use Perl

Even though I do training as a living, and even when I know my material thoroughly, I hate public speaking. I get nervous and then I speak too fast.

Mind you, this happens in some conversations too. I'll be talking to a client, or some course attendees, or even to someone I'd just like to impress and wham I start falling over my sentences and repeating myself and losing track of what I'm talking about... The more nervous I get the worse my speaking gets.

When I've presented the material a few times and seen it presented a few times more than that, then it's easier... but when I only wrote the talk last night and haven't actually practiced what I'm going to say... well, then I should know I'm in for trouble.

I did a talk at our local Perl Mongers group tonight. I think it went pretty well, but I know I spoke too fast. At least this time I didn't forget what I was talking about and there was some really interesting discussion at the end.

I spoke about the null byte issues with Perl. eg:

open FILE, "<", "$file.html" or die $!;

# and

unless(  $user eq "root" ) {
    system("finger", $user");
}

both of the above "protection mechanisms" can be thwarted by null-byte injection. If $file is file.pl\0 then file.pl will be opened, not file.pl.html. If $user is root\0 then the unless will say they're not the same but you'll finger the root user.

Obviously this means that this code should use proper taint checking.

We discussed how Perl could fix this, internally, and decided that testing for null bytes at the same time taintedness was checked would probably be the way to go, but as an extra module or option you turned on.

I'll add it to my list of things to do when I get a moment.

I don't know what I'll talk about next month. I want to get as much practice in as possible before the conference in December, as I've never had to talk to a room of 200 before.

I still hate public speaking.