I have a bone to pick with the mensa that decided that it was important to give each Railsconf attendee a badge that had all of their personal information encoded on a barcode on the back side.

From the back of the badge:

“Your name, email address, job title, organization, address and phone number are encoded on this card. Please recycle this card at the end of the conference”

What? Is there a magical card swiper that gives you money and ever lasting happiness? Exactly why do I need to carry around a badge with all that information? Do they really expect me to give it back to someone else for “recycling” at the end of the conference? This is one badge that is going in the shredder!

The crew is doing a tutorial today at Railsconf 2008 in Portland. We will be presenting on contributing to open source projects. There will be a short demo of some of the tips and tricks we use when we are contributing, followed by a couple hours of open time to contribute to your favorite open source projects. Bring your laptop and join the fun! We are going to be focusing on projects hosted with git, so if you haven’t already installed it, now is the time.

I just finished writing a pdf book for Peepcode Screencasts about security auditing Rails applications. The book covers all the high level concepts needed to properly determine and fix security related problems in your code and on your servers. The contents include:

• Cross Site Scripting
• Model Security and SQL Injection
• Fuzzing Testing / Spidering
• Server Security
• Risk Ananlysis

This book is a must have for any serious Rails developer exposing their applications to the web. The best part is you can get your very own copy right now for only $9! Peepcode has also recently released a few more great books, so it might be a good time to pony up for a 5 or even 10 pack and sharpen your development skills.