Houston.pm

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.