CPOSC 2010 will feature 21 speakers divided into 3 tracks! You can also check out the event schedule.
Nick Bastin: Leveraging Amazon Web Services To Improve Your Open Source Project
In the last 5 years Amazon has opened up their rather incredible IT infrastructure for general use, kicking off a true commoditization of “cloud computing”. Lost in the noise, however, is that Amazon offers many specialized services on top of all of that raw computing power, and those services are both cheap and powerful. These services can improve all phases of your project – from installer building and distribution to crash and configuration tracking to creating ad-hoc focus groups and taking donations. And that’s just the beginning.
On top of all of the IT infrastructure help (and who doesn’t need that – we’re software developers, not systems administrators), Amazon provides a litany of well designed services for managing application data and messaging. The Simple Queue Service and Simple Notification Service can be used to communicate update information to your clients, or allow application instances to communicate with each other. There are also a number of database options that scale easily to your demands and provide more obvious cloud-driven applications with data storage options that allow you to offload management, scaling, and payment.
This talk will explore the services Amazon offers and explain how to put them to use to benefit your community.
Nick Bastin is a software developer at OPNET Technologies where he evangelizes the use of Open Source projects in commercial products to the benefit of his customers. He has experience with the Amazon, Sun, and Rackspace clouds, as well as experience with more than a few Open Source projects that could use their help.
Tom Clark: Writing Internet Applications in Python with Twisted
Twisted is a networking engine written in Python that allows rapid and easy development of both clients and servers for Internet applications. While it is easy to use, it is also quite powerful and capable of supporting robust, high-performance programs. In this talk we will introduce Twisted and examine examples of both servers and clients written with Twisted.
For the past 11 years Tom Clark has worked as a programmer, sysadmin, and occasional college lecturer. Currently Tom is a software engineer with entropy media, where he writes web applications for the PBS television programs FRONTLINE and the PBS NewsHour.
Sean Dague: Solar System in your Pocket – Developing Android Applications
It started with a simple discussion after a local astronomy meeting trying to figure out which moons of Saturn we were looking at. This seemed like the perfect first Android application, building an astronomy simulator that would let me answer that question wherever I was. Little did I know that trying to do this would take me on a Journey through most of the major subsystems and interfaces in the Android SDK.
This talk will take you along on that journey of writing your first Android application. It will touch most of the major concepts involved in mobile development for Android, and many of the interfaces you’ll need to write you first application. Most importantly it will give you a list of things *not* to do when developing for the mobile space.
Sean Dague has been an open source software engineer in the IBM Linux Technology Center for the last 10 years. His spare time is split between the outdoors, amateur astronomy, and random bits of open source hacking.
Danilo Diaz: Open Source @ Microsoft: 5 Things You Might Not Know
Microsoft is actively participating in open source and share the common industry view that software users will continue to see a mixed IT environment of open source and proprietary products for years to come. We also understand that open source software alternatives can represent healthy competition and an opportunity to complement or enhance Microsoft technologies and products. Microsoft recognizes the value of openness to working with others (including open source communities) to help customers and partners succeed in today
Danilo Diaz, aka Dani, is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft’s Mid-Atlantic State district. In this role, he helps developers understand Microsoft’s product offerings and strategy. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Perficient Philadelphia where he helped establish their Mobility Practice. Dani has over 8 years of experience in the IT industry. His ability to identify and utilize the right blend of technologies to solve business needs has been an asset on all projects he has worked on. Dani’s first .NET project was a Web-based eLearning application which was built on ASP.NET 1.0 Beta 2. As a consultant he has served the roles of system architect, technical lead, developer and mentor on various large and small projects. He has worked on SOA-based applications, Web applications, Windows applications and mobile systems.
