Machine Head is back on AOTW, and this time with my personal favorite Machine Head album, and possibly one of my favorite metal albums of all time. I have yet to see any of this stuff live so I’m really looking forward to seeing Machine Head play at Oslo Spektrum in November!
My favorite songs on this one:
I got a message on Flickr a little while back from someone telling me that one of my photos (shown below) were to be included in a guide of Chicago called Schmap. I have no idea if the guide is any good, but with my picture in it I’m pretty sure it can’t be all that bad! :p I just got a new message telling me that the new guide was out with my photo (and allot of others’ photos as well) included. The photo they chose is attached to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel and was taken at my stay there in 2007 while attending php|tek. And if I’m not mistaken Naveed is present at the photo (lower right corner), which is a pretty weird coincidence (concidering I’m at another Hyatt with him at the moment).
Check out the guide as well!
Sooo, the day today started with a great breakfast in the room delivered by the ever so great room service! Why haven’t I got that at home?! Since there were no conference talks today I had decided to get up to Berkeley to check out the Adidas Originals store.
Naveed and myself took a quick cab ride to the CalTrain station to take the train up to SF. Once there he met up with his friend here and I went for Berkeley. I had written down some notes from google maps on how to get there so it wasn’t that hard figuring out where to go. I had to take the train down to the bay and then get on the Bart over to Downtown Berkeley Station. Once there I walked around a bit before I went for the Adidas store.
When I got to the store I got a little disappointed though. I visited similar stores when in New York and Chicago but this one was quite boring. I had hoped to find some nice shoes for Hilde but no luck! :( The were a couple ones I liked but they didn’t have the correct size. Sorry Hilde! So, all the way up to Berkeley for nothing! Well … at least I have been somewhere I haven’t been before, which is always nice!
After a coffee at a small cafe I headed back to SF to have a look at a couple of places I hadn’t been before. I somehow stumbled upon a rather huge North Face shop which I visited for some minutes. I just had to get out of there to avoid emptying my account. Since I picked up a jacket last weekend I thought to myself that I had gotten enough.
When I got out of the shop I continued to walk around for some hours. I really like the atmosphere in SF. There were a couple of people who stopped me to tell me that they loved my t-shirt (the one I’m wearing on this photo). That don’t really happen to often back home! To me it seems that people are much more open and talkative here. I wish it could be more like that at home as well.
After a while I got some food at a Mexican restaurant which I don’t remember the name of. The food wasn’t all that great so no loss. After the quick meal I walked down to the CalTrain station to get back to Santa Clara. There had been an accident of some sort so I was stuck on the station for well over an hour. I had my iPod with me so all I had to do was just sit down, relax and listen to some music.
Once I arrived in Santa Clara I got in a cab to go back to the hotel. The driver told me that it would be much cheaper to get off one station before Santa Clara and take a cab from there instead. Would have been nice to know that before my last cab ride here (at least for this time)! Anyways, once back at the hotel I ate some fried calamari at the hotel bar and had one last beer before going back to my room to pack up and write this post. I tried to upload some photos earlier today but the connection is quite horrible so I’ll wait until I get back home.
I have really enjoyed my stay here. San Francisco has become one of my favorite cities. I will most likely come back here for a longer stay sometime. I’m sure other cities on the west coast are great as well so when I get back here I’ll have to visit some other places as well. It’s time to go to sleep since we have to get up around 05:00 to go to the airport. See y’all later!
Today I only managed two talks. This was the last day of the conference so it was a bit shorter than the other days. I skipped the first session because of, well, I just didn’t manage to get up early enough. Yesterday was a bit too much for me I guess.
The first talk I saw today was What’s new in PHP 5.3 by Andi Gutmans, Stanislav Malyshev, Marcus Boerger and Elizabeth M Smith (slides available here). There is allot of new stuff coming in 5.3. Some worth mentioning are namespaces, late static binding, __callStatic magic function, goto and lots more. Check out the slides for more info.
The other talk I attended today was I need more servers! what do I do? (Scaling a php application) by Maurice Kherlakian which was about scaling (duh!). Some of the stuff he talked about was load balancing and database infrastructure.
