Exploring Web Services And Service-Oriented Architecture
Peter Thompson, Sonoma State University Alumnus
09/04/2008
What are Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture? What are they good for? How do they work? I'll walk through some scenarios and dig into some of the code that enables platform agnostic interactions. Along the way, I'll show how being familiar with procedural, declarative, and object-oriented, pattern-based programming in a distributed computing environment can help demystify this complex and important topic. I am by no means an expert on this. This talk is as much about how I am approaching the problem of needing to stay current with industry standards as it is about the technology itself. I'll share a list of tools and learning resources I have encountered so far.
Tux Paint - How I Made Millions Of Kids Happy In My Spare Time
Bill Kendrick, Open Source Developer, Davis
09/11/2008
Epiphanies, frustrations, l10n, cross-platform considerations, web scripting, automation, project management, and other things you need to worry about to create a popular and award-winning replacement for crayons. Pizza after talk
Love And Authentication - Addressing The Problem Of Password Reset
Markus Jakobsson, Xerox PARC
09/18/2008
One of the most commonly neglected security vulnerabilities associated with typical online service providers lies in the password reset process. By being based on a small number of questions whose answers often can be derived using data-mining techniques, or even guessed, many sites are open to attack. To exacerbate the problem, many sites pose the very same questions to users wishing to reset their forgotten passwords, creating a common "meta password'' between sites: the password reset questions. At the same time, as the number of accounts per user increases, so does the risk for the user to forget her password. Unfortunately, the cost of a customer-service mediated password reset---currently averaging $22 is far beyond possible for most service providers. In this talk, an alternative technique will be presented. It is fast and efficient, compatible with input-constrained devices (such as handhelds), and has low error rates.
Rdbms: From Fantasy To Infrastructure -A Journey Of Innovation
Bruce Lindsay, IBM Almaden
09/25/2008
Dr. Bruce Lindsay, an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, will review the exciting series of innovations that led to the acceptance and deployment of Relational Database Management Systems. From Dr. Ted Codd's seminal papers, through the development of new transaction management technologies and query processing strategies, Dr. Lindsay will describe the technical innovations that were key to the adoption of RDBMS technology in business critical applications.
Microsoft Terraserver: A Look Back At A 10-Year Scalability Research Project That Won’t Die
Tom Barclay, Microsoft Research, San Francisco
10/02/2008
An enormous challenge in industrial research is getting research ideas and prototypes into products. Microsoft TerraServer is an industrial research project whose primary focus was to improve the chances of such transfers. In the mid 1990s, Microsoft was rewriting SQL Server from the ground-up to compete with Oracle, Db2, and others in the DBMS marketplace. A key requirement was scalability. The SQL team commissioned Jim Gray's research group to build a real world Internet application that would test the SQL system's ability to scale a single database server to terabytes and demonstrate scalability to end users and potential customers on the Internet for a period of 18 months. This past June, TerraServer logged its tenth year on the Internet and remains popular in the face of competition with Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, Globe Explorer, and others. This talk will review both the organizational and technical characteristics and accomplishments of the project and how TerraServer led the way to systems like Google Earth (Keyhole), Virtual Earth, and others.