me talking out loud

I have been mostly out of touch with the PHP world since April when I was hired by MySQL. I admit it - I have let things slip while I settled into the new job and the hoopla of the new house - figuring that not much will change in the 6 months or so while I am gone. How wrong I was.

The last couple of days I have had a few startling revelations on how much has changed. The big one the keyed me to it was watching the ##php channel on freenode and going to look up an answer from the manual to a question… Only to find the manual had been completely reorganized and I had no clue where to go to find what I was looking for. I asked a couple of friends when the manual changed - and they told me “a while ago”… clue X 4 moment!

Go to check out the PHPWomen site - and we are almost at 400 registered members, with lots of introductions in the forums… I normally would try to say hello to everyone that introduces themselves and feel bad for not doing it. To those I have missed - my apologies. Sheesh - I have not even looked over the articles for the contest till today.

Next - I *really* looked at the people who were chit chatting in #phpc on freenode… and there are way too many that I have no clue who they are! Me - the local busy body - the one who for the most part knew everyone in there (I know - sounds egotistical - but true). Outrageous!

Heck - I have not gone to the last couple of PHP User group meetings or met with any of my PHP friends just to hang out or read phpdeveloper.org in months! I am seriously slacking! Someone slap me please.

Finally took my tests (yep took both instead of doing the upgrade from Core) for the Certified MySQL Developer cert and I have to say - Dang that was hard. I passed them both thankfully though. The first test is on the basics and wasn’t too bad - did pretty well though I would have been happier if my score was higher. The second test though - man did it kick my buttocks. It covers Joins, stored procedures, triggers, views and all that good stuff. And stupid, arrogant me didn’t study much for it since I do so much of it at work - and oh boy did it show.

Anyway - at least I got a nice breakdown of my test with percentages on the various part to help me work a bit on my soft areas. That is nice. I have to admit to being a bit embarrassed by some of my scores so I won’t be posting them.

Now I just have to wait for official word that I passed, so I can see what the logo looks like and put it up. Yeah - it is all about the pretty picture.

Hmm - now time to start working on my CMDBA cert… *sigh* - no rest for the wicked.

If you follow the MySQL world, you have probably heard of the plight of Andrii Nikitin and his son Ivan. But for those in the PHP world who may not have, I ask you to please help.

Andrii Nikitin is a MySQL support engineer in the Ukraine and his son desperately needs a bone marrow transplant operation. Unfortunately where he is, they do not have the facilities to handle it - so he must go outside his country to get Ivan the medical help he needs. This, of course, will be very expensive. Estimated costs are 150000 - 250000 EUR.

MySQL and all of it’s employees are working to help Andrii raise the money he needs. Many of us (myself included) have given money to help him. Will you join us? If every person that has used MySQL over the years gave just a single dollar to help Andrii, he would have the money to get Ivan the medical treatment he needs to survive.

For more information on Andrii Nikitin and Ivan or to donate via Paypal please go here

Did you know there was a mysql.org - and that it redirects to http://dev.mysql.com/… and that it has a one click link to get to the latest Community Editions for the server on the left hand side? I have to admit, I didn’t until now.

Ok - I had to install MySQL on my Mac for the first time - using a tar of the binaries none the less. And it has been interesting. These are notes mostly for myself but if others find them helpful - great.

1. instructions I used - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/installing-binary.html
2. to create a group in 10.5 - use dscl. In my case ‘dscl . -create /groups/mysql’
3. to create a user in 10.5 - again use dscl. ‘dscl .-create /Users/mysql’
4. I had to make /usr/local with mkdir -m 775
5. I did not have to decompress things since the Mac did it for me - but I did have to place it in my Library dir and make the ln to it in my /usr/local dir
6. DO NOT FORGET to give your root user a password and either drop the anonymous user or put a password on it!

