currency trades from a delayed Forex feed into different groupings. His method involves both string manipulation and use of the DateTime module.

Topic: From YAPC::EU@Houston.pm

Presenter: Nicolas Rochelemagne

Nicolas Rochelemagne summarized the presentations he saw at this year's YAPC::EU. The talks spanned a fairly large spectrum of topics.

A Metasploit module for Locale::Maketext format string attack 🔗 1440115200

August 2015

Topic: A Metasploit module for Locale::Maketext format string attack

Presenter: John Lightsey

This was the second in a series that JD has done on Metasploit modules attacking vulnerabilities in Perl code. This presentation focused on problems with the Locale::Maketext module. JD shows background on the flaw, how it manifests in Locale::Maketext, and the module he built to perform the exploit.

Perl List Operations 🔗 1437436800

July 2015

Topic: Perl List Operations

Presenter: G. Wade Johnson

Lists are a fundamental data type in Perl, unfortunately people do not make as good a use of them as they could. In this presentation, Wade gives an overview of lists and arrays and the operations that apply to each. He then went over the modules List::Util and List::MoreUtils for more advanced list operations.

Hooking up your distribution to TravisCI and Coveralls.io 🔗 1432166400

May 2015

Topic: Hooking up your distribution to TravisCI and Coveralls.io

Presenter: George S. Baugh

Many development groups use continuous integration to generate quick feedback on the quality of their software. George shows how to use the TravisCI and Coveralls.io systems to provide equivalent functionality for your Perl Modules.

Weaponizing Perl Serialization Flaws with Metasploit 🔗 1429574400

April 2015

Topic: Weaponizing Perl Serialization Flaws with Metasploit

Presenter: John Lightsey

In recent years, there have been a few potential security flaws relating to serialization libraries for dynamic languages. This presentation introduces a few of these flaws and shows how they can be turned into actual attacks using Metasploit.

How to Disagree - But Still Be Agreeable 🔗 1426896000

March 2015

Topic: How to Disagree - But Still Be Agreeable

Presenter: Robert Stone

Disagreements are part of any development effort, but they don't have to be unpleasant. Robert Stone discusses how disagreements become disagreeable and strategies for you to avoid being part of the problem.

A Few Short Topics 🔗 1424476800

February 2015

Topic: A Few Short Topics

Presenter: Chris Mevissen

Presenter: Julian Brown

This time we had a pair of short presentations. Chris Mevissen showed the use of bitwise operators in Perl as a followup to his previous talk on BER decoding. Julian Brown was up next showing how to use the D3 JavaScript library to generate candlestick charts in SVG.

Best Practices Gone Bad 🔗 1421798400

January 2015

Topic: Best Practices Gone Bad

Presenter: G. Wade Johnson

Best practices serve as kind-of a short-hand for pointing the way to good programming practices. Unfortunately, there are many ways that people can misuse any given best practice to generate a bad result. G. Wade Johnson covers a few ways that best practices have gone bad in his career.

A Clear Text Explanation of the AES Cipher 🔗 1413849600

October 2014

Topic: A Clear Text Explanation of the AES Cipher

Presenter: Robert Stone

Robert is working on a pure Perl implementation of the Rijndael cipher in order to fully understand the algorithm. He presents his findings, with code. This helps others to understand this algorithm that has become critical to modern cryptography.

Introduction to ASN.1 BER Encoding 🔗 1408579200

August 2014

Topic: Introduction to ASN.1 BER Encoding

Presenter: Chris Mevissen

Chris introduced the BER encoding for ASN.1. He showed some code and decoding examples to introduce this notation that underlies several technologies we use every day.

Upload Your First Module to CPAN 🔗 1405900800

July

Topic: Upload Your First Module to CPAN

Presenter: brian d foy

brian d foy gives a workshop showing how to create and upload your first Perl module to CPAN. The workshop also shows how to use github as the repository for your module.