Finished the third book, “I nasjonens interesse” (In interest of the nation), in the series about Carl Hamilton by Jan Guillou on the way home from work today. Looking forward to the fourth tomorrow. :)
I also noticed that I am yet to publish the last blog post from php|tek 2007. I will probably finish it up tomorrow.
I just uploaded some pictures from the New York / Chicago trip to my gallery. Check them out!
I will also upload some stuff to flickr soon that might not be in the gallery.
Arrived in Norway earlier today around 0930 local time. The conference was very nice and the trip has been great.
I will try and upload some photos later today to flickr. I also have some blog posts I have not finished writing from the other days of php|tek. I will finish them up the next couple of days. I have been up for about 26 hours now, so I’m not too productive… I have to try and stay up all day and go to bed at normal time so I won’t have to deal with that much jet lag.
It’s good to be back home again though. It wouldn’t have hurt to stay some more days, but it’s all good for now. I will probably return to New York some other time…
Today was the last conference day. I know that a lot of other guys was going to skip the “Microsoft Tools and Platforms for PHP” talk by Joe Stagner, but I decided to go anyways. I don’t use Windows for other than gaming (and I usually go gaming on consoles), but I think it’s interesting to hear about what they are up to. Joe talked a bit about what he was doing at Microsoft, and talked some about what kind of work they were doing towards PHP. He also talked about the COM support in PHP and some about Silverlight.
Next up was Derrick with “Help, I Found a Bug in my Code!”. He talked about xdebug and how it to de debugging and also some about profiling using KCacheGrind to display the output from xdebug. I have used xdebug mostly for debugging stuff, but the profiling stuff look good as well, so I’m gonna have to try that out some more.
The last session for me was “Lock Your Database Application!” by Lukas Smith which was about, yes, you guessed it, database locking. I was familiar with some of the MySQL’s MyISAM and InnoDB stuff he talked about, but there were other stuff I had not heard about, so there was much to learn.
Marco Tabini had a closing keynote that wrapped up php|tek 2007.
For me the conference has been a very cool experience, and I hope to be able to attend more in the future. :)
This day started of by attending Derick’s “Exposing Hidden PHP Secrets” talk which explained some of the magic that happens behind the curtains whenever someone makes a request to a php file. He also talked a bit about compiler caches and repeated some of the stuff Sara talked about in her tutorial yesterday. He also mentioned the memory leaks that can occur when doing circular references in PHP which Sara did not mention. He also mentioned that today is the 17th of May (Norway’s national day). The fact that I did not remember this myself should give a small hint to how much I care about this day…
Next up was “APC @ Facebook” by Brian Shire which was very nice. They are doing some pretty cool things to make Facebook run as smooth as it does (well, mostly smooth). I picked up a couple of cool tricks that might be used on Nettby later on.After the APC talk Sara was on with “Cryptography, Keeping a Secret” which was cool. She talked about some of the different algorithms out there and some hashing. Most of the stuff I already knew about though (oh yeah, the md5 hash for “Array” is 4410ec34d9e6c1a68100ca0ce033fb17 in case you wondered). She is a good speaker though, so it was all good. :)
After lunch I saw Marcus Börger talk about “The Standard PHP Library” which he has written. I have used only a small part of it (ArrayAccess) and I have never heard anyone say Iterator that many times in one hour before. Quite impressive!
Next up was Chris Hartjes and his “What Can PHP Learn From Ruby on Rails?” talk. He talked a bit about how PHP could adopt different ideas from ROR. He also talked a bit about different PHP frameworks such as Zend Framework and CakePHP. What he liked about CakePHP is that they follow a strict convention so that you will always know where the models, controllers, views and so on is, instead of making it very configurable. I tend to agree on that, and it makes thing a little easier when you don’t have to do that much configuring to get stuff up and running.
The last session of the day was “PHP Security Pitfalls” by Ilia Alshanetsky. He talked about some of the usual security issues these days like XSS, CSRF, session fixation and some more stuff.
Some of the slides that were used are available at http://hades.phparch.com/ceres/public/tek/live/index.php/tek_live::slides.
When the conference was finished we just relaxed a bit in the hotel. After a dinner at Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse (which was very nice btw) it was time for “Facebook’s Thursday Night’s Cocktail Hour” that took place in the bar at the top of the hotel (actually a revolving bar). Andy McKee played his guitar, and we consumed several beers. Too bad people started going back to their rooms a bit early.
