(Some) videos from the Fall 2008 Microsoft Bluehat security conference (from the extern SensePost blog).

From PerlBuzz: Higher Order Perl available for free (legal!) download. I started reading it and already found some interesting tidbits. It always felt that Perl is more a functional language than an OO one (see this post from chromatic on the same topic) and this book strengthens this idea.

Staying at the topic of Perl for a moment, from taint.org we have How I learnt to love Perl. A good read. From the same blogpost I got the link of Python Makes Me Nervous. Even though I’m no fan of Python, the article is a little overstated. Python does have exceptions, you just don’t have to catch them. And the majority of the problems can’t be codified in a form that your compiler can check (yes, some languages are better than others – but exactly how many of you program in language that has extended support for codifying pre- a postconditions again?), they must be codified in unit tests.

From XKCD comes the following comic (this is very true on multiple levels, not just for highschools):

Via Perlbuzz comes a link to a rant about what not to do in your Perl code.

On the Postgresql Conference page we have links to a lot of videos / recordings / slides about PostgreSQL and other related topics. Very useful (please rate the videos if you watch them – many of them don’t have any ratings yet!) Speaking of videos, they are up for HEAtnet conference 2008 (you might know them from the SourceForge mirror list).

From Hosts news comes the following very useful information: Google Diagnostic now reports on entire Networks.

On the Microsoft SDL blog we have MS08-078 and the SDL. It gives a very good description of the source of the bug (basically the array size was changed, but the variable used to store the upper limit for the iteration was not updated).

From RemkoWeijnen.nl the blog (try typing that without copy-paste) we have a New Universal Patch Method if you need your windows server to accept more than N simultaneous RDP connection (where N is 3 for 2K3 and 2 for 2K8 if I remember correctly). It always ticks me off when a company limits a product not for technological but for sales reasons. So I use Linux :-). But it is nice to have options (although probably they are in the gray zone from a legal stand point probably).