December 2009
Monthly Archive
Thu 31 Dec 2009
Continuing the in the spirit of trying something different (first with the Charter Tickets) the php|architect crew are trying something else for next year’s TekX conference - dropping the unconference all together in favor of a Hack Track.
So after much deliberation and debate, we reached a simple conclusion: We’re dropping the Unconference this year. (gasp) I know you’re disappointed but in exchange we were able to add 6 more sessions to the 36 we had. Now we only had ~9 submissions for every speaking slot! Whew, problem solved. […] So after a bit of eggnog, arguing with Marco & Cal, bribing Arbi with cookies, and another round of eggnog, we came up with another idea: Enter…the Hack Track.
The idea behind the Hack Track is that the conference provides the space/projectors/coffee/etc and the attendees are free to use the area to meet, share ideas and talk about their next great ideas.
Thu 31 Dec 2009
Vinu Thomas has posted a tip for WordPress users working with scheduled posts and the “Missing Status” status that’s caused by a bug in WordPress.
Ever since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.9, I’ve been having a problem in the scheduled posts in Wordpress. Everytime I set a post to be scheduled in the future, it used to miss the scheduled time and never get posted. When I checked the status of these posts in the posts admin area, each of these posts had the status “Missed Schedule” next to them.
To correct the issue, you need to make a change to the cron.php script for your installation (in wp-includes) to change the default timeout by quite a bit to ensure that the remote call has plenty of time to finish. It seems its related to the version of PHP’s curl extension that’s compiled into the web server installation.
Thu 31 Dec 2009
As Johanna Cherry and Derick Rethans have a reminder for those wanting to get in on the Early Bird pricing for this year’s PHP UK Conference 2010.
Today (Dec 31st, 2009) is the last chance for £100 registration to #phpuk2010 next month is £110!
You can find out more about the conference and what’s included in the registration on the conference website or just reserve your spot immediately!
Thu 31 Dec 2009
Many software developers (the ones that haven’t been in on a start-up usually) are tempted to make the jump into the seemingly glamorous start-up world to build that next killer web app. Keith Casey has posted a bit of a reality check for developers thinking of making the move.
In the last few weeks, I’ve talked with a number of friends about career changes. Some are feeling antsy and just want to move, others are starting their own consulting, and others are starting and joining startups. While I’ve done all the above - to varying levels of failure success - I thought I’d share the things I’ve learned along the way.
He gives six things to keep an eye out for when considering your entry into the startup world:
- Everyone does everything
- There’s no career path
- You never have enough money
- v1.0 never looks like the original Vision
- Every founder believes in him/herself
- Most startups don’t explode, they fizzle
He’s not saying all of this to push you away from startups, though - more to help you go in “with eyes open” and ready to ask the harder questions before you get into a bad situation.
Thu 31 Dec 2009
New on the Zend Developer Zone there’s the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions (as recorded at ZendCon 2009). This episode is a talk Sam Hennessey gave on scaling vertically with IBM i.
Welcome to the ZendCon 2009 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. […] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA and features Sam Hennessey giving his talk: “PHP - Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i”
There’s three ways to catch this latest episode - you can either listen via the in-page player, download the mp3 directly or subscribe to the ZendCon Sessions feed and get the latest episodes automatically. Be sure to check out the slides too!
Thu 31 Dec 2009
In a new post to his blog today Derick Rethans talks about his move to what he calls his “PHP Development Environment 2.0″ - an upgrade to some of his sites and servers prompted by an update of the Xdebug website.
I’d heard a lot about lighttpd and decided to give that a try - yes, that meant something that I didn’t really know to well was going to run in a production environment. Unlike Apache, with lighttpd PHP doesn’t run as a module, but instead you run it out of process with something called FastCGI.
He talks about his transition to this new web server and how he wanted to replace his current setup of having to use multiple static modules for PHP and having to recompile each time he wanted to use one of them. A few scripts later and a few modifications to the lighttpd configuration file later and he had a working installation with multiple versions of PHP running on multiple ports.
Thu 31 Dec 2009
On the WhyJoomla.com site today Qasim Virjee has a quick tutorial showing how to add in a module to your Joomla site that talks to the Tweetmeme website with just a small bit of code.
When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there’s a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating. However, there’s an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code.
It really just boils down to about five lines of Javascript that can be customized to pull just the information you want (like article templates or article lists). Then it’s just a simple matter of dropping it into your template and adding it to the site.
Thu 31 Dec 2009
George Huey and Wade Wegner from Microsoft talk to Carl and Richard about George’s creation, the SQL Azure Migration Wizard, a free tool that will save you countless hours when migrating SQL Server databases to SQL Azure.
Wed 30 Dec 2009
According to this new article on CIOUpdate.com there’s a few skills that are looking to be in high demand for 2010 including PHP!
IT contractors with Web-related development skills have the most sought-after talents heading into 2010, while demand for mobile developers is growing quickly, according to a new study by Elance. In particular, the online contract worker marketplace said 2010 is shaping up to be a hot year for developers with PHP, HTML, CSS, WordPress and Adobe Flash skills, as well as designers with Photoshop expertise. Demand for those skilled in the MySQL database also cracked a Elance’s top-ten list of 2010’s most requested skills.
They also point out that Elance has given PHP it’s “MVP” award for being the most consistently in-demand skill.
Wed 30 Dec 2009
If you haven’t heard about the Charter Tickets available for this year’s TekX conference you only have a little bit of time to pick one up yourself - until January 6th! If you want to find out a bit more about why these special tickets were offered, check out this new post to Marco Tabini’s blog (of php|architect) with some of their thoughts.
It possible to purchase a full - experience TEK·X ticket’”valid for both the main conference and tutorial day - for $650. The catch (if you want to call it that) is that the special is only valid until we announce the schedule. […] The reasoning behing the Charter Program is very simple: we recognize that there is a core of attendees for whom our conferences have become an opportunity to meet up with their peers and learn what’s happening in the PHP world.
This Charter Program was created just for those people, the ones that are there regardless of what the conference itself has to offer but are confident that they’ll be in for a good even no matter what. For them it’s not just about the sessions, it’s about the people they’ll meet and friends they’ll see again.
Next Page »