I noticed one of the topics of the conference is on NodeXL and social capital, which we plan to cover in our lecture tentatively scheduled for July 23rd.

Also, we have been given a 50% discount as well.  Discount Code: guestdgo2012.  Online registration has closed and this would be handled onsite.  I will contact the organizers of the conference to ensure your discount in advance if you email me your interest.

Here’s some specifics.
Location: University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Original Cost waved for 1 ticket: about $400-$870 approximate
Dates: June 4th – June 7th

Here’s the conference flyer:
http://www.dgo2012.dgsna.org/images/pdf/dgoflyerconference25october2011.pdf

Here’s the main conference page:
http://www.dgo2012.dgsna.org

There may come a day when the data source for a web application isn’t a database by default, and the message of this presentation was plan for that day.  This talk, given May 9 during DC PHP Developers’ May meeting at Fathom Creative’s office in DC, was useful to developers of applications large and small.  The presenter was Brandon Savage, a software developer for Mozilla.  Savage pulled from his experience working on Socorro, Mozilla’s web application for handling crash data for applications like Firefox and Thunderbird, to illustrate the importance of building web application data layers thoughtfully and with the future in mind.

According to Savage, creating a scalable data layer can be achieved by doing four things while planning and coding a web application: separating code for data usage from code for data retrieval, organizing the code into components based on the actions the code performs, building applications to be “storage agnostic”, and choosing the correct type of data source from the start.  While all of these steps may be particularly pertinent to an application with terabytes of data, like Socorro, all applications can benefit from this type of forethought.

It could be argued that the presentation needed a few more code samples, but seeing as Savage’s guidance can’t be implemented in a formulaic manner, additional code snippets may have been pointless.  Overall, this was a laid-back meeting, no doubt aided by the abundance of beer.  Also, a small aside, Fathom Creative’s office is beautiful and worth seeing in person.

Savage’s slides are available online: http://www.slideshare.net/brandonsavage/data-abstraction-for-large-web-applications

This book is, among other things, an illustration in prose of the adage “it takes one to know one”.  It is through the writing of Poulsen, a noteworthy ex-hacker himself, that you gain a clear understanding of how and why Max Vision (born Max Butler) became the infamous hacker who stole 1.8 million credit card numbers resulting in $86.4 million in damages.  Poulsen, now a news editor for Wired.com, is most famous for being the phreaker who hacked into the phone lines of a Los Angeles radio station during a Porsche giveaway to ensure he’d be the winning caller.  So when Poulsen describes the thrill and satisfaction Max felt when he exploited a BIND vulnerability to create back doors into government and military machines in 1998, the feeling is palpable.

Living vicariously through a notorious hacker, who becomes a carder (one who participates in credit card fraud), leaves you dealing with the same moral ambiguity Max himself struggles with as he oscillates between black hat and white hat activities.  If you enjoy observing his exploits, you can’t easily condemn his actions without feeling hypocritical.  Poulsen plays with this uncertainty throughout the book.  At times, he suddenly confronts you with your ambivalence after allowing it to quietly build as the plot unfolds, such as when Max hacks into a point of sale system at a pizzeria in his mother’s neighborhood.  Your reaction, disappointment in this case, reveals that you are rooting for him.  You give him the benefit of the doubt until he crosses your hastily drawn line.  To the last page, it is unclear whether Poulsen wants you to pity Max or fear him.  Consequently, you’re left doing a little bit of both.

At 266 pages, this book is a quick read that is not only well researched (there are 20 pages of notes) but also thoroughly engrossing.  Even if you are aware of Max Vision and his crimes, Poulsen’s storytelling will captivate you.  Additionally, the manner that he describes the everyday life of a hacker will enrich your understanding of the threats facing the technology we maintain, create, and utilize.  His examination of magnetic stripe vulnerabilities is particularly striking.  This book will educate and entertain, but it will also leave many questioning the notion of security.

That may sound straightforward enough, but they also covered deploying a Node app to Heroku (a cloud platform as a service), leveraging the Express framework to build a web server, implementing Twitter Oauth for authentication, storing data in a MongoDB database, using the Jade template engine to render HTML, using CoffeeScript to decrease the amount of JavaScript code needed, and using Mocha for Node testing.  They finished their presentation by discussing when Node should be used and best practices for its use, including the use of a module pattern to prevent banana code.

As a Node newbie with sufficient JavaScript skills, this was definitely immersion style learning for me.  It’s a credit to both Troy and Seth, particularly the organization and clarity of their demo, that I was able to understand their process.  With more than forty attendees, this event was well-attended, and worthwhile, even considering the post-presentation research required to fully appreciate the frameworks and technologies used.

For the SharePoint uninitiated, Jessee’s introduction to the topic–explaining authentication and authorization, claims-based and classic-mode authentication, Azure AppFabric ACS, and the services offered by identity providers–made the subject accessible.  He then demonstrated the creation of a SharePoint 2010 web application and a Facebook app that would verify the users’ identities, the configuration of Azure AppFabric ACS for Facebook support, and the delegation of Azure as the trusted identity provider in SharePoint, which was a fairly straightforward process.

With the identity matters addressed, Jessee went on to demonstrate how the newly acquired Facebook token information of the user could be employed in the SharePoint site to update the user’s display name, provide local weather data, populate a calendar with the birthdays of Facebook friends (if said friends’ privacy settings allowed it), and take pictures with a webcam and upload the pictures to a document library with Microsoft Silverlight.