Other notables (yes I am a server noob):

• start the deamon with ’sudo bin/mysqld_safe –user=mysql &’
• If you forget the ampersand at the end - use cntl+z to escape then use ‘bg’ to put the deamon in the background
• stop the deamon with ‘bin/mysqladmin -u root shutdown’

Other notes to self on having multiple versions available:

1. option 1 - have multiple binary installs in their own folders and just change the ln.. or have multiple ln with individual names. since I do not need to have all of them running at one time - I can start and stop the deamons as I need.
2. option 2 - is provided in the manual at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/multiple-servers.html

Yep - I have finally ready for my trip to the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara. MySQL and Oreilly have been incredibly generous in providing us the opportunity to attend their conference, giving us an exhibition booth and a free pass to all the sessions. With out them - we couldn’t have gone.

Anyway - for those that will be there, make sure to stop by our booth and pick yourself up a PHPWomen sticker (for your laptop, car, bag or anywhere else you can think of). Or if you just want to talk about what we are and what we are doing or the weather - that is great too. Come out and meet me!

Just a quick not to let the world know that I have started the mentor listing for testfest. It can be found at http://wiki.php.net/qa/testfest

Mentors - if I missed you please send me an email to update it or feel free to add yourself to the wiki.

Also we have moved the listing of the User Groups to the wiki so if your user group is participating and not listed - again let me know if you want to be added or add yourself to the testfest wiki page.

Edit: forgot to mark it as PHP. Ooops.

I am pleased and proud to say that come Monday - I will be working for MySQL (*sigh* - Ok Sun). I will be working for a Dream Company of mine - doing a Dream Job. Life does not get better then that.

So to everyone who kept telling me I would get the job when I swore there was no way (you know who you are) - feel free to tell me “I told you so” next time we talk - and first beer is on me when we meet.

It has been a really long time since I wrote anything - luckily the folks at phparchitect gave me just the push I needed to get back to my writing. Took me a while to get back in the hang of it again - but I did it - and even finished by my deadline (even if it was turned in a day late).

So if you feel the need to learn a bit more about foreign keys and what they can do for you the coder - be sure to check out my article on them at c7y

Just found out about the Orlando BarCamp from another member of the JaxPHP UG. I had no idea there was a BarCamp out this way.

It will be held on April 5 and 6 at Wall St Plaza. The 5th will be dedicated to Developers and the 6th to various media (film, photo, etc.). For more information on it be sure to check out their site - http://www.barcamporlando.org/ Registration is now open for any who want to go.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend - niece will be participating in a gymnastics state championship that weekend in Tampa. Family comes before playing.

While talking with Dynom and Davey I learned something really cool today - how to get the declared definition of a column all by itself with MySQL (I used version 5.0.45). Yes there are lots of other ways to get the info - not the least of which is using the information_schema - but this just struck me as being way cool.

You can even use wildcards in the column name. From a different database (note you have to have the perms to access the alternate database):


DESCRIBE Db.table column;


Example from my test db:

mysql> describe lig_test.student guardianship;
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field        | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| guardianship | char(1) | NO   |     |         |       |
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
1 row in set (0.08 sec)

mysql> describe lig_test.student 'guard%';
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field          | Type     | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| guardian_photo | longblob | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| guardianship   | char(1)  | NO   |     |         |       |
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Went to the Florida Linux Show today - a 1 day conference held in Jacksonville at the University of North Florida University Center. At only $10 to attend - it is hard to find a reason not to attend something so close and so affordable. Had a good time and met a number of my fellow JaxPHP members there who were also attending.

The conference ran from 8:30AM - 5PM and had 12 different sessions with 3 keynote presentations. There seemed to be about 150- 200 people (saw all together maybe 10 women) in attendance with representatives of Redhat, Ubuntu, and gentoo in booths along with various other companies both local and linux centric (like Linux Journal and the local LUG).

The sessions I attended were quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed “Software as a Service: Implications of Web Apps for Software Freedom” by Mr. Gavin Baker for the interesting questions it raised on web applications being closed source though they are built on the popular open source tools and languages. Until then I never realized how closed source a site is - which goes completely counter to FOSS like PHP.