Now it’s time to go to sleep here… Another day tomorrow! :)
Today was the first official day of the conference. Rasmus Lerdorf held the opening keynote which was ok, and I went to “Unicoding with PHP 6″ by Andrei Zmievski, “Building PHP based Rich Internet applications” by Mike Potter, “Dude, Where’s My Used Car?” by Adam Trachtenberg, “DB Design for PHP Developers” by Mac Newbold, “PHP Features You Didn’t Know Existed” by Eli White and lastly “PHP Security by Example” by Chris Shiflett. Most of the talks were quite interesting, but I should have gone to “Testing PHP Applications with PHPUnit (2 talks)” by Sebastian Bergmann instead of DB Design and PHP features though. That would have been a bit more interesting I think.
It was quite nice to listen to some of the guys talking though. Most of them has loads of experience and are good speakers.
Some time after the conference there was a quiz that was quite funny. I won a PHP phrasebook since my number was picked out, and because of that I could not be picked to enter the quiz, which would have been more fun since I managed to answer almost every question correctly. :( Well well, maybe some other time. :)
When the quiz was done we went to see the White Sox play against the Yankees. We went a little late on purpose since it was raining, but when we came they had played for quite some time. I think we arrived in the 7th inning. The Sox were not doing very good, and the Yankees ended the game with a couple of homers. It was very fun though. :)
Stay tuned for more php|tek stuff later on.
Today I went to see Sara Golemon’s Extension Writing tutorial which was ok. I have read her book and there was not that much new in the tutorial. The first tutorial i went to was Ilia’s High Performace PHP talk which was quite nice. The hotel we are staying at (Hyatt Regency O’Hare) is pretty darn nice though (except for the really slow elevators).
After the tutorials we took the subway into Chicago to have something to eat. It was raining, so we kinda took the first and best place we could find, which happened to be some place called Cafe Absinthe. We stayed there for a while and had some beers and a burger, and watched some baseball to try and figure out the rules since we have tickets for the Sox vs Yankees game tomorrow. After a while I kinda got reminded on how much smoking sucks since they were allowed to smoke inside the cafe, but apart from that everything was nice! :)
After a while we just headed back to the hotel to get a good nights sleep and get ready for the conference.
Well, now we are in our hotel in Chicago after a weekend in NY. The weekend has been great and we managed to see a lot despite our short time there.
The flight from Oslo went smooth and we landed in NY around 3pm. First we just went to our Hostel on 101st/West End Ave called West End studios which was a “you get what you pay for” kinda place. It was ok for our purpose though. Single room with three beds, and a couple of bathrooms shared by the floor and the price was decent.
The first day we went to a stand-up comedy show around union square which was cool. Unfortunately we were all very tired since we had been up almost 24 hours to try and get used to the local time. At the end of the show we were all just sitting there and trying not to fall asleep. Once the show was done we went straight back to the hotel to sleep.
The next day we went to a diner called Metro Diner which was great. I ordered the Lumberjack breakfast that included a big slice of ham, 3 pancakes, a sausage, two eggs and 3-4 strips of bacon. Deeeeelicious. It was a tad bit too much for me though(I’m used to two slices of bread with cheese in the morning), so I had to leave one of the pancakes behind! :(
The second day was just a sightseeing day. We went to Chinatown and did some shopping, and then we headed over to Brooklyn and had some beers at a bar and just relaxed for a while. We decided to walk across Brooklyn Bridge on the way back which was cool. I took some pictures that I will upload to flickr soon.
Sunday was another sightseeing day and we went to the Empire State Building and out on the deck at round 86th floor or something. Later we went to a burlesque show on Rififi called Sweet and Nasty Burlesque which was fun. Semi-nude girls, humour and beer can never go wrong! The host, Schäffer The Darklord, was fun as well.
We did not do that much on our last day in NY. We just checked out of the hostel and went to the train station, deposited our stuff for a while, and then just went for a walk on Times Square, and had a beer on Planet Hollywood, which by the way was a place that sucked just as much as I thought it would. Before we went back to the train we stopped by Midtown Comics Store which was great.
We had a great time in New York, and I will definitely go back there some time.
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Planet PHP
