Day: April 22, 2008

Wow, that was something: Les Troyens

Opening night is past. Les Troyens, Part I is a magnificent beast, and it has already bloodied the cast—poor Dwayne Croft had a cold the likes of which I’ve never heard from someone singing a part like that. I think we all breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the duet. All the soloists were magnificent, but the prize has to go to Yvonne Naef, or as I called her in my Facebook status “Yvonne Fricking Naef” in homage to John Moltz’s Jennifer Fricking Connolly. Her Cassandra is vulnerable, fierce, and fey, and easily the strongest presence on stage. A close second would have to be our women: hats off to Fanw and other women of the chorus, whose second act number is one of the great heart-seizing moments in Berlioz (or in all women’s chorus literature, for that matter).

I’ve been overwhelmed with the rehearsals, but now I can’t wait to sing it again. Good thing we repeat Part I three more times!

The intersection of Barack and security

Netcraft: Hacker redirects Barack Obama’s site to hillaryclinton.com. Okay, folks, here’s the thing: never trust any place where a user can enter text into your website and have it displayed back at you. Never trust any text that comes from a form field on your site. Because if you do, smart and devious people like Mox here can use your trust to do embarrassing things to your visitors.

On the (very) slightly mitigating side, the attack was not against the main Obama website but his community blog platform, and the vulnerability that was exploited has already been closed. But this type of vulnerability, Cross Site Scripting, is insidious unless you begin your web application with the assumption that all user input needs to be sanitized. And even then, it’s not enough to check your code; you need to check all the third party code that makes up your site.

It would be immodest of me to mention that my company’s service can do just such a check, without requiring you to build security expertise inhouse and for a modest fee.