A Day in Paradise

I’ve finally gotten around to testing this new google docs and spreadsheet thing they have. It’s pretty nice. Like with all things google I’m impressed with the speed and simplicity of the interface.

It looks like I’ll be dumping backpackit soon

Now I need to see how I can publish this to my blog.

I just noticed that PHP Programming with PEAR has hit the bookshelves, and is available for order.

This is a collaboration between Stoyan Stefanov, Stephan Schmidt, Carsten Lucke and me. The original book was conceived way back at IPC2k4 so it’s been in the pipeline for a while now. The book covers different aspects of programming using PEAR, We tried to approach the packages which we featured from a solution-based point of view, so a lot of packages are covered and there is quite a bit of code that you can play with.

I’ve created an “unofficial community wiki” for the book where you can add reviews, links to your reviews (I know there are already some out there), comments, or eratta that you may find. So hop on over to The Pear Book and have fun! I’d also like to add links to other sources of information about PEAR, tutorials, books, etc.

Get them here

Yahoo! announced that it’s opening up its signup system to allow external sites authenticate their users using yahoo.

You build great web applications. We have millions of users who store their data on Yahoo!. Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) makes it possible for your applications to use that data (with their permission).

BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.

I have a couple of problems with this:

• Yahoo only accepts Yahoo email addressses. If people signup to yahoo for the authentication or YIM they will probably not check their yahoo account very often (I know I don’t). If I have a service which needs to alert people via email, I want to be able to contact the user at any email address they want, not just their yahoo email address.
• Until the Yahoo! Single Sign-On is widespread, it may be confusing to the users to get shuttled back to yahoo to authenticate / sign in.
• Using Yahoo! to remove “yet another signup form” works if you require only the information that Yahoo! requires, if you have to bounce the user back to another signup form to get some more information, it would be even more confusing. Of course, it would be cool if Yahoo! allowed you to require more information and then stored that as well.

Now the disclaimer, I have read no more than the introduction article, so if this is FUD then I apologise. There is PHP example code available, hopefully I can make time to check it out.

Thanks Kventon.

Cross posting this nice article from Mike Kruckenberg into my PHP section, since it has some great things to keep in mind.

I recently went through this on a platform I was maintaining. The thing that bit me in the ass was some very silly ways previous programmers were parsing timestamp fields. Lesson: do it the right way the first time. The MySQL date/time functions are able to do whatever you need done, there is no need to do date parsing in PHP.

The other issues are mostly minor, and if you do need to change them are relatively easy todo with a global search and replace, or configuration option. Those hours of digging through code looking for timestamp parsing code taught me to RESPECT THE TIMESTAMP!

It’s the beginning of (Un)Conference season, PHP Appalachia is in full swing, and PHPWeekender.

PHP Weekender is an event organized by the PHP Dortmund crew. The event will take place on the 7th and 8th of October in the University of Dortmund. All the information is here.

Unfortunately, due to a very demanding month (relatives visiting, followed by trip to the US, Zend Con and then IPC2k6) I won’t be able to make it. When looking at the schedule I saw that Tobias Struckmeier was giving a talk on Shell Scripting with PHP I thought it would be a good idea to see if I could get an article I wrote on the same topic republished online. And PHP Magazine was happy to oblige me. Even though the article itself was written in the months after the initial release of PHP5, the CLI SAPI hasn’t changed that much and (as far as I can remember) the article is still relevant I’ll post a link when it gets released.

From the Perl Foundation Blog

This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006.

Nick joined the Perl community in the early days of Perl 5. He consistently contributed to the perl5-porters mailing list and later became pumpkin for 5.003_02 where he added the initial implementation of the PerlIO layer.

Some of my first programming projects dealt heavily with Perl/TK. I never met nick but followed the mailing lists and partook of his tireless efforts for the advancement of Perl/TK and Perl in general. He will be missed.

Thanks, Nick

Paper CD Case

Don’t know how long they are going to last… but you can view them all online here and here. Also got Family Guy, South Park and American Dad.

Just got back from watching Crank. What can you say? It’s craaaazzzzy! A couple quick comments.

