I spent a few hours at Linux World Conference & Expo today. Compared to last year, the show was a lot more lively. There were more vendors and more people. Booths seemed more beefy, but since I’m not a collector of swag I don’t have much reason to troll around them.

Even though it will probably be reported that this increase in attendance is the direct result of the continued rise in Linux usage, I’m betting that’s it’s merely a reflection of everyones willingness to travel compared to last year. I also hope it’s a sign of the economy starting to stabilize, at least a little bit.

I did meet Adam Trachtenberg and David Sklar, authors of the PHP Cookbook. Their book helped me out a lot last month so it was nice to let them know. I met some other O’Reilly authors as well, including Æleen Frisch (whose books I have been reading for years) and Ethan Cerami, author of Web Services Essentials.

I also finally met Andy Oram in person, which was nice considering we’ve been working together for a couple of years now.

Related link: http://online.securityfocus.com/bid

Looks like the exploit code from the Security Focus (i.e. Bugtraq) vulnerability database has been removed. There used to be an _exploit_ tab between _discussion_ and _solution_ on the individual vulnerabilty pages. It provided exploit code, if available. This was extremely useful for doing vulnerability testing so it’s too bad. Seems to me that this is just one less resource for white hats and one more advantage for the blacks hats. I wonder if the recent acquisition by Symantec had something to do with the change.

Alternative vulnerability databases and security sites? Or, do you think this was the right decision?