After this talk I headed back up to my room to relax a little. After a while Naveed and myself went over to Taco Bell (thanks for the great tip Stein!) to eat a taco. After this we got a cab and headed down to Santana Row to see if we could find some shops. I guess the shops in that street is a bit to up scale for me. We headed over to a Macy’s nearby but we didn’t get too much. I got myself a new cap, and that was it. After this we just walked around for a bit. We visited a Best Buy shop to pick up a cable for my camera before going back to the hotel.
When we got back we headed over to a nearby place called Birk’s Restaurant which was pretty decent. After the food we went back to the hotel, and I started writing this post. Tomorrow I will try to get back up to Berkeley to find the Adidas Originals store to get some more shoes! That’s it for today.
Oops, almost forgot this week’s AOTW award!
This week the award goes to the album that many people believe is one of the best thrash metal albums of all time (myself included): Reign in Blood by Slayer. I was lucky enough to see Slayer perform the complete album live at Wacken Open Air in 2003 which was my first time seeing them live. It was absolutely incredible.
My three favorite songs are:
Getting up this morning was not that easy. I hadn’t slept too good so I skipped the first session to try to get some more sleep and get more out of the rest of day.
When I got up I went to a talk called Pick Your Protocol: Creating Web Services with Zend Framework by Matthew Turland. He had some technical issues to begin with so the talk was about 10 minutes too short. He talked some about REST, XML-RPC and SOAP and showed some examples using Zend Framework. Unfortunately I didn’t get too much out of this talk. If he had had two hours instead of one it would have been much better.
After this I went to check out Stefan Esser’s talk about Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications which I thought was good! No doubt that Stefan is very good when it comes to security issues (and probably lots of other things as well). Some of the issues he talked about was a bit obscure and requires the attacker to know allot about the system before attacking. Since there are so many open source products out there today this is often the case anyways so the stuff he talks about is very important.
After this talk I had some lunch and sat down with Morten Amundsen from Teleperformance and had a chat with him. Apart from Naveed and myself I believe Morten is the only one from Norway at ZendCon (with the exception of Sebastian Bergmann and Derick Rethans who at the moment lives in Norway).
As soon as lunch was over I headed over to see Ben Galbraith’s talk about State of Ajax which was probably one of the best talks here. People at the #zendcon channel on IRC just wanted to let him talk on, which I agreed to. The presentation was absolutely great!
After this I went to see Terry Chay’s UnCon talk called Making frameworks suck less. Terry Chay is an entertaining speaker and has some pretty interesting views on the topic. I also saw his “The internet is an Ogre” talk at php|tek in May which also was good.
When Terry was done I went across the hall to see Sebastian Bergmann’s Quickstart to Continious Integration talk. He showed us phpUnderControl which looked cool. As stated earlier I will try it out for some of the stuff I do at work. We have a dedicated machine for Subversion and Trac and I will probably try to get phpUnderControl up on that machine and see how it goes. When that happens I’ll be sure to blog about it.
At this point I was getting really tired but there was only one more session for the day. The last talk I attended was High Performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques by Eli White. The talk was pretty much the same one that Eli did at php|tek in May. I learned more from the talk Jay Pipes did on Tuesday which was a bit more technical than this one.
When all the talks was over I headed over to the hotel bar to have some food together with a couple of guys I had talked to on the #zendcon IRC channel. At the bar I met a guy called Laurence Chalem who worked at Cisco that had written a book called Thrive with Diabetes. He was not here for the conference but lived close by and used to come to this hotel to eat. There was actually a guy from Norway who had written a chapter in his book. I don’t have diabetes myself but I know a couple of people that does have it, and some of the things he had to say was pretty interesting.
After we had finished eating we went up to check out the Yahoo! party here. The drinks were more than at the hotel bar so we just headed back down. I had talked to a guy called James about going someplace else to get a drink so we teamed up with Shahar, Nick, Alexander and Masi from Zend and headed down to San Jose to check out some pubs.
First we headed down to a street called Santana Row and went for an “Irish” pub called Rosie McCann’s Irish Pub that turned out to be a really bad disco. The description of the place from sanjose.com is kinda funny:
Rosie McCann’s Irish Pub in San Jose isn’t a typical Irish bar because being located in swanky Santana Row it has to play host to trendy diners and drinkers rather than brogue accented boozers who’s tastes don’t stray far from the meat and potato spectrum.
