me talking out loud

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.

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.

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!

In the tradition of zero based indexes I am calling the tutorial day - Day 0. So my day started out pretty well with an awesome Belgian waffle for breakfast. Went to John Coggleshall’s tutorial “PHP Security Crash Course” and while not everything was new (thank goodness) I did learn a few things - Ex: like some of the databases allow multiple queries to be run with one query statement (Note mysqli). All in all, very informative though I have to admit that 6 hours of lecture (even with lunch in the middle of it and finally finding Curt in the sea of people) was harder then I remember it being from school. Will be sure to go back over the slides and notes I made later.

After that came the ZCE and speakers party at 6. I have to admit - I haven’t had that much fun in a long bit. Basically hung out with the #phpc crowd and all the new people I managed to meet. Played pool with Sara Golemon and managed to win a couple of games (she should be talking about that on her blog later - so I will stop there). My only question on that is - why was I always the one who had to ask people to move to make a shot?!

Anyway after that came lots of drinks (mostly non-alcoholic for me though I did have one daiquiri), some outstanding discussions, and lots of laughter and fun. All in all - a great Day 0.

So here I sit another day at home when I was hoping to be on a flight to Zend Con. Why you ask? Well I am trying to use the military flights to get there (AKA Space A) since I can’t afford the $2000 for the flight stateside.

On the pro side - the military has pretty regular flights to Cali so I should be able to do it. On the con side is that the last 4 flights have been canceled for various reasons. Luckily I still have a number of days - even if it is only to Hawaii. Then I can get a commercial ticket for ~$400…

Now normally I would say “no big deal” if I can’t get there, but I have a number of people relying on me… *sigh* - frustration!

Cross your fingers and wish me luck.

Edit: Well I finally got here. Caught a military flight to Hawaii on a tanker plane (got a couple of pictures of the F18’s along side as we refueled them). Ended up just buying a one way ticket to San Fran from Hawaii (only cost $300 vice the $1800 from Guam).

Was reminded today of a gem from the streams extension - sending a POST message and getting its results. We could do it using cURL or sockets - but why work that hard. Being lazy does have its advantages after all.

Now I could make up an example for this - but why when the manual has such a nice one (though it is a bit buried in the manual on the HTTP/HTTPS wrapper page):

While cruising around looking at various PHP blogs I noticed on a friend's blog (Etienne Kneuss) a nice easy explanation about late static binding ( a feature coming in PHP6). You should check it out fi you are unsure what it is and how it works.

(Sorry colder for taking so long to notice it - it has been a while since I just blog surfed)

Look my name is listed for the book over at sitepoint. Woot!

(Sorry I get excited about the weirdest things)

Everyone has a dream job or jobs. So out of all the companies in the world, if you could choose from all of them for who you would want to work for - which company or companies would it be? Big, small - well known or not, what companies would be the top 3 that you would love to work at and if you feel bold - Why?

For me: OmniTI, Yahoo! and MySQL - though not necessarily in that order. As for why - so many reasons. But primarily because of what I could learn while working at them. So much to learn - so little time to pick so very many brilliant minds.

Got my PHP5 ZCE certificate in the mail the other day along with its sticker. Just one question - why is the sticker in the PHP4 ZCE colors (gold) rather then the PHP5 ZCE colors (blue/purple) with the PHP5... was kinda hoping it would be different then the one I already had. :\ Call me picky.

PHPCommunity (#phpc on freenode) has always had a pretty strong showing each year at the Zend Conference. This year we have 17 people going so far. Because of that we have again decided to get t-shirts.

This years shirts will have the original PHPcommunity logo on the front and I should be making simple iron ons of the members nicks (ex: <lig>) to go on the back. So if you are member of #phpc and are willing to fork over $10 for the shirt - be sure to place an order. If you have questions or want to try and figure something out if you aren't attending Zend Con - get a hold of me on the channel.