More Example Zend Framework Blog madness

Pádraic Brady has been busy writing more posts in his Example Zend Framework Blog series:

• Part 9: Exploring Zend_View and Displaying Blog Entries
• Part 8: Creating and Editing Blog Entries with a dash of HTMLPurifier
• Part 7: Authorisation with Zend_Acl and Revised Styling
• Part 6: Introduction to Zend_Form and Authentication with Zend_Auth
• Part 5: Creating Models with Zend_Db and adding an Administration Module
• Part 4: Setting the Design Stage with Blueprint CSS Framework and Zend_Layout
• Part 3: A Simple Hello World Tutorial
• Part 2: The MVC Application Architecture
• Part 1: Introductory Planning

All parts include loads of code and they are very easy to follow along. If you want to learn (much) more about Zend Framework, this series is perfect for you!

Chicago - Day 5 (php|tek - Day 3)

The days are going by pretty fast over here! Suddenly it’s the last day of the conference and soon we will be going back to Norway. Well … these are the talks I attended the last day:

1. Securing the PHP Environment With PhpSecInfo by Ed Finkler
2. High Performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques by Eli White
3. APC @ Facebook by Brian Shire
4. The Internet is an Ogre by Terry Chay

The APC talk was pretty much the same as the one I saw at last years php|tek. It included some of the new features of APC but the rest was pretty much the same. Terry Chay’s keynote speech was pretty amusing but contained IMO a bit too many f*ck’s and s*it’s.

After the conference was over we took a short break and headed downtown Chicago for some last day shopping and relaxing. We took a taxi but the driver suggested that he could take us to the nearest Blue Line station instead because of the traffic. We got off at Washington and headed for the nearest restaurant which happened to be The Italian Village. The food was great so if you happen to be in the neighborhood, go check it out.

After eating we went out for some shopping. The others stopped by a big shopping center to buy some jeans and other stuff. I took off and headed for The North Face shop in the famous John Hancock Center. Once I was done there I headed over to an Adidas store nearby to get some shoes.

I met up with the rest of the guys at the top of the Hancock Center for a beer and a break. The view of the city up there is pretty amazing. We didn’t step outside though and the bar was full so we had to sit someplace else.

Once out of the building we took a cab back to the hotel. Our flight left early the morning after so we headed for our rooms to pack our things and just relax.

And that’s it for this years php|tek!

WordPress usability issues

Mats has written a couple of posts about some usability issues in the WordPress blogging software:

• WordPress Usability Issues
• Followup on WordPress Usability Issues

I agree with most of the points he mentions. Especially the ones about the placement of the save button in the admin dashboard. If anyone else reads this feel free to link it in your blog as well!

Zend_Service_Recaptcha proposal

A little while back I wrote a set of classes in PHP to fetch a reCAPTCHA instead of using the libraries they offer (which is just a set of functions). I checked to see if there was a proposal for a reCAPTCHA ZF component and Pádraic Brady had a proposal placeholder in the wiki. There was no relevant information in the proposal so I restructured my stuff a little to make it “ZF compliant” and sent Padraic an email about it.

The proposal has been updated and I’m co-proposing it with Pádraic and you’ll find it over at the ZF wiki.

Great bloggers of the past

xkcd latest is about the great bloggers of the past watching over us from the stars. Instant classic!

Chicago - Day 4 (php|tek - Day 2)

It was a tad bit hard to get up this morning but I managed to attend the following talks:

1. Test Driven Design in PHP by Jason Sweat
2. Of Haystacks and Needles by Derick Rethans
3. PEAR, Phar, and Smart PHP Application Deployment by Greg Beaver
4. Help, my website has been hacked, now what? by Eli White

After talking to some of the other guys I wish I had went to Performance Tuning MySQL by
Morgan Tocker instead of the Phar talk that was IMO pretty boring and left me with nada. I guess it’s hard to be more specific on the topics when you only have one hour as I wrote earlier…

Anyways, I met up with Shahar Evron from Zend that had a course for some of us at VG last year. I had hoped to grab a beer later on with him but we didn’t find each other so we’ll take it some other time.

After the talks I relaxed a bit before heading over to Gibson’s with the NRK and Dagbladet guys. Erlend was at a family dinner since he has some family here in Chicago and Peter went downtown with Espen and Espen from Go Mobile. This time I had brought my passport so I could enjoy some Samuel Adams with the food over at Gibson’s but this time they didn’t ask us for ID at all!

