Houston.pm

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perl has turned out to be a popular choice for processing bioinformatics data. Daniel Culver introduced the group to subject and a set of challenges for anyone wishing to try their hand at the field.

Brett introduced the Sphinx indexing/search system and showed how to use it from Perl. This system allows queries to be made against a local set of data.

Daniel gives a presentation describing Moose from the point of view of a beginner.

Mark Allen gave a presentation intended to help people with no experience with Erlang up to the point of having written a simple Erlang program in one hour. Although it took a little longer than that, the audience got some pretty good insight into this fascinating language.

Random numbers are important in many areas of computing. A very important approach to generating random number sequences is Pseudo-Random Number Generators. Robert Stone gives an overview of Pseudo-Random Number Generation, with some explanation of Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generators. He also discusses some of the ways this can go wrong, including examples from recent security news. He finishes up with information about Perl modules that can be used for generating Pseudo-Random Number Sequences.

Ruth gives an overview of Library information systems and the work she did in migrating libraries from various systems to the open source Koha system. Perl's abilities to manipulate text-based data efficiently was critical to this work.