Somewhere Over the South
I'm on a plane somewhere over the south (probably Mississippi) and thought I would jot off a quick entry. I actually just wanted the surreal feel of blogging in the air.
My wife and I really enjoyed our trip to Florida to be with my folks at Christmas. We had a great time catching up with the family, seeing sites, watching dolphins, and being lazy. We ate too much and slept too muich. I'm coming home fat, dumb, and happy.
I've continue to plow through The Art of Deception. It's a great book. It will definitely change your perception of security. I've known about social engineering for years, but I'm starting to understand that I really didn't know about it. I never fully understood what could be done by skilled social engineers and what kinds of information were targeted. It's absolutely amazing, enlightening, and scary.
I'm also reading the latest issue of Linux Magazine. The magazine always provides at least one "great find", and this month is no exception. This month's cover story is about the 2.6 kernel development effort. It details some of the features that are coming in the next kernel, and I'm getting anxious. I'm even toying with compiling the development kernel on my laptop. There's going to be some awesome threading, asynchronous I/O, file system, and VFS improvements. I'm hyped.
Another compelling article was on XUL (pronounced zool), the Mozilla API that helps build cross-platform user interfaces. I'm anxious to play with some of it when I can stretch out my arms (not on the plane!). I'm wondering what kinds of languages you can use it to front-end. Their example shows some JavaScript interaction, but I'm hoping you can do more than that. I'm pretty sure you can -- I think I saw an article somewhere about using it as an alternative to wxWindows which is another cross-platform user interface API.
I also gained a new appreciation for Perl. The Perl column passed along Eric Raymond's idea about "What Perl Got Right". So what was it? Easy cross-platform access to low level system calls. I have to agree. From what I read, the power is very impressive. Makes me want to dust off my Perl skills.
Here's something else that I think Perl got right -- CPAN. I think as a package distribution and installation mechanism, it's down right brilliant. I'm amazed at how easy it makes it to grab and compile Perl packages and their dependencies. I've used it a couple of times recently and have been VERY pleased with the results.
So, it sounds like it's time for me to fire up Linux, dust off my Perl, code up an interface with XUL, and let the fun begin!
3:52:43 PM 
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