Potpourri Track for 2008

This track begins with Lightening Talks at 1:30 PM

2:50 PM

The Engineer’s Desktop – Hacking Your Software to Work the Way I Want It to

Paul Speulstra
IT Manager and Software Developer, URS Corporation

Leonard De Rooy
Professor of Engineering, Calvin College

Software developers face many challenges as they craft their code: accurately perform a desired function, provide a treasure trove of new features to justify upgrades, write bug free code and satisfy the end-user with an intuitive interface. One additional challenge easily overlooked by programmers involves catering more so to the system administrator than to the end-user (however oft times they can be one in the same). Call it system customization, app tweaking, or program hacking; software configuration can be the devil-in-the-details factor which can mean the difference between your product enduring undesirable blog posts in IT forums or enjoying favorable tips-and-tricks articles in popular industry periodicals. This presentation addresses the software configuration issue on two fronts, the prelude during software development and the postlude after software installation.

3:40 PM

Hacking 101– Properly Securing Web Applications

Jeff Laskowski
IT Specialist, IBM

Failure to properly secure Web applications exposes organizations to malicious attacks. Adopting a process to monitor for and identify the top 10 flaws is perhaps the most effective first step towards ensuring the security of Web applications. This session, which offers an informative discussion and demonstration of the top 10 Web application attacks, highlights examples of common Web application vulnerabilities and demonstrates how to test for them.