Archive for January, 2007
Sun, 28 Jan 2007 2:36 UTC
Just thought I’d take a moment to promote a local BarCamp-style event being held at Emory University in Atlanta on March 16-18: PodCamp Atlanta. Apparently, there’s a lot of PodCamps going on around the world this year, and this is just one of them.
I plan on attending since I’m interested in creating a vlog for another website (perhaps more details on that later… or maybe I’ll just be a tease and make you find it on your own), but I’m not sure if there will be much discussion about podcasting related to vlogs. Nevertheless, I’ll try to make it if only to hear about the various podcasts in Georgia.
If you’re in the Atlanta area in March, you should try to make it.
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Tags: atlanta, barcamp, podcamp, podcast, vlog
Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:53 UTC
Yesterday my grandmother passed away (my mom’s mom). She had battled cancer for many years, and underwent chemotherapy treatments for a long time. Chermotherapy is just plain evil. It’s poison that’s meant to kill cancer cells. The problem is that it doesn’t target cancer cells, so it affects your entire body. It’s very painful, and it’s hard to watch someone undergo the treatments.
Several weeks ago, the doctors decided that chemotherapy wasn’t helping, and so the decision was made to stop treatments. When this conversation occurs, the inevitable is apparent: there’s not much more time. My mom has been making frequent trips to south Georgia, and yesterday, my dad, brother, sister, and nephew made the trip down to see my grandmother. Things were not looking good for her, so we all knew it was time to visit. Unfortunately, I was unable to go. Liz’s due date is Feb 2nd, which means the baby could come at any moment, and I have to be here.
Then, yesterday evening, while close family gathered round, my grandmother passed away. My sister called me at the very moment it occurred at 9:08pm. I was grateful for that because I was able to feel a little bit like I was part of the experience, but, still, I’ve not really been able to deal with it emotionally like I know I would if I were with my family.
Now, as one member of my family passes on, so, too, another member enters the world. Our baby could be born at any minute, and the death of one family member and the birth of another makes me think about how life is a sort of cycle with the older generation passing its knowledge and lessons learned on the next, giving them the charge of this world and it’s burdens, good and bad. While my grandmother is gone, I look forward to introducing my child to his/her grandfather and to my paternal grandparents, as well. I also plan to talk to them a bit more often and let them know I love them.
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Tags: birth, cancer, death, family
Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:52 UTC
Just got a call from Robert Swarthout of PaperBackSwap.com and SwapaCD.com. Robert’s a member of the Atlanta PHP user group, and he was calling to let me know that he and Zack (also of PaperBackSwap and SwapaCD) want to speak at a meeting about what to do when your “pet” project grows into a huge, heavily-trafficked website.
I also noticed today that Robert has a blog (which is why I’m writing this post), so I decided to check it out. Looks to me like he’ll be sharing some of those same experiences with scaling their sites from hardware issues to helpful scripts to build a standard install of Apache, MySQL, and PHP on new machines. Good luck with the blog, Robert!
While writing this post, Robert sent me the blurb for the talk he and Zack will give at the Atlanta PHP February meeting. If you’re in the Atlanta area on February 1st, feel free to attend the meeting. Here’s the blurb:
So what happens when your pet project is no longer a small little site but rather a site with thousands of visitors a day? This month we will talk about the growing pains and code changes we have experienced in taking our pet project to a site that has in excess of 650,000 page loads a day. Can your site scale? What kind of hardware, database and software has it taken to scale our site, PaperBackSwap.com? We will share our experiences with these issues and many other problems we have tackled. Let it be known that we are not experts, just normal Joes sharing what we have learned and continue to discover.
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Tags: atlphp, blogs, php, scalability
Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:08 UTC
Last week, I received a rather cryptic e-mail with the following subject line: “Are you available today to talk about PHP?” The body was even more cryptic: “If so, please provide a phone number. Thanks.” Normally, I would’ve tossed such a message aside, assuming that it’s either spam or someone in Nigeria wanting me to build a PHP application for them after I give them my bank account and routing numbers so they can deposit the funds necessary to complete the work, but I noticed that this message was sent by an Editor at Large from InfoWorld. So, I decided to give it a shot and send my number back to him.
