softwareville

Hanging out at the conference with the GWT team, in San Francisco.

There are some pretty cool talks going on, but particularly neat was an Ajax security talk done by Mr. B. "acidus" Hoffman. Maybe he'll put up a link to his presentation, but the take-home point is "your web-services are getting bytes from the Internet, and you can't assume that it's the unmodified client that's sending you those bytes." ... which you would think people would think about a little harder. But he showed some really concrete ways of messing with applications that fail to take that into account. Basically, with just FireBug, you can 'spl0i7 quite a lot of web applications.

Also, last night at dinner:

gwt-team-member: ... so he got her a new motor for the vacuum cleaner for their anniversary.
gwt-team: *general disapproval noises*
jat: I'm planning on getting [jat's wife] a Roomba...
gwt-team-member: Aw, geeks in love! I bet she'll really be into that. [0]
jat: I'm going to install the SDK on her computer!

[0] jat is married to a CS professor. (he also used to work for IBM, writing compilers for AIX -- and remembers how the TRS-80 handled loading applications from cassette)

Oh! And I got to briefly play with an XO laptop today! It's really adorable and waterproof! Think of the childrens!