The AJAX Experience - Day 2

So, day 2 of the ol' AJAX Experience. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend many sessions today, due to having to reschedule doctors appointments, navigate the trickeries of booking hotels (which got handled very wonderfully by our very own Jen Yamamoto and the famous (and eternally patient) Caris Chan [many many thanks again to you both]), and general coding work.

I was able to check out a couple of the sessions though, and they were generally pretty good. I'll go over the talks briefly, and then just talk about random Boston stuff.

Advanced jQuery by John Resig
John did another good job with this talk, but sadly, I was hoping for more from the session. It was basically him building a social networking app from scratch, and using jQuery to handle the interaction.
It was nice to see him promote Unobtrusive Javascript (UJS) techniques, but it's not anything new or exciting.
I would have liked to see some more OO based stuff, some funky closure hackery, or even some things about custom events, and using them to enforce an observer pattern.

Advanced Web Security by Joe Walker

Joe (of DWR fame) went through and talked about some pretty hairy stuff that can happen in a web environment. He talked about the usual Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, but he also talked about things like domain pinning, where a malicious site can set a DNS timeout of 1 second, embed an iframe after 2 seconds that points to your intranet, and the browser now thinks that the iframe and the main page are pointing to the same site, so that the malicious site now has full javascript access to your intranet. Luckily, the browsers have begun to not allow DNS timeouts of 1 second, but I can see the principle still holding.
He also showed some very cool, if somewhat non-threatening ways for a third party site to see what sites you've visited via Javascript and CSS.

Basically, the malicious site lists off on a plain page hundreds or thousands of links to various sites, and the site can use Javascript to read the current color of the links. So if the links are purple, it can tell that you've visited that site.

There were some good best practices in there, and Joe was a pretty decent speaker.

Sadly, those were the only two I was able to visit.

I did however manage to get to see an old friend, and learn about the awesome Boston subways, and visit the northend, where it's pretty much a Little Italy.

My buddy Josh McGinnis, the business & marketing director at PowWeb hosting, gave me a very nice tour. I got to go to the Cheers bar (which is actually called Bull & Finch), which consisted of walking around and walking right out. What would really be the point of ordering a Diet Coke from a bar?
We stopped by a market where I had an awesome (if somewhat cold) piece of pizza, and in honor of Mike Young, I stopped by Mikes Pastry, and got a Pignoli Macaroon, a Chocolate dipped  something or other, and some apricot pastries.
The place was packed, and Josh said it was actually slow. Usually the line runs out the door.

I am here until Thursday the 1st of November, so we will probably hang out this weekend. I am really kicking myself that I forgot my camera, though.

I can say that traveling is pretty tough, and I have a ton of empathy for our consultants. They are an incredibly vital part of our business, and boy do I appreciate the sacrifice and time they put into travelling every week, or even the long term commitments that some of our guys make, like James (BTW, James, did Suresh ever give you your passport back? ;).

I have to say, I miss my wife Jessica quite a bit, but thankfully, we both love Liferay, and when you're passionate about what your doing, 2 weeks isn't long.
Especially when 1 of those weeks is spent at a very sweet conference :)

I really feel incredibly blessed to be a part of the Liferay team, not only to get the perks of going to a conference like this, but working with a mindblowingly brilliant group of folks. I've gotten to see quite a few places that I wouldn't have gotten the chance to see otherwise, and while I would have loved to have Jessica join me, I have to say that getting to experience it at all is a true blessing.
And working with people who you not only respect, but actually like, and love spending time with is such a critical, and awesome, experience. Getting to goof off with the Br(i|y)an's and Mike, hanging out at the company BBQ's and social hours, and connecting with the people you work with in ways not even related to work is probably the biggest perk we have.
Learning from these guys, and being able to truly contribute is something I have always wanted, and am glad I've found it in Liferay.

Okay, I promise I won't start singing "We Are The World".

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Hey Nizzle.

It was my pleasure showing you around Beantown. Too bad it wasn't a little colder though as I'm sure you were burning up.

Oh, also, I've written a small write-up about Liferay:
http://blog.powweb.com/2007/11/08/liferay-an-introduction/

The JQuery post is coming up next. I'm just trying to think of the best way to approach it as the documentation out there is already well-written and easy to dive into. I'll probably just write or copy a bunch of commonly used examples that way people can see how easy it makes things.

Alright, ttyl.