The first test in the recruitment process is figuring out how to contact me! I will respond to all requests, so if you don’t hear from in 24 hours comment on this post.

Not only did I find the interface fairly intuitive (after a 3 minute clicking session), but it comes with the functionality to actually present your presentation online, invite viewers etc.

There is currently no way to export as a powerpoint (although you can import) but it will give you a html version of the presentation for offline use.

Now I need to see what kind of API it gives for programmers. I can see this being LOTs of fun.

Greg Stein (Director of the Apache Software Foundation) was Mugged – Accepting Donations

Last Friday night Greg Stein was mugged and seriously injured outside of his home in Mountain View, CA.

They gave Greg a black eye and a serious laceration to the head which required numerous stiches. Apparently, he was bleeding profusely when the ambulance came.

The doctors were worried about his head wound and he spent the entire night under observation and went through numerous CAT scans.

The fund is set up to raise $2k to send Greg on a vacation, overflow will go to the ASF. Greg’s work on mod_dav and subversion are IMHO some of the most useful features of Apache2.

More information at the fund’s google group.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

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It really depends on the framework… Zend Framework is very SEO framework. Others that rely on a lot of ajax or javascript POST callbacks to facilitate basic navigational tasks will stop a search engine dead in its tracks.

I have also seen frameworks which use strange http redirects as part as the controller, this has the habit of killing search engines as well.

Speed is also important in SEO, being able to output the correct http cache tags. You should have complete control over the output HTML, the ability to create descriptive css styles and have full control over the structure of your html output.

Clean URL support is good in ZF, but the default front controller still needs some modification to be truely SEO friendly.

When it comes to SEO experts I totally agree that they are the scum of the earth… but they are also just playing a game that Google set up for them to play.

The monetary value of being #1 on Google is just too much to pass up.

Back in “the day” #phpc consisted of between 5 and 10 people, and as IRC channels go it was only us in there for about 2 years. This resulted in everyone getting to know each other well. As time passed the community grew organically, we had the regulars and then people who drifted in and out either asking PHP questions or just coming in to chat for a bit.

In April 2005 Davey set up the #php.thinktank channel, and the additional attention add more regulars to #phpc. By the end of 2006 #phpc participants hovered around 50.

The interaction between #php.thinktank and #phpc was good and many of the same people lurked in both groups. #php.thinktank was designed for more technical discussion, and several organized discussions took place on various technical topics. #phpc on the other hand was simply a place to hang out amongst friends.

Sometime in the beginning of 2007 the community size started to grow quickly, however the number of active participants remained roughly the same. Basically the lurkers were growing, the channel is currently about to break 100 users.

This situation brings up some special concerns.

1. is it reasonable to expect that a public IRC channel can afford you any privacy.
2. does a community that was built around “just farting around” have the right to be exclusive when they think that too many people are involved?
3. is there any reasonable way to limit the number of lurkers?

Note that when I say lurkers, I just mean people who park themselves in an IRC channel and don’t contribute to the channel. People who contribute and then go dormant for weeks/months are a different story.

Toggg was a funny guy, he loved programming and being involved with the communities to which he contributed code. His grasp of written English was such that it gave way to both great comedy, and the occasional flamewar on the mailing list. He was passionate about what he worked on, and held a great grip on regular expressions.

He will be missed.

More information about the projects he was involved in here.

The problem that I’ve stumbled upon is that Ruby’s Gem repository is full of randomly licensed code, including lots of GPL stuff. At the very least, this information ought to be very visible so that it’s possible to weed out any GPL’ed libraries. At best, the Ruby guys would only accept MIT/BSD licensed code for the standard repository.

I am of the opinion that small snippets of code serve everyone best when released into the public domain.

Case study
Survey center is an online survey generator written in PHP. Used to run multi-country panel portals, has interfaces to third-party applications.

Why migrate to Unicode. Before the switch non Western European languages were using html entities which caused a lot of trouble.

UTF-8 is simple to use, backwards compatible with ascii, variable bytelength. Slower than UTF-16, can waste some space on single byte characters.

PCRE supports UTF-8 with the /u modifier

Iconv and mbstring provides functionality missing in PHP. Mbstring offers the possibility to overload some of PHPs native string functions. Overloading functions, will break any binary handling. Slower but safer than iconv. MySQL has good UTF-8 database support in 4.1 and that warranted an upgrade.

The Migration: Grepped through the code and find what string functions were being used. Some functions worked with UTF-8 others had to be replaced with mb_* functions or other custom scripts.

1.Convert all files, Scripts, Templates to UTF-8
2.Enabled mbstring and iconv in PHP
3.Make sure all PCRE functions use the /u modifer. Get rid of the ereg regular expressions.
4.Change all the string functions.
5.Implemented on-the-fly character set conversions for IO, make sure that file uploads/downloads have the right character sets. Convert GET/POST to UTF-8
6.Send the HTTP Content-Type headers for the page. IE doesn’t bother reading the meta tags on SSL pages.
7.Update MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1, decide what the best collation is, discovered the most suitible is utf8_general_ci.
8.Update SQL queries which no longer worked
9.Converted all tables to UTF-8 (Set everything to Latin1 first)

Most of the third-party code wasn’t compatible. Serialized data in the database broke because the strings were no longer the same length, to fix this all data had to be unserialized converted and then serialized again.

Everything was much more complex than expected. Don’t do this because you think that UTF-8 is cool, it’s difficult, not well supported in PHP, and don’t do it without needing it. Don’t do this without a CVS.

Check out the website for meeting details. Wish I could be there.