So much for liveblogging. Honestly, I found that having my laptop with me was a huge distraction so I simply took it upstairs to my hotel room and left it there. That way I was able to concentrate on the talks.

So, after my interview with Cal Evans I went to a talk on "The Truth Behind XSS" by security expert Chris Shiflett. Honestly, the talk was way too short: it could've easily been two hours of talking by Chris. He knows his stuff and gets his point across in a very low-key way. I've been really thinking about the implications of XSS and CSRF (cross site request forgeries) when it comes to all the forum sites. I wonder how good a job vBulletin is doing of it.

Next was a talk by Ilia Alshanetsky (I met him at least year's show and he autographed a copy of his book that I owned) on migrating to PHP 5.2 from either PHP 4 or PHP 5.1. I need to get those slides, print them out, put them on my bosses desk and say "this is proof of why we need to move to 5.2 when we upgrade and redesign the forums." It's really that simple, and he dispelled a lot of myths about what sort of things will break when you move from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

I then went to Joshua Eichhorn's talk on "Javascript Sweet and Light", but I was too busy tinkering with my slides to pay full attention. He did do a good job of showing just how easy it is to use the Prototype javascript library for most of your AJAX needs. For some reason, I've turned to using YUI for my Ajax stuff. I seem to be able to understand it better.

Finally, I went to another talk by Chris Shiflett on "Agile PHP Testing" but he had modified it and included some great tips on doing security testing for your application as well. Again, I'm starting to have some thoughts about how we need to implement some testing of our code at work beyond the "please do a quick run-through of the site" variety. I'm hoping that I won't get a lot of push back on it, because I'm itching to also slap some of the tools onto vBulletin that Rasmus talked about during his keynote.

Anyhow, I'm off to do a last run through of my slides and get some sleep so I'm not dog-tired when I give my talk.