Pragmatism in today's world
The PHPNW 09 Conference took place last Saturday and I've finally found time to write up my thoughts on it. I went up on Friday in order to meet up with the speakers for dinner and also to go to the pre-conference social at the Lass O'Gowrie. The conference was kicked off with an excellent keynote by Kevlin Henney on uncertainty. The main point I took away was that the attitude of "any decision is… continue reading.
At conferences, I really like to meet people that I know online, but haven't met in person before. The big problem for me is that I have trouble connecting the dots, so if we end up talking, please mention where I might know you from. For example: "Hi, I'm Sue. You might know me as fiddlesticks on the zftalk channel on freenode" and I'll be able to place you correctly and may even remember you… continue reading.
(Updated 1st May 2010) With OS X 10.6, Apple ships PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. Also, everything is now 64bit. This means that the entire effort required to get a working PHP dev environment for my work is now much easier. /usr/local Ensure that the following directories exist: sudo mkdir /usr/local/include sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1 MySQL Download the 64bit DMG version of MySQL… continue reading.
I recently discovered that iTerm has bookmarks so you can set up a bookmark to ssh into a server and change the colours of the window. This makes it easy to remember which terminal window is for which server. Thinking about it, I wondered if you could change the colours of the standard OS X Terminal via AppleScript. Inpired by Red Sweater's Random Color Terminal post, I wrote some code to automatically change the Terminal… continue reading.
I met Chris when he was temping for a client of mine doing data entry into an e-commerce system we were writing. Recently he contacted me to let me know that he has now started learning PHP and is starting to develop a career in web development with PHP. I was quite impressed that he had even managed to land himself some freelance work and had a client happy enough to pay him! He asked… continue reading.
Chris Kirk has kindly provided a Q&A PDF which summarises a number of problems that have been raised and answered in the comments on the tutorial page. If you are having problems, download it and see if it helps. Thanks Chris!
Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :) Three years later and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for Zend Framework as you can tell since the latest version of the tutorial supports ZF 1.8 and 1.9 and uses the new features like Zend_Application and the command line Zend_Tool scripts.… continue reading.
I've just updated my tutorial to version 1.6.3 after checking that it is still compatible with version 1.9 of Zend Framework. The only changes I had to make were: ZF 1.9 comes with its own BaseUrl view helper, so there's no need to write our own. ZF 1.9.0's command line tool doesn't work on Windows. I've created patches on issues ZF-7464 and ZF-7465. I'm sure this will be sorted with 1.9.1 though. ZF 1.9 looks… continue reading.
Just a heads up, I am currently transferring the registrar for akrabat.com, so there may be an interruption of service here if I mess up :)
I'm sure everyone else already knows about watch, but it's new to me. This little utility executes a program repeatedly at a set interval and displays its output. I've been using it with mysqladmin's processlist command like this: watch -n 1 /usr/bin/mysqladmin -uroot -pMYPASSWORD processlist Note that this does put your password on display at the top of the command window whilst watch is running. If you don't want that, you could write a little… continue reading.