After the steak orgie I headed over to Shoeless Joe’s with Andreas and one of the guys from Dagbladet for a couple of beers. We were all pretty stuffed from Gibson’s so we didn’t stay at Joe’s for very long.

Last year we went downtown Chicago every day after the talks but this year we have been more around the hotel which has been very ok actually. Several hours of talks each day is pretty exhausting and it’s nice to take it easy once in a while. It’s also pretty boring to spend 45 minutes on the rapid transit each way…

And once again … that’s it for today!

Chicago - Day 3 (php|tek - Day 1)

So, the first official day of php|tek 2008. Andi Gutmans held the keynote which was very good. I’ll post some links to presentations once I find them.

On the first day I attended the following talks:

1. Choosing RIA technologies by Josh Eichorn
2. State & Ajax - How to maintain browser, and application state in an asyc world by Paul Reinheimer
3. XQuery: Next Generation Data Access, Today by Kitman Cheung
4. Building Distributed Web Applications by Jason Rexilius
5. Facebook performance caching by Lucas Nealan

It’s quite exhausting to go through all this in a day and at the end of the day it’s hard to stay focused. It might be better to have each talk last about 2 hours and be more in-depth instead. Some of the talks I have attended are quite basic stuff, and I think it’s a waste of time to do that at a conference such as this one. People don’t come here to learn basic php, right?

After all the talks we went to our rooms and relaxed a bit. I got to write some posts and uploaded some photos to my flickr account.

Later there was a Rockband battle here at the hotel which was quite fun. Paul Reinheimer and some other guys had dressed up as Kiss and was rocking out when I got there. Microsoft sponsored the event and the drinks were on the house for the first hour (and then became ridiculously expensive). I had some experience from Guitar Hero III on my 360 and we formed a band called Fjord that consisted of me on guitar, Andreas (from NRK) on vocals, Fredrik (also from NRK) on drums and another guy (Mike?) on bass. We failed miserably and didn’t qualify for the second round. I totally blame the other guys!

After the Rockband battle we headed over to the hotel bar for some drinks where we met up with two guys from Dagbladet (another Norwegian news paper) and some other guys from Sweden. We had great fun and then headed over to a nearby bar called Shoeless Joe’s and stayed there for a while having fun. To get there we had to play frogger across the main highway right by the hotel. Since it was pretty late it was not that much traffic though.

And that’s it! Another day gone by in Chicago!

Chicago - Day 2 (php|tek Tutorial day)

Today I got up early after a really good nights sleep to register for php|tek. This was the in-depth tutorial day and each talk lasted for 3 hours. I went to Working With Web Services by Rob Richards and Testing with PHPUnit and Selenium by Sebastian Bergmann.

I’ll try to write some posts about unit testing in php using PHPUnit sometime soon since Mats and I will use that allot for a project we are doing together.

After the tutorials I headed back to the hotel room for a quick rest. I met up with the NRK guys a bit later and we took the metro to Damen to get something to eat. Andreas wanted to visit a comic book store there as well to pick up some more comic books.

We decided to eat at a place called Earwax Cafe. It was a pretty good choice since the food there was really good! After a little while we headed over to a place called Nick’s Beergarden to grab some beers before heading back to the hotel.

And thats pretty much it for this day.

123-meme

I just read about something called 123-meme on oterbloggen. What’s that, you ask?

1. Pick up the book closest to you
2. Open page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence…
4. …and publish the next three sentences
5. Link to 5 other bloggers and tell who linked you

The book closest to me is actually a book I have borrowed from Jo Christian (that linked me). It’s called Bringing Down the House and it’s about some MIT students that teams up and learns how to count cards and uses that to win millions of dollars from casinos. Here are the sentences:

‘Good luck with your third round,’ she said, before numbly walking away. Kevin watched her go. Then he gathered up his briefcase and headed for his gate.

Last I have to drag some other people into this as well. I can only think of two names at the moment so I’ll link those: Mats, Shahar.

Uploaded some photos from New York

Just added some photos over at my flickr page! Check ‘em out!

Here’s a couple of sneak peeks:

Traffic jam at 1st avenue:

Flatiron Building: