Fri, 18 Nov 2005
London Web Frameworks Night Nov 2005 - Done and Dusted!
The day seemed to get worse by the hour, first the pub phoned to cancel
my booked room, they'd let me have it for free but then someone offered
them a 1000 pound for the night so they dropped my reservation, and then
we had a double booked room at the venue and had to kick out the
occupants. After these hickups two of the speakers arrived and things
actually started to fit together.
We had an amazing turnout, the final tally was just over 200 people in a packed lecture theatre. As the organiser I'd have been happy with the performance any of the three speakers gave tonight, but to have all three of them presenting on form was brilliant. I've seen both Matt Biddulph and Simon Willison present before and they're both damn good.
To me MattB seems a very practised speaker, I have no idea how long he rehearses for but his delivery is great, his timing excellent, his slides very well suited to his presentation style and he really knows his field. Looking at Mr Willisons presentation, he's got a real talent for pulling an audience in with a demo and keeping them going with his enthusiasm and passion. It's very hard not to get drawn in when he's speaking and his sessions seem to go quickly.
Matt Trout was my unknown for this event, I'd never met him before tonight, and we were very lucky that he was willing to travel all the way down to speak. Of the three languages I'm more of a perl person so I'm his ideal target market. I enjoyed his talk and he's kicked off my interest in Catalyst; something a bad experience with Maypole had killed off in the past. I don't know what more a speaker can really do in a limited time period.
Every meeting I organise teaches me something new. This time the good things were: the signs pointing to the rooms went up bloody quickly and once the talks started people were sent in through the back door in an attempt to not disturb too many people. I had some simple slides ready thanking people, outlining the evening and other small details. These made my life easier. I also used the microphone for once rather than shouting.
Things not to do? We had some Children in Need collection pots floating around the room (Paul Makepeace bought these along) and I handed them out in the last five minute break but they were still moving around when MattB started talking. This caused some unneeded background noise for the audience as coins were being dropped in. The other bad thing was me panicking and speaking at 90 words a second when I started things off (I was not a calm person). I'm not a public speaker and I need to work being calm and more coherient before I pick up the mic! I also lost my speaker introduction text so I ended up just saying "Here's FOO!"
All in all things went very well, the talks and speakers rocked and thing exploded. I'd have been happy to attend this one as a member of the audience so I'm happy with it. In a day of two I should have enough people posting about the event to let me know if the audience were as well.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/18 00:58 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 12 Nov 2005
London Web Frameworks Night - Location Change!
It's a little late in the day to change any of the details but I've had to
move the venue from Morgan Stanley in Cabot Square to the New Cavendish
Street campus of Westminster University (Streetmap). Some of you may
recognise the venue, we hold a lot of GLLUGs there.
The reason for the move is a great one, the demand for seats has far surpassed my expectations. The original venue had room for 100 people, 120 at a push. We've just had person number 200 sign up. Wow. I know not everyone is going to actually make it on the night but double the rooms capacity was too much for me to risk it. It also means you can sign up again. Until we have to reclose it anyway!
The change of venue will be announced in reminders for the event I'm planning on sending out over the weekend. I'll also mail shot everyone who registered as soon as I can get the list of addresses. This is an ideal chance to thank Ben Evans, who was extremely helpful with arrangements at MSDW and Sean Tohill, who once more pulled a rabbit from his hat to get the room at Westminster on very short notice.
PS: We may even get a first look at one of the BBC's little projects...
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/12 20:37 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sudo Article Promoted Bad Behaviour
I like sudo, it allows you to
give people (and automated jobs) more privileges without having to hand
out the root password. One of the more important aspects of its use is
restricting the commands a user can run. After all, limiting peoples
access to rootly powers doesn't help much if they can just shell out to
bash or edit the shadow file (or other important files) and locally
escalate their privileges.
Unfortunately a Linux.com sudo article shows new users a number of ways of doing this without explaining why it's a really bad idea. I understand that a lot of people just give themselves full root powers using sudo (hell I do on my own machines) but in an article pointed at beginners, especially one that has examples of using an interactive editor with sudo, the concepts need to be explained and some good practices presented. More why with the how please.
The highlight of the article for me was introducing new users to the 'sudoedit' and '-e' options: "but it uses the editor in your $EDITOR environment string". How often do you check the value in $EDITOR? Neither do I. And you're expected to blindly trust, with full root powers, whichever command it points to?
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/12 16:33 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
OpenCON 2005 OpenBSD Slides
The OpenCON
2005 OpenBSD Slides are now available and linked to from undeadly.org. When ever the OpenBSD people
get together and present on security it's worth ten minutes of the admins
day to have a look for the new ideas, after all they'll often appear ever
where else over the next year.
The highlights of this batch include an overview of how the congestion indicator works and allows you to log in even when getting DoSed, the changes to the ports and package tools (which are moving to Perl!) and the whole of Theos Exploit Mitigation Techniques slides. Especially the Stackgap slide.
PS: MagicPoint needs to output HTML with access-keys defined. It'd make the slides a lot easier to read...
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/12 15:53 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Being Sick Sucks
I've been out of action for the last week and a bit due to illness, this
may have something to do with all the windows where I live being removed
and left out overnight by incompetent, unprepared builders. Nothing like
trying to sleep through a minor gale. In WINTER. When it's raining. And you
have NO WINDOWS!
On the plus side I know my email system's working fine, I've got a big enough backlog to prove that. I've also got an announcement about the frameworks evening to send out shortly, I'm just waiting for a final confirmation.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/12 12:38 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 01 Nov 2005
London Web Frameworks Evening - Nov 17th @ Cabot Square
Update: the venue has changed! Please see the London
Frameworks Night Update page.
I'm pleased to announce that on the 17th of November, starting at 19:00 and being held in Morgan Stanley at Cabot Square, is the first ever London Web Frameworks evening! We were incredibly lucky with the line up and we're proud to present:
Matt Trout - Catalyst
Catalyst core developer and author of DBIx::Class.
Simon Willison - Django
Javascript guru, Sitepoint author, Pythonista and Yahoo!
Matt Biddulph - Rails
The man behind the BBC's programme catalogue. Nuff Said.
You must sign up (it's free!)
Each speaker will give an overview/introduction and some of what makes each framework great. The talks will begin at 19:00 on the 17th of November and will finish about 21:00. We'll then be heading to a local pub for food, drink and conversation. The venue for the meeting is the Shakespeare training room on the 12th floor of the Morgan Stanley building in Cabot Square. Registration is required if you plan to attend.
Thanks go to Ben Evans for getting us the venue and the speakers for presenting with no pay, no travel expenses and no safety net...
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/11/01 23:56 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
