Houston.pm

The goal this meeting was to do some code reviews as a group. The idea was that we would learn from each other's techniques and knowledge.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.