Jessee’s presentation was the second of the night.  The first was Matthew Bramer’s “The Alphabet Soup of Front-End Development: (XML/XSLT/XPath/jQuery/JavaScript/SPServices/CSS/(X)HTML/CAML/ClientOM)”, which was called off due to compatibility issues he was having with his graphics card and the projector. Hopefully, he’ll have a chance to present this topic at a future meeting.  If not, I’ll be left wondering about the mysterious bacon/unicorn/rainbows slide.

FEDSPUG meetings are a good place to start if you’re at all interested in SharePoint development as the crowd is friendly and technically diverse.  Plus, FEDSPUG is not averse to providing pizza or holding giveaways.

The slides from Danny Jessee’s presentation are available online: http://www.slideshare.net/dannyjessee/sharepoint-2010claimsbased-identity-facebook-and-the-cloud-12296272

The funeral will be on Friday, March 23, 2012, at 10:30 AM, at the Judean Memorial Gardens, 16225 Bachellors Forest Rd, Olney, MD 20832. People can feel free to call (301) 384–1000 for directions.

Solomon Rosenthal contributions to computing began back in the days of ENIAC where he led the team that did the actual wiring.  He served many roles for the DC ACM including Chair from 1960-1963.

He was also very active in the Community in which he lived, as one of the Founders of the Stonegate Citizens Association, one of its Presidents, the author of its Bylaws, and was serving as its Parliamentarian and as a member of its Board of Trustees at the time of his death. His friendship, cheerfulness, and wise counsel will be greatly missed by the Board.

Compensation also listed.  Check it out:

http://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/311088600

Agenda

• Prior meeting minutes approval (PPD)

• Reports from the Officers

⁃ Chair

⁃ Overview of last year’s adopted strategy for the benefit of new attendees.

⁃ Nominations Committee

⁃ Elections are coming up. The elections committee will be formed by next meeting.

⁃ Vice Chair

⁃ Volunteer Recruitment

⁃ New volunteer postings

⁃ Secretary

⁃ Nothing to report

⁃ Treasurer

⁃ Mid-year budget review

⁃ No adjustments. Need to focus on revenue generating activities (Professional Development workshop)

⁃ Member-At-Large

⁃ Nothing to report

• Reports from the Committees

⁃ Programs

⁃ Resume Workshop – 1st week of March, RFA

⁃ Eric will contact Harry to check on room availability

⁃ Robert Neelbauer can coordinate resume consultants

⁃ Lecture Series – 3 events, 1 coordinator

⁃ Wikipedia mirroring lecture

⁃ Need to set a date. Kent Miller to present on his work regarding mirroring Wikipedia.

⁃ Distinguished Speaker Program

⁃ dsp.acm.org – a resource of speakers provided by ACM that can be used for lectures

⁃ Professional Development Seminar

⁃ GWU spring break week of 12 Mar

⁃ Target for the first week

⁃ Technical Focus Committee – Technology Startups

⁃ DC ACM supports NightOwls as part of a Technical Focus Committee on area technology startups

⁃ http://www.acm.org/chapters/professionals/toolkit/tech_focus

• New Business

⁃ Membership Benefits Discussion

⁃ Discussion on the value-add that Robert Neelbauer’s product can bring to the benefit of the membership

⁃ DC Tech transportation visual map

⁃ Andrew would like to start a project that compiles various data mappings about area technology. Details will be on the project page of the dcacm.org web-site. Volunteers welcome and encouraged

The following topics were covered:

• Bayesian estimation with R and JAGS – Grant Cavanaugh
• arules package, apriori algorithm (Market Basket Analysis) – John Dennison
• Example of using R to query the google maps API to create a color-coded map of road and public transit times  - James Leopore
• MCMC with Gibbs Sampling – Katya Vasilaky
• Webscraping with R, RCurl – Robert Vesco
• Git your Version Control on Using R and RStudio – Brian Danielak
• R’s spatial tools – Lee De Cola

To start with, I was impressed by the large community.  Approximately 60+ attended the event.  The immediate takeaway I had as a non-R user, was “get RStudio IDE and try things out!”.   Additionally, the webscraping talk covered XPATH within R, and using Firebug + FireXPATH to help figure out what you want to scrape, before writing R code.  XPATH, as the speaker put it for us laymen types, is the “SQL for HTML documents”.  The Gibbs Sampling talk touched on machine learning through bootstrap aggregating (bagging).

If you’re a data scientist, a statistician, or curious about data analysis, check out this group.  They like new comers.

The 12th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women of Computing (GHC) has opened its Call for Participation.  The annual conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world’s largest gathering of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration will take place from October  3 – 6, 2012 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Maryland. This year’s theme “Are We There Yet?” recognizes that technology and the culture of technology are continuously evolving but there are also concrete goals we are striving to achieve.

Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.  The technical conference features well known keynote speakers and invited technical speakers, panels, workshops, new investigator technical papers, PhD forums, technical posters, birds of a feather sessions, the ACM Student Research Competition and an Awards Celebration.

The attendees who range from students to executives use this global platform to get inspired, stay on top of emerging technical trends, learn and network.

Submissions are being accepted in the following tracks. Click on the track name for full details:
* Birds of a Feather (BOFs)
* New Investigators Papers
* Panels, Workshops and Presentations
* PhD Forum
* Posters and SRC Posters
* Social Collaboration Track
* Women of Underrepresented Groups Track

The organizing committee will review all abstracts submitted to the conference on the basis of a set of criteria including the quality of the submission and its relevance to this conference, originality and scope of the subject matter.

For more information, please visit our website –

http://gracehopper.org/2012/participate/call-for-participation/

Deadline for submissions is Friday, March 16th 2012

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to your participation in the conference!

Seema Gururaj
Director of the Grace Hopper Celebration
seemag@anitaborg.org