Ryan Duff: Why Switching To WordPress 3.0 Is The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Clients
Drupal and Joomla cause headaches. They take a while to install and configure the way you want. Don’t even mention Mambo… WordPress is simple, it takes all those issues away. It’s easy to install, use, and administer. It’s highly customizable and has a vast collection of plugins to do almost anything you want. It also has thousands of themes to make it look any way you want. On top of that, it has the best and most active community around. Come find out why switching to WordPress 3.0 is the best thing you can do for your clients.
Ryan has been working with WordPress since early 2004 and was the original author of WordPress Contact Form. As a long time community member, he enjoys exploring new ways to make use of WordPress. Ryan is a SysAdmin and long-time Linux user who likes to hack things to make repeated tasks simpler. Virtualization, configuration management, and version control software are some of the tools in his arsenal. He began making websites since the age of 12 and has been using PHP for almost 10 years.
Currently, he is running his own WordPress consultancy, Fusionized Technology (http://fusionized.com), in Harrisburg, PA. He also runs the monthly Harrisburg WordPress Meetup. You can find Ryan online at ryanduff.net or on twitter @ryancduff
Nick Gauthier: Grease your Suite: Tips and Tricks for Faster Testing
Continuous integration is a great way to keep your code base organized and well tested. But when a test suite takes so long to run that developers stop running it before every commit, they lose their constant feedback loop and quality drops. In this talk we’ll explore methods of speeding up the test suite so that developers can be confident about the code they’ve written before they share it with the team.
We’ll start with quick cheap fixes, like optimizing your operating system, that can yield drastic results (like cutting test time in half!). We’ll also cover methods of writing tests that reduce their run time with gems like fast_context for shoulda. At then end, we’ll move to more involved methods of multi-tasking your test suite to run on all the cores in your workstation and even to setting up a distributed testing cloud to run all your tests in parallel.
Every tactic will be backed up with hard benchmarks from real production code. We’ll show the evolution of a test suite from its full run time of *13m 15s* down to a number you won’t believe. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have learned methods that they can apply to their own projects to help speed up their development process.
Nick Gauthier is a developer and technical lead at SmartLogic Solutions (http://www.smartlogicsolutions.com/nick), a Baltimore web development company. He’s been using linux on the desktop for almost a decade now, and started coding rails two and a half years ago. He’s an active attendee and occasional speaker at Bmore on Rails. He’s developed a number of performance-obsessed ruby gems, like hydra, slow-actions, and multitest.
Brian Gorka: LessFS and ZFS: A Tale Of Fuse Filesystems
LessFS is a high performing open-source de-duping file system with great potential. ZFS is a next generation filesystem/volume manager. Both run under FUSE in modern Linux kernels. I’ll provide an overview of FUSE, both filesystems, and the advantages and uses of them.
Brian Gorka has been in the IT industry for 14 years, and is currently working as a technical architect for a large public corporation. He‚s been working with Linux since Yggdrasil was cool. Linux has been part of his job and a hobby since the .com boom. Brian has been involved with various open source projects over the years including the NT port of Emacs.
Christopher Grello: MySQL backup and recovery… are you ready?
You perform regular backups of your MySQL databases right? Have you ever needed to use those backups to recover? Most people perform backups, but never need to use them. A shockingly large percentage of these people don‚t have much confidence in their backups however. A little bit of effort up front goes a long way to avoid catastrophe. This presentation will discuss methods to ensure that backups are not only being performed, but are succeeding and can be relied upon when disaster strikes!
Chris has called INetU Managed Hosting home for over a decade. His daily activities include: performance tuning and optimization, capacity planning, security/compliance, and R&D. As an avid cyclist, much of his time outside of work is spend pedaling around New England.
Avdi Grimm: How FLOSS has failed distributed teams
FLOSS development has always been geographically distributed. So why do FLOSS tools for remote collaboration suck compared to commercial tools? We’ll take a look at the remote collaboration tool landscape, with a focus on the tools being used by actual software development teams. We’ll theorize about why FLOSS has completely failed to address the needs of real, working distributed teams; and suggest some directions the FLOSS community can take to close the gap. Finally, we’ll look at some promising FLOSS remote collaboration projects.
