Pragmatism in the real world
The International PHP Conference 2009 took place last week in Karlsrule, Germany. This conference has presentations in both English and German, though fortunately, there was always at least one English session in each time slot! I managed to get to a fair few sessions. Cal Evans' talk on Zend Framework command line applications was an especial highlight as it's an area that we could do better and I now know how to! Similarly, we recently… continue reading.
I've written before about URL rewriting with IIS7's URL Rewrite module. IIS6, which ships with Windows Server 2003 does not have this module though and guess which version my client's IT dept run? As usual, they wouldn't install ISAPI_Rewrite or one of the other solutions for me. In the past, I've simply written a new router that creates URLs with normal GET variables, but this is ugly and I wanted better. One thing IIS6 does… continue reading.
I know I'm late on this one, and I only have the pathetic excuse of being busy. However, ZendCon 2009 was a great conference and I want to thank Eli, Zend and S&S for putting it on. I gave two talks; a Zend Framework Certification refresher tutorial and a talk on project management. Overall I was happy with how both talks went. I think that my presentation style has improved considerably over the last year… continue reading.
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.
