A simple matter of…

Well that was a fun weekend! [http://www.smop.co.uk/album/2008/FOSDEM/ FOSDEM 2008 photos] uploaded.

A big “thank you” to the FOSDEM crew, all the groups who organised talks and those who presented talks. Generally the presentation quality was very good. The timekeeping was _far_ better than the previous two times I’ve attended (2005,2006) – only one talk was about 5mins over, though I heard of one which overran by 20mins (Gnome IIRC).

If I had to single out one talk, I think it would be the [http://www.owasp.org OWASP] one, Rogan Dawes was an accomplished speaker and had a very polished presentation (bar a couple of minor typos which caused a moment of confusion in the demo). Considering how much he was typing the odd typo was bound to happen – I was impressed at how much he could remember. It was also a very good demo both of [http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebGoat_Project WebGoat] [http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project WebScarab] – respectively tutoring and injecting web attacks such as XSS, SQL injection and directory traversal. In fact, Rogan demostrated these and more in about 15mins – using a very intuitive tool (WebScarab) and tutorial application (WebGoat).