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2006

PHP, the trading card game!

Cal Evans of Zend's DevZone accidentally revealed his php community who's who flash cards (so that he can put faces to names at the conference)--and it looks just like a trading card game.

Luckily for you, Terry Chay was on hand to document them:

You can see more of these on Terry's flickr stream.

The flip side of the cards has each PHP community members bio on the back (I don't think Terry managed to capture that).

It appears that Cal's print run had a glitch, as you can see from this pic:

Looks like Zak has yet another lookalike. At OSCON 2005, there were three Zaks:

OSCON coming up

Tomorrow afternoon I begin my 3-hop flight, via my favorite airport (Phoenix... I got stuck there on my last visit to the west coast) to attend OSCON. I'm giving my tried-and-true PDO talk again this year (yeah, yeah, but I have new material for php|works).

As usual, I'm looking forward to the gathering of OpenSource folks for drinking^Wbrainstorming sessions, and the opportunity to be subjected to cross-polination from non-PHP projects.

See you there?

  • in php
  • 1 min read

deja-vu / nostalgia

I was pleasantly surprised to see this picture on Henri Berguis' blog just now:

I'm pretty sure that this is within a couple of hundred yards of the apartment block that I lived in about 18 years ago in La-Linea, Spain.

Back then, those seats on the waterfront were poorly maintained white-washed concrete blocks, some of which had fallen down towards the coast. The other side of those blocks used to be a rocky slope leading down to the water.

If you followed the road closer to the Gibraltar border, you could park your car on the road side and a group of gypsies would "look after" your car in exchange for a small fee (typically pocket change, if I remember correctly). If you felt that their protection wasn't worth much, you'd return to find that someone had indeed broken into your car and removed any valuables. I wonder if they're still protecting cars to this day?

  • in Blog
  • 1 min read

Beware of hardened Boca burgers

I enjoy eating at Red Robin; they have a delicious menu, and you can substitute Gardenburger or Boca burger patties if you're of a vegetarian persuasion.

I've had a consistently good experience with RR since we moved to the USA, but over the last couple of months the boca burgers have been a bit tough at the Columbia location.

The last one I ordered did this to my fork. Ow!

  • in Windows
  • 1 min read

Mounting ISO files and disk images on Windows

The folks over at OSR Online have a handy, no-nonsense and free (as in beer) driver and configuration utility that allows you to mount disk, floppy and ISO images under Windows.

You have to register to get at their downloads, and in return you get a very occasional email as well as a periodic printed "magazine" containing low level windows kernel coding information.

You can find the download at OsrVirtualCdAndDisk; it works like a charm for me.

  • in php
  • 1 min read

Want to work with us at OmniTI?

My friend and colleague Laura Thomson is posting about some job openings at OmniTI.

Here's a copy-and-paste excerpt from her post:

We are currently in need of four people:

  • A junior PHP dev
  • A junior-ish web designer (Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript + ideally some coding)
  • An Oracle DBA
  • A PostgreSQL DBA

The job ads will be up on our website shortly, but if you are eager to act before then, please email me your resume at jobs@omniti.com

You can find some background about how we hire and what we do on our previous job posting here and here.

I'll be at php/db|works 2006

I'll be giving my usual PDO talk, and a brand new, never-been-seen-before, talk: "PHP and Mail: Best Practices". This will be focused on good, responsible techniques for PHP applications that send out email, from accountability and performance viewpoints.

You can find the schedule online here; as usual, a lot of experienced folks (including several of my colleagues from OmniTI) are giving talks, and this year there are some damned good prizes to be won at the social events.

See you there?