Geeknotes: Friday 17 October

(Note: this entry was originally published on the Skyscanner Geeks blog.)

Security

• Funny: A set of security maxims from the Argonne National Laboratory. (Via BoingBoing)
• Serious: Bill Zeller and Ed Felten have an interesting paper on cross-site request forgeries (csrf/xsrf). Jeff Atwood highlights the double-submitted cookie technique recommended for tackling the problem.

Front-end?

• (I'm wondering now: Are server-side frameworks back-end or front-end technology?) ASP.NET MVC has hit Beta 1 now. According to Scott Guthrie, it's not yet feature-complete, but it does comes with a Go-Live license. It's the first Microsoft release I've been excited about in years.
• The Run-time Page Optimizer combines, minifies, compresses, and caches JavaScript and CSS on-the-fly. Even more impressive, it automatically turns images referenced in the CSS into CSS sprites. (<jawdrop />) (Via Steve Souders)
• Scott Hanselman on IIS7's new rewrite module. Much though I loathe IIS7's management console, the underlying engine is very impressive.
• Eric Miraglia and Matt Sweeney give a preview of the YUI 3 architecture. Yum. Also: more reflections on the 2008 Yahoo! Frontend Engineering Summit. (Am I a Yahoo! fanboy? Why, yes I am. Thank you for noticing.)

Browsers

• The first beta of Firefox 3.1 is out. Geolocation, @font-face in CSS, TraceMonkey, and other goodies.

Other Geekery

• Paul Graham: Why to start a startup in a bad economy
• Remember the Eyeballing Game from the last Geeknotes? I should have dug deeper into its origins (Ze Frank did). Matthias Wandel is the guy who built it. Apart from writing nifty games, he also loves building mechanical things out of wood. Check out his awesome binary marble adding machine: