Beosig's Rambling Thoughts

Day two started out like day one, and I found a great seat up front in the Hacking Web Sites tutorial. I was really hoping for some serious hands-on experience at hacking a web site. I don’t really need the experience since this is kind of my specialty in the security field, but it’s always nice to pick up new tips and tricks. The tutorial was mostly theory with some practice thrown in to boot. Even though the talk wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I did come away with two pages of notes and some good ideas on what to do in pen-testing and what not to do in coding. Good stuff.

The second tutorial was also security related, but this time we were learning about locking down PostgreSQL. The speaker was very good and knew his stuff. He ran through all sorts of scenarios from default installs, how to fix them and how to break them. The notes were very very good, and I also came away with a few pages of notes to hand off to my DBA back at work when I return to the office. I also have a booklet packed with detailed information that is also useful. We also covered quite a bit about encryption, ssh tunnels, SSL and similar topics. This was all review for me as we use all of this at work already, but it was a good refresher of the knowledge, and I even learned a new trick that I think will help me at work. We’ll have to see how that pans out.

After the tutorials, I ran off to find food in the form of a Philly cheese steak which was really nummy. I did this solo as I could not find a familiar face to snag to bring with me. Ah well. It was nice to have a little solo-based downtime.

Then it was back to the conference for the Ignite Talks and the O’Reilly/Google Open Source Awards. The ignite talks were fantastic, though a couple of them got a little political, and that always rubs me the wrong way.

Congrats to all of the winners of the awards, and thanks to the speakers who entertained all of us before and after the award ceremony.

I need to speak to one of the ignite talks, but first let me explain what they are. Each speaker has 15 seconds per slide and 20 slides. Do that math and you realize that they only have 5 minutes to cover a topic. What topic? Any topic. There were talks about hacking assistive technologies for disable people, textiles, a new movie rating system someone wants, improving the lives of teachers (we’ll come back to this one), the semantic web (thanks Damian!), and fixing rigged elections in Nigeria.

The one that really spoke to me was the one that ended up stating there are no open source tools or collaborative efforts to help teachers teach. This gaping hole in our technological wonders leaves our children at a disadvantage. I think I can help out with this effort, and I tracked down the speaker after the event was over. I managed to fight my way through some overly wordy people, and got my business card in the teacher’s hands. Anyone that knows me even a little, knows that I would love to be a full time teacher, but I can’t afford to live the way I do on their salary. The hope is to teach night college once I finish my Masters degree, but we’ll see how that goes. In the mean time, I can put my current skills to good use and maybe help this teacher out with his lofty goals of improving the lives of his fellow teachers.

I would post the teacher’s name and possible contact info because he put them on his slides. However, I was an idiot and didn’t bring a laptop, pen, paper or papyrus/reed with me to do some note taking. I wasn’t expecting to need to. I just hope he doesn’t lose my business card.

That’s the wrap up from today. I just got a tweet from one of the award winners. They’re heading out to a nearby bar to do some celebratory drinking. I’m going to run out and join them since it’s only 9:30 PM and tomorrow doesn’t start until 10:45 for the classes (the keynotes start earlier, but I usually skip them.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 10:32 PM by Beosig and is filed under OSCON 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.