Avdi is a husband, father, software cultivator, and amateur community builder living in Southern York County, PA. He is the creator of WideTeams.com, a blog and podcast for geographically dispersed teams, and organizes the York Coworking group. He is also a longtime Linux and FLOSS user, and blogs about software development at http://avdi.org/devblog.
Barry Grundy: Open Source and Linux in Computer Forensics
This presentation will cover the growing use of Linux and Open Source tools in the computer forensic community, particularly in Law Enforcement. In addition to the wide range of programs used for data recovery and forensic analysis, we will very briefly discuss the legal ramifications of the Open Source model on computer forensics. We will discuss the role OSS can play in modern computer forensic laboratories. We will cover specific open source tools, and the technical and legal arguments that make them a powerful addition to any forensic examiner’s toolbox.
Barry J. Grundy serves as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of a major federal agency, in a unit responsible for conducting digital evidence collection and forensic analysis in support of criminal investigations. Prior to his current position, he worked for the NASA Office of Inspector General, Computer Crimes Division as the Resident Agent in Charge of the Computer Crimes Division’s East Region, responsible for the supervision of criminal investigations related to cyber events at all NASA Centers and facilities east of the Mississippi river.
Barry is the author of the Law Enforcement and Forensic Examiner
Bill Hathaway: Using Puppet for infrastructure automation
Whether your machines are on bare-metal, virtualized, or in the cloud, Puppet can manage your UNIX infrastructure and help you go home on-time with your sanity intact. This talk will discuss with participants:
- How Puppet works
- Puppet architecture
- Several evolving configurations
- Extending Puppet
- Web tools for managing Puppet
- How to get started on your own
Bill has been trying to make computers obey him since the mid 90s, occasionally with success. He works for Versatile Systems in Mechanicsburg, PA as an architect, and recently moved out to the San Francisco Bay area. When not dealing with computers Bill enjoys running, playing tennis, and trying to find a tasty chicken vindaloo.
Steven Heckler: Performance Tuning Apache Tomcat 6
Apache Tomcat 6 is the world’s most popular container for serving Java servlets and JavaServer Pages. A default installation of Tomcat will fall sfar hort of its full performance potential due to a lack of any built-in tuning. In this presentation, attendees explore how to accelerate Tomcat by removing unneeded applications, turning off Jasper development mode, compiling native connectors, tuning the JVM, precompling JSPs, and more. At the same time, attendees will gain insight into a wide variety of free Tomcat performance monitoring tools and how to monitor key Tomcat counters that are exposed via Tomcat’s JMX (Java Management Extensions) MBeans.
Steve Heckler is president of Accelebrate, an IT training firm based in Atlanta. A Java developer since 1996, Steve began consulting and teaching on Tomcat administration at the request of a client in 2004. Since then, he has consulted on and taught Tomcat more than 60 times for clients in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Malta.
Bob Igo: GUI Testing and Automation With Sikuli
Sikuli is an image-driven tool with the power to interact with any GUI that your desktop can display, regardless of the underlying technology. It can interact with web apps, native apps, cross-platform apps, or anything you use in any desktop-sharing application. Regular users can use its power to automate common desktop tasks, and software developers can test and validate GUI-based software. Regardless of whether or not you have any testing or automation background, you will appreciate the elegance and utility of Sikuli.
Since graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 1994, Bob Igo has applied his combined Computer Science / Math / German degree in his work with some of the world‚s leading technology researchers and fortune 100 companies. In addition to developing custom software solutions for clients, he has worked in the diverse fields of Machine Translation, Computer-Assisted Surgery, Automated Package Sortation, Software Automation, and Quality Assurance. His driving philosophy is to make technology easier to use by implementing smart heuristics behind the scenes that encode the best practices of human experts.
