So, in trying to figure out the LDAP issues that I had earlier, I needed to check the public key that was returned by the LDAP server when using SSL / TLS. The problem was that I had the damndest time trying to figure out the command necessary to open up and examine SSL certificates on non-standard ports (ie: anything but HTTPS, IMAPS, POP3 over SSL, etc.). Finally, I found on the Atlassian Confluence website the exact command I needed:

openssl s_client -connect host.example.com:ldaps

This displayed everything I needed to know, including the PEM formatted public key / certificate as well as the Certificate Chain (ie: who was the Certificate Authority for the certificate).

I’m here in Austin, TX today at the SANS: Web Application Security Workshop (I was also here yesterday, too). I hope to be able to provide an accurate review for this nearly worthless workshop that many of us from CIS Customer Applications are attending. There are a couple of individuals who believe that the information being taught here is somewhat worthwhile, but most of us from the group either know everything that’s been taught so far, or find some of the information being taught doesn’t relate to us.

For a quick synopsis, here’s what I would have to say: If you are a intermediate or experienced developer, you will be absolutely bored with this workshop. If you are an executive who has not much technical know-how, but want to learn about security for your web applications, this is a worthwhile program for you to attend. Be aware, however, because there are some things that executives don’t need to (or don’t care to) learn about in this. Regardless, this is the most watered down version of a so-called technical workshop I’ve ever been through. Read on to find out how ridiculous some of the things we learned were.

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Day 3 ended the tutorials and began the sessions - the events that the majority of people showed up for. Keystones also precluded the days events, and the first Keynotes were rather intriguing. I heard talks from one of the leads and founders of SixApart, the company responsible for such things as LiveJournal, etc. In addition, Mr. O’Reilly gave a talk on how opensource licenses are out of date. With lack of further explanation of why he believed this, there were many members of the audience (including the other Keynote speakers) who were questioning that statement.

The sessions, left much to be desired. They were approximately 45 minutes each (some actually spanned an hour and a half - though those were rare). As such, 45 minutes hardly gave enough time to thoroughly explain the concepts being presented, but for some of the sessions it was just enough time. For example, the first session I attended was on how this developer used Ruby on Rails to create an MMO in about 45 minutes. The game, is called Unroll - found at llor.nu. It’s a rather simple game, but he explained the concepts behind the creation of his game, rather than explaining some of the methods he used - such as showing code examples, tips and tricks, etc. As such, I left with hardly an understanding of how to use Rails to create a game of my own, but his game is at least open source, so I can download the source code and figure out what I need to then.

The other sessions, which included a combination of PHP, Ruby, and Rails were rather uninteresting for the most part. I took notes in some sessions, but many I’ll have to find the slides in order to benefit from attending them.

However, despite how uninteresting some of these sessions were, I admit that I did take out a lot of ideas that I plan to integrate for my business and CIS. Such things include code caches, such as APC, using IDE’s for development and then running traces on the code to further be able to determine where slow-downs in code occur. I also found a couple of other interesting software items people were using on Macs that I have found quite awesome.

BTW, the Exhibit hall resulted in me getting lots of goodies.

Day 2 of OSCON training was rather sluggish and disappointing. There were several things that I found out that I already knew, but many things I wasn’t expecting from one of the talks, the High Performance PHP. Going into this, I was expecting to see some code examples and talks about certain functions or stylistic coding techniques that would result in improved PHP code. This was definitely not the case, as the majority of the talk was about improving applications that run PHP, or co-exist with PHP. There were also other things to avoid (such as SOAP, but for obvious reasons), but hardly any talks about how to improve your code to improve it’s performance.

The one thing I did learn through this tutorial was how to go through and trace the code, and use things like kcachegrind to make graphs and help you figure out where the slow parts of your code are laying. Percentage breakdowns of the time spent inside certain functions, classes, and objects help to show where your code is “slow”. I plan on using this on my many different projects, just as soon as I figure out how to use the damn program.

The Security tutorial was also nice, but at the same time going over many of the things I learned in my online PHP training that Paul Reinheimer gave last month.

Today: Ruby and Rails
Verdict: Better than awesome!

First thoughts: Instructor name’s David Thomas. First thing on my mind: Wendy’s. lol, sorry, had to get that off my mind.

Anywho, David Thomas and Mike Clark were the instructors for The Ruby Guidebook and The Rails Guidebook. For my first tutorials of OSCON, this definitely caught my attention and I was totally drawn into their presentation. They were excellent speakers, humorous when they needed to be, and more than knowledgeable on the subject.

For those who don’t know what Ruby and/or Rails are, lemme give a quick explanation. Ruby is another programming language out there (actually scripting language), much like perl. There are many aspects to it that really make it a powerful language, especially the fact that everything is an object, which means that everything has certain methods that can be used directly with it.

Rails (or commonly stated as Ruby on Rails) is a framework to build Web Applications that is based on Ruby. From the tutorial, I learned the basics of building a Rails web app, and it is amazingly simple. In fact, the instructor timed himself and it took 47 seconds to get the basic interface for adding, deleting, and modifying items in a shopping cart, complete with MySQL tables, and all the forms necessary and “backend processing”.

Anywho, it’s dinner time. Just wait for my next update.

Well, I am officially writing on the WIFI here at OSCON. After a long, approximate 9 hours of flight, waiting, more flight, waiting, a prezel, and more flying, both myself and Melissa made it here to Portland. I don’t thing we got checked in and situated into our Hotel room until about 1AM Pacific time.

Overall, my flying experience wasn’t as bad as Tom’s was the other day. For those who don’t know (cause I don’t think I posted an entry about his situation), he basically was held over 3 hours in Houson on American Airlines, followed by held over in Chicago for another 3-4 hours before his flight was cancelled and Tom was left stranded in the airport overnight, then didn’t get home till around 4 or 5 PM the following day. In my opinion, that is absolutely horrible service, and airlines should do their upmost best to make sure people get to their desitinations the day they are travelling - not the following day, practically completely through the day.