• The first time I’ve seen google product placement. Between the scenes there were shots from google maps where it panned across the city and then zoomed in on a street/car/house. In the corner was a “Maps provided by google” logo
• Nokia, having phones ring with the “nokia sound” is just as annoying as hearing the windows sound when laptops boot up.
• You really should watch this with proper surround sound set to the appropriate volume
• We have been desensitized to violence
• We have not been desensitized to Sex and Drugs

Now I want to rant about violence in movies. This movie has a lot of Sex, Drugs and Violence. The “funny” thing about it, is that I was really only “shocked” by the Sex and Drugs. This sort of goes along with the rant about how cartoons are being edited to remove scenes where cartoon characters are chugging on a cigar. This is a cartoon where the characters repeatedly blow each other up with various forms of dynamite/fireworks but we’re offended when someone smokes on a childrens show.

So apart from the crazy ride this movie was, I think that this movie has was some form of social commentary. Why is it “alright” to create action and laugh about people blowing each other up, when it’s not “alright” to laugh at people shooting themselves up with huge drug cocktails and the running around town with a huge erection? Obviously when I say “alright” I mean socially acceptable.

Of course combine them all and you have some great scenes, like where he is involved in a car chace / shootout while getting a blowjob. Gives a whole new meaning to shouting “Keep your head down!”

Another highlight was when he needed the poor indian guy’s taxi so he threw him out of the taxi and yelled “Al Quida”, and have the crowd jump on the poor guy and beat the crap out of him. I know, I shouldn’t have laughed… but again, I think this was yet another peice of social commentary by the director.

We took the kids out to the park to have a bbq. While we were waiting for everyone to show up, Annie comes up and says

Annie: “I want to play goofball”
Stella: “goofball?”
Annie: “yes, where you have a stick and hit the little ball”
Stella: “You mean mini-golf?”
Annie: “Yes, mini-golf”

I’ve blogged about Shadow Falls a before, it’s an audio-drama which centers around an epic power struggle between good and evil which takes place in the mysterious town of Shadow Falls. Shadow Falls was created by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff and a large crew of actors and producers. The show has ramped up, and we’re now gearing up for the 6th and last episode of the first season.

Alongside the drama, Mark is doing a “companion” podcast where he talks about various issues (think directors commentary on a DVD). In the first episode he solicited interview requests, so I decided to put together a couple questions and Mark responded immediately.

Thanks Mark for taking the time, and for being the first interview in my 5-question-interview section So without further ado, on with the interview.

(more…)

This one is at least a little more coherent. I agree with what they say, the problem, is that what they say doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you think my website is ugly and because of all the ugly sites the internet sucks. What matters is that despite (and in some cases, because) of all the crap on the internet people still use it and enjoy it.

Another case of the elitest “there-goes-the-neighbourhood” syndrom.

Having said that, the original list is quite interesting. Notice how YouTube and Del.icio.us are on both lists. Where is Craigs list? Is that just another one of those ugly sites that millions of “uncool people” use?

A nice tutorial on GIT explains the development of the program, and Linux’s history.

Torvalds began working on Git as an interim solution to replace BitKeeper, which had previously been the primary source code tool in use by Linux kernel developers worldwide. Some members of the open source community felt that the BitKeeper license was not the best fit for the open source world, and thus Torvalds decided to investigate revision control systems with more permissive licenses.

Has to make you wonder what this guy was smoking, as I remember it went down quite a bit differently.

Over the next three months, BitMover intends to phase out the free BitKeeper product. Some money has been set aside to provide commercial licenses for certain kernel developers, however Linus Torvalds is not one of them. Larry suggested, “if Linus and Andrew and the others moved elsewhere, we’d glady comp them licenses”, referring to their current employment with OSDL.

But it’s good to hear that GIT is gaining momentum.

and can’t log into the system!

Thankfully there is usually someone who has done this before you. I also took a quick look at the 3 tables on another development machine and compared the data. The tables in question are: ezuser , ezuser_role and ezrole - although I didn’t modify the ezrole table.

The EZP forums are great for this type of thing.