Brad Lhotsky: Regular Expression for Fun and Profit
With regular expressions, you can extract data from unusual places, and harness immense intrinsic power. By the end of this talk, you will be able to leverage regular expressions in your conquest for complete world domination. You might also be able to match an IP Address, incorrectly! :) Beginners guide to basic regular expressions and how to avoid potentially catastrophic mistakes.
Brad is a System Administrator, Perl Programmer, and Network Security Analyst for the NIH. In his spare time he tries to promote science and reason, things that tend to be lacking in the .gov IT Security Community.
Bryan Liles: Practical Rails 3. A view from a guy who uses it daily.
Ruby on Rails version 3 is finally here! Wonder why it took so long, and what great new features are in store for you? Well you don’t have to wait any longer. I’m here to detail some of the new hotness the Rails core team has in store for us. From the new mailer to mountable applications, there is something good here for all of us. Of course this talk is for you fine folks who use Ruby on Rails. I’m certain I’ll be able to show you something you’ve never seen before. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ruby or Rails, come for the entertainment! If I can’t persuade you to come to the dark side, you can at least heckle me on stage.
Hello, I’m Bryan Liles. I hack and I code. I code and I hack. Sometimes I speak about coding and hacking. I blog about hacking and coding, and I hack and code on my blog.
Walt Mankowski: Essential Perl One-Liners
Perl’s got a reputation for producing unreadable, unmaintainable code. In many cases that’s probably well-deserved, and conferences like YAPC and OSCON are filled with talks on modules that try to rein in some of that complexity. That’s great, but sometimes people can forget that Perl’s still a great language for throwing together quick and dirty little programs. And nothing is quicker or dirtier than the one-liner.
This talk is an introduction to writing one-liners in Perl. The focus isn’t so much on Perl golf, but rather on getting a handle on all those command-line switches described in “perlrun”. So if you can never remember the difference between -l, -n and -p, this is the talk for you. However, even if you already write the occasional one-liner in Perl, chances are you’re not taking advantage of all the tricks and shortcuts you could be. In this tour de force of compact Perl prowess, every audience member will become a command-line ninja!
Walt is a PhD student in Computer Science at Drexel University. His research involves pattern recognition and human-computer interaction. He doesn’t know when he’s going to defend. In his spare time Walt runs the Philadelphia Perl Mongers.
Christian Pearce: AEgir and Drush: A new workflow for Drupal
Drupal has seen an amazing amount of growth over the last three years. One of the most difficult aspects using Drupal as a professional is grappling with the volume of change from month to month. Traditionally people use the vendor branch merge techniques to keep up with the change. This process is valid, but still requires manual intervention that takes time. This talk shows you how you can use AEgir and Drush makefiles to periodically build a new Drupal platform, roll out changes faster and avoid tracking your websites in subversion. Drush make also gives you the ability to include patches or your own modules from your favorite source control repository. This way you can still customize your Drupal websites.
Christian Pearce lives in Harrisburg, PA and has supported open source software since he first discovered Linux at college. He has spent the last sixteen years developing web applications in Perl, PHP and Ruby or working as a system administrator configuring Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, Linux, OpenLDAP, Sendmail, Postfix or any other open source project that gets the job done. Recently he has turned his attention to developing and managing large numbers of Drupal deployments. He is partner with xforty technologies.
Brian Stempin: Open Source Geospatial Technologies: Capabilities and Demonstations
Throughout my work as a research assistant, I’ve worked on a project that involved using historical traffic data to calculate predicted traffic times and shortest routes based upon those travel times for the city of Minneapolis. In order for me to enable my graduate counterpart to generate predictions, I had to produce some data models to describe the road and sensor network.
GIS (geographic information systems) tools were the obvious answer. Through using a mix of PHP, PostgreSQL (with PostGIS), QGIS, Geoserver, OpenLayers, and OpenStreetMap, I was able to produce the models that we needed. After generating these models and receiving the predictions from my graduate counterpart, I was tasked with building a web application to allow a user ask for a route based on predicted traffic speeds.
