A Day in Paradise

How can they not when their confirmation emails read like this:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that
money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, August 30th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

One of the Zend conference sessions that I’m pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe’s “Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP”.

WSO2 was recently listed as one of the top 10 Open Source companies to watch. Among their open source products is Tungsten which is an “Application Server for Web Services.” Essentially a stack of open source packages which offers web service middleware which can either run as a stand-alone application or on top of Tomcat or a J2EE server. It would be great to see how PHP can work together with platforms like Tungsten.

I’ll be presenting a session on “Moving to PHP5 with Style.” This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.

I was banging around Jonathan Coulton’s site and came on some must see zombie related stuff on Flickr and these two songs YouTube.

Go JC!

Oh, and like zefrank, I feel sorry for pluto as well.

As seen on The Eric Rice Show blog.

Lig on IRC pointed me to the phpcommunity site on ning.

It’s been a while since I’ve bothered to look at ning, but this time around I was VERY impressed. The interface is slick! Kudos to Elizabeth and Ben for setting this up, and of course all the people at ning for the cool platform.

I’m running way behind on a pile of stuff, so have decided to do a quick linkdump of some things that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while now.

• I just listened to the latest pro-php newscast (I didn’t listen to the old ones, but love the new format). Haven’t listened in a while and was happy to hear my blog entry discussed. I am planning on writing a follow-up to that. You guys need better show notes, some links maybe?
• I’m giving a workshop at PHP Conference
• I experimented with Chorizo Scanner at our UG meeting, since then I’ve run some other tests and have some comments (blog entry pending).
• I am LOVING YUI. I suck at CSS and Javascript, so the grids and comprehensive js library gives me more incentive to embrace the web2.0 hype. Carousel rocks! I’m planning on blogging about the “controversy” surrounding Yahoo’s design choice in the Grids CSS.
• My Router sucks, so I apologise for the connecting and disconnecting on irc (need to use a proxy). In the last 2 weeks a 300gb hard drive failed, as did my TV tuner

So there are a couple of things that I need to catch up on. Will keep you updated.

Gail Orenstein is currently on a shoot in israel, blogging and posting pictures on her flickr stream. Worth a look!

English movies in Frankfurt

My sister is visiting for the week, so last night I decided to take her into frankfurt to watch the Pirates of the Caribbean.

There is only one Cinema in frankfurt that shows English movies, it’s called Turm Palast, and it is impossible to find on the internet. It seems like there has been a huge influx of spam which buried the website under a pile of domains with names like “kino-turmpalast-frankfurt.gaysm.augustow.pl”. After searching for a while (and having my browser crash after clicking on exceptionally hostile links) I found the yahoo movies page, which showed me what was on. I’m linking to it now so I don’t have to search google again for this.

So anyway, we make it into frankfurt have an ice-cream work our way to the cinema, sit down and wait. The movie started about 15 minutes late, then showed about 20 minutes of commercials and then 10 minutes of trailers and then stops. We wait for a while, a couple people run in and out, and then the light comes on in the projection room and the technicial fixes the problem and we continue with the trailers. By the time we start the movie over an hour has passed.

The movie starts out alright, of course I can’t remember what the first part was about so Angie gave a quick run down. Just when the movie is getting going (after about 20 minutes) it stops again. We wait for another 15 minutes before a guy comes in and tells us that they can’t fix the problem and everyone can come downstairs and get their money back. This is EXACTLY why I watch my movies at home!

The technician had already gone home, and bringing him back would have taken over an hour. So much for german efficiency.

Anyway the good part of the evening that we bumped into Thorsten (from our UG) and his business partner and had a couple beers before the movie started. I promised I’d send him a URL, but I’ve forgotten to what site

You should have a “Remove this domain from all searches” button next to your search results. There are some domains that just come up for everything, and you wish they would just die.

This would only be active when you have “Personalized Search” on.

athlon-reviews

Pretty nice reviews on all things AMD… I haven’t had an intel chip in YEARS, doubt if I’ll ever move from AMD. Maybe when I get my powerbook

Our favorite BDFL talks about PHP on the most recent issue of FLOSS Weekly. Nice easy-going discussion about the genesis of PHP as well as other related technologies.

A couple of interesting tidbits:

• PHP/FI was a joke on TCP/IP
• Rasmus doesn’t like PHP as an acronym, “PHP is just PHP”. They joke about People Hate Perl and Pretty Handy Preprocessor
• The “First version of PHP was in PERL” is incorrect, the idea was explored but quickly dumped.
• We should see a preview release of PHP6 this year
• Two cool apps rasmus likes are Moodle and Sahana
• Rasmus: If all the applications were written by CS majors it would be a boring web. Education Majors should write Education management systems, PHP lets them do that.
• Leo owes Rasmus a carwash.

During the show Leo decides to upgrade twit.tv to PHP5… drupal based site has no trouble running.

Just to keep any of you who are subscribed to my podcast feed around, here’s a nice little tune from Atomsplit.

Americanized

D Sazster is also doing a podcast called Project 52, where he releases a song a week. Like what johnathan Coulton is doing over at his thing-a-week podcast.

Keeping this for later… also need to learn more about HAL.