Anywho, I took American Airlines, but only because I had booked my flight about 3 months before he had this problem. Normally I travel Continenetal. Albeit the problems Tom had, however, both Melissa and I had reasonable flights. The last leg of my journey was on Alaska Airlines, which was the best leg overall because they at least provided a snack (peanuts). American didn’t even offer free peanuts, $4 for a “snack pack”, which would cost less than $1 at the grocery store. No way in hell.

Melissa, took Frontier, and she said they were the nicest airline she had ever been on. In-flight snack: you bet! Chips! A little better than peanuts, to some. But, eh. I’m just glad both of us arrived at the airport and had our luggage just in time to catch the last light-rail that was leaving the airport for the night. Free fare, too.

Double Tree has by far the best beds out of any hotel I’ve ever been to. I didn’t wake up with a sore back at all, and was rather rested, despite not being able to get to sleep till 2AM local time and waking up at 5:45 AM to get ready. Melissa is obviously back behind at the hotel sleeping in, *shakes fist in hotel’s direction*, but hopefully she’ll be able to find something to do to keep herself entertained. I hope that she gets out and sees the town a bit, as this is supposed to be a pretty cool area.

Anywho, time for me to get ready for the convention, and finish answering emails that I haven’t checked in the past couple of days. I’ll keep updated on how awesome the CON is, as I’m in training.

Well, in just over a week I’ll be going to Portland, Oregon to attend my very first OSCON. My boss usually goes, and since I got staff at CIS too late last year, I didn’t have a chance to go to any conferences.

OSCON, for those unfamiliar with it, is the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. From what I can tell, this seems to be the biggest coding convention on this side of the planet - especially the one that seems to emphasize open source development to the extreme. I like the attitude of open source developers, and hope to network a lot at the event. I’m planning on bringing all of my business cards to hand out, and plan to have my little Rolodex pocket holder available to stuff everyone else’s in there. I met a lot of cool and nice people at the last conference I went to (cPanel Traning Conference - Houston, TX), and got their business cards. We’ve stayed in touch since then.

My fiance, Melissa, is coming with me. It was a last-minute decision, but one I hope she’ll thoroughly enjoy. I’ll be in sessions all day most days, and some evenings I’ll be networking with people, but agree that my life has been far to hectic lately, so we plan to take a few evenings to go do some cool things such as visit the Japanese Gardens up there, in addition to the International Rose Test Garden and other things such as the Oregon Zoo, etc. During the day she’ll be meandering probably in the Hotel and surrounding Portland area, enjoying herself. For anyone else interested in a list of other things / places you might find her at, check out the following page.

My camera will be coming with me, so be on the lookout and if you don’t like to be shot, don’t be in range of my viewfinder, else bring that wonderful smile of yours. I’ll be blending in with the crowd, for the most part.

Okay, so day 2 more or less sucked, minus a couple of things. The sessions were more or less mundane and didn’t cover very much. For the most part, I was working on client webpages and trying to get them fixed. Occassionaly I’d pick up a couple of really interesting things, such as SPAM topics and whatever else seemed interesting at the moment.

I did hear about one cool thing called cPGS - or cPanel Game Server. This is the frontend that is an addon to cPanel for being able to resell gameservers. It will be really cool in the future if our company decides to actually get back into the gaming business.

Other than that, more good food was served, but I didn’t benefit too much from the second day of training. I did meet another photographer though and got to see some of his photography (which was pretty good, mind you). I don’t quite remember his name…

So yesterday was the first day of the Training Seminar. It was not as shabby as I thought it might be. I was kind of getting pissed off with the lack of communication they were providing me, so I figured the rest of the conference was gonna suck. There were aspects of it that were rather uninteresting. I’m taking the advanced track, hoping to get a lot out of it (because the beginner track would have definately left me uninterested), but was rather disappointed that a couple of sessions included 5-10 minutes of presentations, then 25-35 minutes of Q&A- and most of the people didn’t have anything to ask.

I was provided free breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday - all of which were mucho delicioso. Lunch was mexican (fajitas and taquitos), and dinner was a filet and a chicken with herbs inside a pie crust with vegetables on the side. Open bar too…not bad at all considering they eliminated the $25 registration fee - meaning the only expense for me is gas seeing as I’m staying with Melissa’s lovely mother. Today I get breakfast and lunch (*types as he munches on a fruit and yogurt parfait*).

Yesterday was also a very wonderful day for interaction, socialization, and trying to make new potential partners and/or clients. Geeks are generally very cool people, and passionate about the topics they talk about - whether it be from old army stories (for the 40+ year-olds), to things they are currently implementing in their infrastructure, to seeing what everyone else’s view about politics are. Most of the people I met yesterday were very cool, especially an old ag who’s been getting into the hosting business. This is odd, but cool at the same time - he’s class of 87, Electrical Engineering. So he’s a graduate of the class 20 years before me - not to mention, he’s had many of the same professors I have (including our advisor Dr. Russell). Oh yea! He was also the president of IEEE his second senior year (practically what I got voted in to!).

Today’s tracks should be more interesting, as well be talking about securing our computers. That’s something I gotta work on…

I’m going to be on my way to Houston tonight to spend my Thursday and Friday sitting in an unknown environment learning about our beloved cPanel program. cPanel is nice - but I think I could make something better. There have been a lot of inconsistencies within the program as you move from one operating system to another, and not to mention I can’t understand why they’d code for one O/S but not another (Debian).

Anywho, I will be without my beloved, and will miss her dearly. But, hopefully this will give me a good chance to network with some people in my field.