While working on this project, I spent a lot of time working with geospatial queries, geographic datasets, and geospatial web standards. I would like to share what I learned about the world of open source GIS software while using my project as a demonstration of some of the various capabilities.
Attendees should have an understanding of SQL. Knowledge about web services, PHP, and JavaScript will also come in handy.
Brian is currently a college senior and plans on pursuing a PhD after he graduate from Temple University. As of late, he’s been working as a research assistant for Temple’s Center of Information Science and Technology. In his spare time, he can be found hiking, orienteering, running, or getting the remainder of his tan from a computer monitor. He also enjoys the company of his local ACM and Linux users group chapters, especially when they involve beer. He began using open source software when he was in middle school, starting with Linux Mandrake. After he started using Linux as his primary OS, there was no going back — he fell in love with the technology and the community.
Chris Teodorski: Taking the sting out of the OWASP top 10 with Mutillidae
The OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Top 10 List is a consensus based list of the most prevalent and critical web application security flaws. The document is a great resource for web application developers and people charged with web application security. Reading about the top 10 vulnerabilities is one thing, experiencing and exploiting them first hand provides a whole new level of insight into how they work and how you can prevent introducing them into your web application. Unfortunately, unless you’ve been specifically tasked with attempting to exploit an application, it can be difficult (and often illegal) to get some real hands on experience with these flaws and vulnerabilities.
For my talk, I will examine the OWASP Top 10, talk a little about W3AF (the Web Application Attack and Audit Framework) and the open source (and deliberately vulnerable) web application Mutillidae (and others if time allows) to see how the web application developer and security tester can use Mutillidae to learn how the top 10 work, how to prevent them, and get an opportunity to practice their pwnage skills in a safe and legal environment.
Chris Teodorski is a Senior Security Analyst with PPG Industries in Pittsburgh. He holds a Masters degree in Information Security and Assurance and currently working on his doctorate in Information Systems. Additionally, he is a documentation contributor to the W3AF project. He was co-founder of ErieLUG and also one of the founding members of PittSUG, a Pittsburgh based security users group. He’s a dad, husband, and full time geek. Much to his wife’s disappointment he dreams of some day mastering the banjo and singing sad country songs.
Scott Walters: Compliance, what’s the hubbub, bub?
You‚ve probably heard about, or been exposed to, many different compliance regulations these days such as SAS70, PCI, HIPAA, SOX, etc. What do they all mean and why have they been put into place? I will answer those questions and also cover some lessons learned during implementation and on-going support of environments that need to be compliant.
Scott Walters has fiddled with computers since a TI-99/4A. In 1995 he helped found an internet company, then did some consulting for Mack Trucks and Volvo AB, and developed a smidget of Open Source software, larrd, that was used with Big Brother along the way. He is currently the Director of Client Services at INetU Managed Hosting in Allentown Pennsylvania.
Chris Williams: The JavaScript Renaissance
There are few (if any) languages that force “open source” as much as JavaScript. JavaScript has seen a meteoric rise in interest, excitement, and energy in the past 3 years. It has become one of the fastest interpreted programming languages available, mainly to due to vested interest from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla. JavaScript is no longer chained to the browser even and is continuing to captivate the top server-side development minds. This is a survey of everything awesome that is currently going on in the world of JavaScript.
Chris Williams is the curator of JSConf, owner of Iterative Designs, and VP of OurParents. More commonly known, internetwise, by the handle of voodootikigod, he has been known from time to time to fancy a good beer. With a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, he has been a network security developer for the DOD, Security Engineer for TSA, and a parallel entrepreneur. In terms of Ruby, I have whole slew of Ruby/Sinatra/Rails/etc projects from a directory service, legal office groupware, automated patent aggregation and analysis tools, and a full stack call center system.