All in all a good time and I will be back again next time.

I have to admit to not writing much lately on the blog - mostly because I haven’t been doing anything interesting. Visiting family, making new friends, catching up on my personal reading (no tech books - well ok only a few - Mostly High Performance MySQL with a dash of Flex 2), relaxing from the move and the craziness of the last year… basically trying to feel human again rather then a wound up ball of stress that is ready to explode - Man have I needed this break. This has got to be the longest stretch I have ever done where I intentionally tried to stay away from the computer and anything related to work to regain my personal internal balance. And it has been much more difficult then I thought it would be (still ended up doing stuff for PHPWomen and going to PHP User Group meetings… ). Wonder if I fulfill the definition of a junky.

As much as I love my work and the people… sometimes you have to step back and remember that life does go on - even when the computer is turned off. I mostly managed to do it.

Unfortunately my time to stop and relax is coming to an end soon. And I have to say I will miss it even as I revel in my ability to get back into to the game.

Ok - so I have RSVPed a yes to attend the local Jacksonville user group (JAXPHP) get together next week and I have to admit to being kinda nervous about it. I have never been to user group meeting and have no clue what to expect. Hopefully all will go well and I won’t get lost or show up late or make an idiot of myself.

Anyway - if anyone is in the area be sure to stop by, say Hi and hopefully save me from myself.

When?
Tuesday, Jan 8, 2008, 6:30 PM 20080108T233000Z
Where?
Jacksonville Public Library - Southeast Branch
10599 Deerwood Park Blvd.
Jacksonville, FL 32256
904-996-0325

Well #phpc on freenode is at it again. This time we have cooked up a scheme to have a road trip to this springs |tek. Davey Shafik and I live pretty close together (he in the Tampa, FL area and I in the Jacksonville, FL area). So being the cheap people we are (conferences get VERY expensive very fast) agreed to carpool it to Chicago so we can both get there for the plane fair of one (it is about a 19 hour drive).

Somehow the conference comes up on the #phpc channel - who is going, who is thinking of going and who is speaking at the conference. We comment that we are car pooling it up - and poof! We have more people wanting to get in on it. At it’s height we had potentially 8 people going with us - though most ended up backing out. As it stands now, we are down to 4 (Davey, Ben Ramsey, Elizabeth Naramore and I) last I heard. It is pretty cool since we will picking up fresh meat drivers people as we go north so no one person will have to do all the driving.

I figure by the end of the road trip up and back… we will have become closer friends then we are now or will be ready to kill each other. Not quite sure which is more likely One thing is definite - we will have gotten to know each other well and isn’t that the goal of the community.

Woot - the book, The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition, has been slash-dotted - and they actually liked it giving it a 9/10 rating. *gasp*

The reviewer, Michael J. Ross, seems to only have 5 major grips with the book overall:

1. Firstly, a reader hoping for a well-edited book will likely become distrustful by the authors’ misuse of the term “that” in place of “who.”
2. Secondly, there are far too many ambiguous comments in the first-person, e.g., “I would dare to say that…” In a book written by five authors, the reader naturally has no idea who is speaking.
3. Thirdly, there is a fair amount of inconsistency in the formatting of the code throughout the book, including indentation and other spacing, as well as variable naming.
4. Also, every instance of a “{” on its own line (presumably to line up vertically with the corresponding “}”), is an antiquated waste of space, since any decent programmer’s editor or integrated development environment (IDE) can do brace matching automatically.
5. Lastly, almost all of the section titles begin with the phrase “How do I.” That is fine within the body of the book, at the beginning of every section. But when dozens of these section titles are listed together in the table of contents, that phrase could be excised so each section’s topic would be faster to spot, and there would be fewer unnecessary words.

