Tragically developers seemed to be in a massive minority, but I hope to send a plea out to bring a few of those folks in to be part of the conversation.

Well worth turning up and being part of what could be a top group of security professionals talking code and how best to keep it safe. The beers during and after are great too

Date: Tuesday, 20rd April 2010

Location: PricewaterhouseCoopers, 201 Sussex St, Sydney, NSW 2000

See here for latest update: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Sydney

I shall pop along and see what I can learn!

Sydney’s on, off, on-again security con is back on. $60 dollars covers the two day entry fee, it’s being held at UTS, so easy enough to get to for Sydney-siders.

Good line up of speakers, including the always entertaining Christian Heinrich, doing his Google hacking talk.

http://www.ruxcon.org.au/

Support your local SecCon and get your butt there!

I was the seventh one up (out of 11 presenters) and had spent most of my time listen to SQL or coding based talks. I actually leaning a number of things and it was much more fun having a live presenter walking through their stuff.

I decided to split from my carefully plan script and took on a persona of a demented sysadmin (BOFH). I spent a good 5 minutes ranting and telling bad jokes, 2 minutes of demo-ing File server resource manager, 3 minutes telling off developers and 4 minutes filling in the rest of the FSRM story. So much for sticking to the 10 minute time line. Oops. Managed to get a few laughs, a couple of points across and numerous death threats for the large assembled group of developers.

After all that Tatham Oddie won the demo comp, with an excellent presentation. His style was very calm, clear and well practiced. Something to aspire to or, at least, attempt next time around.

I’m now the proud owner of a bright orange teeshirt. Still somewhat confused on what Roger was thinking on the colour, but I’m sure it made him laugh.

Well worth the time and energy to be part of the community!

Fab night and thanks again to both Roger and Andrew for judging and kind words.

Demos Happen Here – State Finals

Dear Chris

Congratulations!! We are excited to advise that your demo has been chosen to proceed to the next round of the demo competition – the State Finals.

We received several incredible entries in the National Community Demonstration Competition, and now it is your turn to strut your stuff and present live at the State Finals.

I now have to stand up in front of a judging panel and group of other very worthy peers to give the FSRM presentation again!

The rest of the field is here and there’s some excellent presentations. I was hoping to be the only infrastructure focused one up there but I see Ken Schaefer has sneeked two great presentations in at the last minute! Ken does some top talks and always seems to be one step ahead of the pack.

Really looking forward to see it goes and learn a couple of presentation tips and tricks from the others there!

All this from make a bit of free time to join a user group and being part of the community!

Doing the talk was excellent fun and (I think) I managed to answer all the questions put to me.

Here’s the Ms Silverlight video version of the talk I’ve just published for the Heroes Happen Challenge

On Tuesday the 15th of July I’ll be give a quick under ten minute talk on File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) which is a funky component of Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 R2. This is in response to Jeff Alexander – Oz Ms Guy challenge to get up and present to the user group in the Heroes Happen 2008 launch.

I don’t give presentations as part of my job very frequently, so this is something I have to do a bit of practicing on.

This is how I’m attempting to give a reasonable presentation to a group of my peers

Have a plan and break it in to steps

Write out what I’m talking about, a start middle and end. Just like essays at school. Then break it in to bite size chunks and give them headings for cues during the talk.

Recording my own voice giving the talk

Sounds silly, but have to get use to hearing me say what I’m talking about. Attempt to ditch the um, er and ahs or at least reduce the amount of them.

Never trust technology

Live demos can go horrible wrong. I’ve seen some phenomenal speakers have their demos die mid-point through a talk (Mr Gates’ and Jobs’ failed demos are prominent U Tube clips, for example) I’ll take a live lab on Vmware in with me but will try to record the whole thing with a screen capture tool first.

Have a bit of fun

Technology can be a bit dull, and talking about managing files and folder isn’t high on the adrenaline list. I have to avoid talking in a monotone for 10 minutes and attempt to engage the interest of the crowd. Possible? Yes. Likely? Well I’ll find out on Tuesday night.

Since I’ve got two left to go, I’ll be there with notepad and pen and if he shares any pure gold tips, I’ll post them up.

Ken’s an IIS guru, amongst other things, so looking forward to what he’s got to say on the topic.

See you all on Tuesday.

Why?

Meet your peers with common goals, interests and don’t have any market guys trying to push their lastest product down your throat.

Get to hear others points of view, whether they be like minded or totally insane.

Socialise with people doing the same type of work in different companies Newtorking in real life is much better than have half a million facebook “friends”, especially if they can help with your job and career.

Get ideas or get an a heads up on problems that could happen to you with technology

What if you don’t like what you hear?

Step up and contribute.

It’s a community effort and it takes passionate people to bring life to talks, discussions and plain ol’ arguements. If you think some more could be brought to the meetings, talk with the people running the group and suggest it.

Where to go in Sydney

For the Windows folks:

Sydney Windows Infrastructure User Group

For the Open Source crew:

Sydney Linux Users Group