Martin Odersky and Josh Suereth at Scala BASE Tonight
I'm looking forward to a Scala BASE meeting tonight that is headlined by Martin Odersky and Josh Suereth.
From the announcement email:
Professor Martin Odersky is the director of the LAMP group at EPFL, the creator of the Scala programming language, and author of Programming in Scala.
Josh Suereth hosted the first Scala Lift Off East in Reston, VA and has been involved with lots of Scala projects including scala-tools.org, scala-arm, scala-io, scala-jigsaw, and scala-lolz.
Found: Nice OWASP Top 10 Cheat Sheet
I discovered this very useful, developer-centric cheat sheet for the OWASP Top 10 for 2010 (go directly to the pdf). It's nice and concise and gets straight to the simplest code fixes that will work. Memorize it and your code will be better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster...
Here's the current OWASP 2010 Top 10 list (this is release candidate 1, so it could change):
- Injection
- Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
- Broken Authentication and Session Management
- Insecure Direct Object References
- Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- Security Misconfiguration
- Failure to Restrict URL Access
- Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
- Insecure Cryptographic Storage
- Insufficient Transport Layer Protection
If you are a developer and you don't know what some of these security risks are 
and how to avoid them in your code, then you should be reading this: OWASP Top 10 2010 RC1 (pdf).
Looking Forward to HTML5
I've seen a lot in the geek news lately about HTML5. I've tried to get a book, but none are available for a few more months, and O'Reilly doesn't even have a "rough cuts" book yet.
Today, via DZone, I discovered this super nifty HTML5 sketch pad demo.
I'm really looking forward to the widespread use of HTML5, especially since Adobe can't be bothered to make their Flex Builder work in Linux.
A Tale About Problems of Scale
I earned some new bragging rights this week and had fun doing it. I love computer science!
A tale about iteration, unexpectedly large data sets, and time...
About a month ago, a large file of data unexpectedly needed to be processed, using some pre-existing code written several years ago. This code happened to be written in Java, but this story could apply to most any commonly used programming language. It was a batch process, so speed wasn't of the utmost essence, but at the same time it shouldn't run on and on and one because other files also needed to be processed. The data set was 500K records, whereas the larger data sets normally are in the 20-30K range, so this was more than 10x the norm.
Everything seemed to be going fine. The file was read into a database and some processing had been done on it and the time had come to write out a result file. Along with results, the original programmer had wanted some statistics, so there was a quick iteration through all of the records to gather the statistics and then the results would be written into the file. It seemed straightforward and I didn't expect anything to go wrong. When things go wrong on files, my experience has been that they usually go wrong earlier on.
The Christmas That Santa Got His Geek On
This year I received a lot of geek books for Christmas (2009), and I'm so delighted and intrigued by them that I thought I'd share them here and maybe somebody else will discover a wonderful book to read.
These are the six books I received:
- The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh
- Train Man, the novel, by Hitori Nakano
- Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife
- The Geek Atlas, 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive, by John Graham-Cunningham
- The Annotated Turing, A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold
- e: the Story of a Number, by Eli Manor
I haven't had time to read any of the books yet, but have thumbed through all of them enough to give a brief overview and my first impression of the quality of the book. It should be noted that these books were all on my Amazon.com wish list (thanks to Amazon for suggesting them for me) and I've read the reviews and any excerpts that were available.
The book that I've given the most attention to so far is The Code Book, and that's because I have three puzzles to solve. After my brother-in-law saw that I'd received a cryptography book, he asked if I like that sort of stuff and then promptly produced printouts for three puzzles he needs to solve to be able to locate geocaches. (I've solved two so far and one is partially solved)
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