I can live with those, (to me they are kinda minor),though I have to admit to being the person with a “{” on a new line - sorry but I like my code formatted that way when I am left to my own devices. Call it a quirk if you will - I like to see my braces visually line up.

On the plus side he remarks:

The chapters on error handling and access control are alone worth the price of the book.

Since I was responsible for the chapter on access control - I will take that as a pat on the back.

In the latest PHP Abstract Podcast with Davey Shafik on Web Services, I actually got a mention because of the book we worked on together. Woot!

As for the podcast - Davey I love the accent. So very hot.

Finally, after almost a year, the book I helped write (The PHP Anthology, 2nd Edition) is now published and available through Sitepoint, Amazon and Bookpool.

I ARE PUBLISHED - WOOT!

Can you actually beleive they gave me a trading card this year at zend con?! crazy people. Looks nothing like I do now - back when I was young and cute - but hey a girl can remember. Anyway - here it is:

HOLY COW what a wild ride. I came to the conference thinking I would be kinda busy with the PHPWomen and Zend stuff I planned to do but it was crazier then I thought - and my severe jet lag did not help things. Luckily I still managed to make a number of the sessions but not nearly as many as I wanted - though I didn’t miss a single party

Hmm - now lets see what highlights I remember about the conference…
Day 1
opening keynote wasn’t bad but I slipped out a bit early to 1) find out where we would be setting up the PHPWomen’s booth and 2) try to sneak into Terry Chay’s talk early for a good seat (it ended up being in the room where the keynote was being given - D’uh). During this time Cal Evans (my sweetie) announces that it is my birthday in front of the ENTIRE assembly after the keynote… now everyone knows I am old . So all day I had people walking up to me telling me happy birthday. Oh and did I mention that I was sung Happy Birthday in the bar as well… if nothing else this birthday was memorable (fantastic too but we won’t mention that part).

Went to Terry Chay’s talk (fabulous) and then did a thing for Zend so missed Ben Ramsey’s talk (was bummed about that), the 3-4 sessions I was setting up the PHPWomen booth and handing out some advanced t-shirts to the women and some prominent PHP community members who we promised them to. Then went to Eli White’s talk and I am sad to say started falling asleep during it (jet lag really started kicking in). And after that was very busy handing out PHPWomen t-shirts to the conference attendees for the rest of the night from our booth (forgot to take a picture of all of us with the booth babes)… then on to the parties afterward. I ended up sleeping at night for the rest of the conference in Curt’s room rather then my own since I was sharing it with 3 other people and I admit it… I needed more quiet to recover then our room could provide. Thanks Curt!

Day 2
Slept late this day (jet lag still killing me) and missed breakfast and the keynote. Came down to find a sea of purple shirts… all for PHP Women. Whomever says the community doesn’t support it’s women needed to see this. We easily had the number of Zend t-shirts beat (3-1).

Went to Andrei’s unicode session and again had to run out early to do some more of the Zend thing. Missed most of lunch trying to find all the phpc’ers to make sure they had their PHPC shirts with nick iron ons for the next day. Make it to Joel Spolsky’s keynote (excellant by the way), Elizabeth Naramore’s session on e-commerce (very good) and Laura Thomson’s session (again very good). By now I am once more exhausted from jet lag and go to take a nap so I can be awake for Jay Pipes talk… and manage never to wake up for it. That was the one session I absolutely wanted to attend and I sleep through it… LOL - I kill myself some days.

Day 3
This is the day I pretty much played hookie on. slept late again (never did make it to bed before 2:30 on any given night) missing everything except the closing keynote. Granted I was around before then but nothing really caught my eye and I was too busy talking to all the wonderful people I had met during the conference.

All in all a wonderful time though I will never over book myself like that again. I should have considered how much the jet lag would affect me (I was literally on the opposite time schedule - night was day and day was night) but one must live and learn.

To all the wonderful people I met at the conference (old and new friends) I only want to say - WE HAVE GOT TO DO THIS AGAIN!