Presentations for 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Last month's talk covered a bit of functional programming theory and why it teaches you more about programming. This month Wade focuses on the aspects of functional programming you can apply today in your own Perl code.