A bit prejudice, eh? If you are ever in San Jose looking for a good pub, please don’t go to this place.
We quickly got out and headed over to something completely different. The name of the place was Oasis and was what they call a dive bar, with karaoke and pool tables. We all liked this place allot more anyways so we stayed here for a while playing pool and listening to all the people singing. Quite fun.
Since we now had seen two extremes we wanted to go for something in between to just relax at the bar. Nick knew of a place nearby so we went there for a beer before going back to the hotel to get some sleep.
I was exhausted when I returned to the hotel (around 02:30) and I probably fell asleep before I hit the bed! I will go out for some food now (~19:00 on Thursday) so I’ll write more about todays talks later. I have also managed to get an USB cable so I have downloaded the photographs I have taken as of now and will upload some of the later today.
This day started with some cups of coffee and a good breakfast. I shared a table with Shahar and Masi and some other people from Zend. Talking to some really smart people is always a good way to start the day!
After the breakfast I headed over to the keynote held by Harold Goldberg, the CEO of Zend Technologies. He called in Andi Gutmans so that he could announce the partnership between Adobe and Zend and talk about some other stuff. As stated in Andi’s blog the goal of the partnership is to ease the development of Flex with PHP. Adobe will also provide AMF support to the Zend Framework which will be great!
After the keynote I attended Jay Pipes’ session on Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning for MySQL, which was very good! I picked up some good tips on MySQL performance and optimizing. Some of the stuff will come in really handy for the project that Mats and I are doing. I’ll bing some notes back to the guys at work as well so we can try to get stuff going even faster! Jay was really entertaining and knew how to keep the audience interested in what he had to say.
After Jay’s talk I went to the Getting Started with Zend Framework talk by Matthew Weier O’Phinney which for me was a bit too basic. The main reason for going to that talk for me was that none of the other talks were any interesting for me. At this point I started to think about why I had not signed up for the Zend Framework Certification test! Hopefully I will be able to bribe my boss to let me take the certification (yes, I know you’re reading this). :p
After the ZF talk it was time for lunch. I sat down with some guys from Digg and Eli White (which is an ex Digg’er) and enjoyed some good food while talking about some Memcached stuff.
After lunch I attended Scaling PHP Applications with Zend Platform by Shahar Evron (slides available on slideshare). Again, this was mostly because none of the other talks were very tempting. I had a feeling that none of the stuff in the talk was new to me since Shahar spent a couple of weeks with us at work teaching us about Zend Platform back in 2007. I have also been checking out some of the new features in Zend Platform myself after the course we had, so I knew what was coming. I think Shahar is a good speaker though so it was absolutely worth it anyways.
After this I attended PDO: PHP Data Objects by Wez Furlong in hopes of some information about further development of PDO (PDO2 with or without a CLA) since PDO has not seen to many updates lately. This never happened and the talk was pretty much the same as the one I attended at php|tek in 2007. I talked to Wez the other day about the PDO_OCI stuff still beeing marked as experimental in the docs and he said that it worked pretty good but it was still marked as experimental simply because noone had said otherwise. I will probably try to use PDO for the framework I develop at work when I will start to make components that interact to our article database. Hopefully we will be all-MySQL someday, but we have a long way to go.
This was my last session for today actually. I had a pretty bad headache so I went back to my room to relax a little. I think that 6 sessions in a day is too much. At the end of the day most people start to get unfocused and spend too much time on IRC or something else…
After a powernap I headed back down to have some dinner and free drinks and to collect some swag from the sponsors! Free food/drinks and swag == Instant win! I managed to get a cool Git tshirt, a Zend tshirt, a small RC car and some other cool stuff.
There is also another conference at the convention center called Diskcon that is about harddrives. They have some pretty amazing stuff on display. They have several harddiske from the early sixties and some other pretty obscure stuff. I’ll snap some pictures of the stuff tomorrow and post it on Flickr later. I forgot to hassle Derick for the USB cable today so I’ll try to get it tomorrow!
After the dinner I headed out to the hotel bar together with Justin, who I met yesterday, for some more beer. We sat there for a while talking about everything and just having a great time. After a while I was getting really tired so I headed back up to my room to relax a little (and to write this blog post).
