Technical Meetings

The technical meetings are a monthly event, that aims to provide the Birmingham Perl community with an educational night of talks. If you wish to attend, please feel free to come along and listen in.

Talks Wanted: If you would like to do a talk, whether a 5 minute lightning talk, a 15 minutes talk or longer, please let us know and we'll add you to the schedule. If we are unable to add you to the schedule for the next meeting, we will give you priority at a future meeting.

Guest Speakers: Are you visiting Birmingham at some point in the future, and would be willing to give a talk? Or are you based outside of the West Midlands, but would be willing to make a trek over to see us and present a talk? If so, then I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email with details of when you are in Birmingham and the talk you would like to present. I'll then arrange a schedule and confirm.

See also:

Schedule

23 February 2011 - Birmingham.pm Technical Meeting
Time: 7pm onwards
Venue: Birmingham Science Park Aston
Address: Faraday Wharf, Holt Street, Birmingham, B7 4BB
Details: See our technical meetings pages for further details, http://birmingham.pm.org/tech/main
Links: Technical Meetings

The Talks

Mike Kemp - Fun with Fons

Abstract:

Fonera routers promise accessible wireless for all (well provided you don't mind paying for it). In conjuction with BT, Fon have pushed out over 2 million wireless hotspots in the UK, and are pushing to create the worlds biggest wifi network. Fonera routers are much more fun than BT give them credit for however.

This talk examines some of the hacks available for Fon devices, and how they can be modified to do much more entertaining things (such as acting as rogue wireless access points, intercepting traffic, and 'borrowing' credentials). The means for turning a Fonera router into a wireless traffic interceptor will be discussed (if you don't have NAC by the way you should be worried) as well as a project to extend a router into a fully portable covert attack platform.

This talk has incredibly limited Perl content, but it will mean that you'll never look at a cheesy corporate advert (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vnohKj8LVY) in the same way again....

Barbie - Validating XHTML web pages

Abstract:

As part of my day job I create and managed websites. When updating pages for static sites or templates for dynamic sites, it can be easy to accidentally cut and paste invalid formatting, or mistakely add or delete tags.

With Test::XHTML you can test a single page, or a complete website, to ensure pages contain correctly formatted XHTML markup. Using the regular expression patterns you can test that content exists across pages, and can even test basic form filing.

This talk will take a look at a simple website and show how test files can be created to ensure the site is fully XHTML compliant.

* = Guest Speaker

Meeting Sponsor

Birmingham Science Park Aston

The Birmingham Science Park Aston strategy is focused on a service offering for founders of new technology ventures as well as more established businesses. BSPA are located in central Birmingham, close to Aston University and the city centre. Occupying a 22 acre campus, BSPA can provide flexible office units and a new multi-occupancys start-up facility.

For further information regarding Birmingham Science Park Aston, please visit their website.