about

This piece of art is the personal homepage of Øyvind Skaar. Currently it's mostly a collection of links and aggregated information from other places on the net, and of course, a testing ground for whatever I'm interested in at the moment.

Until recently I was a graduate student at the University of Oslo and University Graduate Center (UNIK). In my thesis I looked at security problems in massively multiplayer games and the use of trusted computing to fix them (pdf).

Current interests

Security

Security have been a interest and hobby for a long time. Especially computer security, but physical as well. Right now videos from Defcon 18 are on the way \o/ (but not yet).
Also follow:

Perl

(that is, "modern" perl, not cgi scripts from '90)
After writing perl for a little while it has become my favourite language.. Sure, Ruby and Python are fun as well, but they do lack.. something.

• Mojolicious: Web framework (yes, another one..) under heavy development. ( home, cpan, github )
• PSGI: Spec for a glue between web-apps and servers. "Middleware". Inspired by (clone of) Ruby's Rack and Python's WSGI. Yet to find any use for it.. ( Specs + links, blog post with a little background )
• Moose/Mouse: Completely new object system for Perl 5. Looks really cool, if you need that sort of things. Guess I don't, but when I get some free time.. or get tired of plain old perl objects. ( home, wikipedia )

NoSQL, open source messaging, web-backend-related things

Because RDBMS' suddenly are useless ;)

• CouchDB: document-oriented db, heavy use of js and HTTP (rest-like). ( home, free ebook )
• ZeroMQ / ØMQ: Open source messaging, looks different than most others: simpler, faster and less reliable (not in the sense that it crashes or anything, well, maybe it does, what do I know). Trying to find something do use it for, could be great at $work.

Javascript

Often think it would be cool to know some js and jquery or maybe yui, so I got some reading material.. have to see where it leads