tech ramblings

I love OSCON. 

We arrived here in Portland on Saturday evening and slept for about 47 hours.  Well actually 15 or so.  On Sunday we spent the afternoon hanging with a bunch of PHP and Perl folks at the Oregon Brewers’ Festival.  This was the second year I’ve been to this festival and it’s really good fun and gives you the opportunity to sample the local microbrews.

Today the conference - and the real fun began.  This morning I attended Stefan Neufeind’s tutorial on XUL.   It was very useful, and he even had some examples linking PHP and XUL.  There are a couple more Firefox development / XUL related talks this week which I plan to attend, since I’ve got to write a Firefox extension shortly for work.

At present I am sitting in Chris Shiflett’s PHP Security tutorial.  I have seen the short version of this talk before but I thought it would be good to hear the long version and the updates from last year.  Chris is always a great speaker, too.  He’s covering the important fundamentals - filtering input, escaping output - at present.  The PHP Security Guide is the best backgrounder for this stuff - if you haven’t read it, it’s well worth your time.