Shortly thereafter I received a phone call from Paul Krill, who was writing a piece about Zend Core 2.0 (specifically with regard to Microsoft support), the Zend-Microsoft partnership, and the new CEO of Zend. Apparently, Zend was announcing their new CEO and releasing a beta of Zend Core 2.0 on the 16th (which they did). Strangely enough, I find it odd that the PHP community remained virtually quiet (literally) on these issues this week.
Nevertheless, InfoWorld ran Paul’s news story on the 16th, and I was quoted in it. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been quoted outside publications in the PHP world. Luckily for me, I was not misquoted.
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Tags: infoworld, microsoft, php, quoted, zend
Tue, 9 Jan 2007 16:06 UTC
I’m pleased to announce the official Atlanta PHP Call for Proposals. If you’re going to be in the Atlanta area and would like to present at an Atlanta PHP meeting, then, by all means, please let me know!
From the official post at Atlanta PHP:
Atlanta PHP announces its official Call for Proposals!
Atlanta PHP meets on the first Thursday of every month at 7:00pm Eastern Time in midtown Atlanta. We seek a wide variety of presentation topics of interest to intermediate-to-advanced Web developers with a focus on PHP and related technologies. Atlanta PHP connects and unites PHP users across the Southeast, provides world-class support and resources to the community, and advocates the adoption of PHP to local, national, and international businesses.
If you will be in the Atlanta area on the first Thursday of a month and would like to present a PHP-related topic at an Atlanta PHP meeting, please contact Ben Ramsey (ben [at] atlphp.org) and include your talk title, brief synopsis of your talk, full contact information (including phone number), and desired meeting date.
At this time, we cannot provide a speaker compensation package, though this is being investigated for the future. If you are interested in sponsorship opportunities allowing Atlanta PHP to provide speaker compensation packages, please contact Ben Ramsey (ben [at] atlphp.org) for further details.
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Tags: atlanta, atlphp, cfp, php, presentations, proposals, talks, user-group
Mon, 8 Jan 2007 18:43 UTC
PHP Throwdown announced today that registration is now open for any individual or team interested in taking part in the competition. PHP Throwdown is, in a nutshell, a competition to see what can be accomplished with PHP in a span of 24 hours.
I’m one of the judges, and I look forward to seeing what you (and your team) will create on Saturday, January 27th!
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Tags: community, competitions, php, phpthrowdown
Fri, 5 Jan 2007 18:01 UTC
UPDATE (5 Jan, 21:00): Patrick Mueller has just posted some links to information about XDebug support for PDT. Now, for those not wishing to use the Zend Debugger, you may now use XDebug.
Since I last wrote about the Eclipse PHP IDE a few weeks ago, the Eclipse team has changed the name of the project to the PHP Development Tool, or PDT. So, if you’ve been looking for the PHP IDE, you can find it in the same place, but the name has changed. The name change isn’t what I wanted to write about, though. Rather, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the free Zend Executable Debugger plug-in for Eclipse.
The Zend Executable Debugger plug-in is part of the all-in-one PDT package, but if you want to install it on your own—since it’s possible to use this debugger without the PDT and with PHPEclipse, for example—then you’ll need to install it using the Eclipse Update Manager (the easier way).
To install the Zend Executable Debugger plug-in using the Update Manager, follow the instructions I provided earlier to set up a new update site using the following information:
- PHP Development Tool (PDT)
UPDATE URL: http://downloads.zend.com/pdt
Please note that the Zend Executable Debugger is not available from the Eclipse site’s PHP update URL listed in my earlier post. Instead, you must use the Zend update URL (listed here) to install the debugger. When installing, if you already have the PDT installed, simply choose to install only the Zend Debugger.
Once installed, you can debug a PHP script by selecting the script and choosing Run > Debug As > PHP Script, and that’s all there is to it. The debugging output appears in the console tab, shown here:
20 Comments »
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Tags: debugger, eclipse, install, php, phpeclipse, phpide, tutorial, zend
