I'm really looking forward to CodeMash. The slate of speakers and topics looks fantastic; It's really nice to look at a conference schedule and see a lot of topics that are totally new to me.

One thing I'm curious about is Scala. I've been working with a research group lately on a project using Intelligent Agents, and through that was introduced to the idea of Functional Programming. Somehow I missed seeing this in my undergraduate days, though I remember my peers complaining about Scheme in one of the senior-level computer science courses.

Some of the talks on Groovy and Grails seem interesting, too. The Ruby on Rails movement has certainly sparked some innovation in the Web Development community, and I like seeing those ideas cross-ported into the technologies I have more of an affinity for, such as Java and ColdFusion. Having recently built a somewhat painful full-scale Java application, there may be something useful here.

I recently started on a research project on network visualization, particularly how it pertains to attacks and intrusions. I was surprised today to see that the creator of one of my favorite net comic strips, xkcd, did a Map of the Internet. I'm not familiar with the fractal mapping technique he used; that gives me yet another topic to read up on!

Google and Yahoo! have apparently gotten together and penned a new standard way to provide metadata on Web site architecture to search engines.

Details are at sitemaps.org.

The nice thing about using a content managment system is that it will be child's play to generate this for our college Web site.

I stumbled upon this in a Slashdot thread:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org

It's a project to fight email address harvesting by spammers. I think this is the first project I've seen where legal recourse is actually a component of the strategy.