It’s getting late, so I think I’ll just go to bed! Good night to you all.
So, first day of ZendCon! I must say, this conference seems to be far better organized than the two php|tek’s I have been to. Everything just seems to work! The registration went by quickly and I got a sweet name tag with a small ribbon that said ZCE. Instant win!
The first tutorial I attended was PHP Developer Best Practices with Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Mike Naberezny (slides are available at Mike’s blog) which gave me some ideas on how to improve the way we do stuff at work regarding deployment/testing/documentation and more. I’m looking forward to writing up some more on this subject when I find the time for it! The talk also made me want to start using phpUnderControl for the framework stuff I do at work.
After the first talk I headed up to see Sebastian do his Quality Assurance in PHP Projects talk which was also very good. The slides are available at slideshare. I also picked up some ideas here regarding unit testing and how things can be done more efficient. I also picked up some ideas on how we can do Acceptance/System tests using Selenium RC.
After the two tutorials I relaxed in the hotel bar talking to some people and waiting for the ZCE dinner to get started. People here are very easy to talk to and it’s not that hard getting a good conversation going. It’s good that people wear name tags here because I suck at remembering names! Especially when you meet so many people at once.
Once the ZCE dinner started people went outside to the pool area where lots of pizza and beer was waiting! I talked some Norwegian with Derick Rethans while Sebastian Bergmann tried to follow along. I think he only understood very small portions of what we were saying though so we switched back to English pretty soon. I’ll borrow a USB cable from Derick tomorrow so I can transfer some photos from my camera and post some of them over at flickr.
After a while I noticed Shahar Evron standing around so I went over to have a chat with him and some other Zenders which was great.
I talked some with Matthew as well, who did the first tutorial today, about some Zend Framework stuff. It’s always cool to meet people you have only “talked” to via mail or on IRC.
There were some guys there (Ivo Jansch and some other guys from iBuildings) who recognized VG Multimedia from my name tag because they had tried out Varnish for their stuff (VG Multimedia initiated the project). They complained about the lack of 24/7 support for Varnish which Linpro didn’t want to do, which seemed like show stopper for them. They has also tried to use the ESI features in Varnish with mixed results. I’ll probably try to chat some more with them to see what they had been trying to do and what had gone wrong. We will probably try to use some ESI stuff at work soon so it would be great to know of problems that other people have encountered before we dive into it. It would also give me more to blog about and that can’t be bad! :)
After a while the temperature dropped and most of us went indoors and sat down in the hotel bar instead of standing outside freezing.
The pubcrawl that was planned didn’t seem to catch on. I think some guys went for it but a lot of others just sat in the hotel bar relaxing and having a blast. I met a really nice guy called Justin that seemed to share my taste in music. We just chatted away about music and some PHP related stuff. He mentioned a friend of his that is playing somewhere in SF on Wednesday and if he decides to go I’ll probably go there with him.
After a while I decided to head back up the my room to write this post and go to bed! And since the post is finished, the bed is awaiting my arrival! See y’all later!
So, how did this day start? You guessed it! With a ride on a fabulous cable car towards the bay area. Since I was going out to Alcatraz at 1130 I thought I could find some place to eat breakfast at Pier 39. I went for some eggs and bacon at a place called Wipeout Bar & Grill which was just your average tourist restaurant. Since I didn’t have too much time I quickly finished eating and headed over to Pier 33 where the boat to Alcatraz waited.
The weather at this time was not too good but it cleared up just before the ride started. I took some pictures from the boat and some more on the island that I’ll post as soon as I can borrow an USB cable from someone!
It was really cool walking around the island looking at the old buildings and seeing the small cells that people did time in. The cells were smaller than I imagined though! I went inside one of them and sat down on the “chair” to relax a little. I can’t imagine how it would be like to only have this small space to “live” in for about 25 years like Creepy Karpis. I had a look at the isolation rooms as well and I can’t really say they looked like somewhere I would like to stay. Anyways, it was a very cool experience to see the place.
After a couple of hours out there I went back to the bay and walked around some more. On the way back to the hostel I stumbled upon a couple of guys playing some music on the sidewalk. They were called The Ferocious Few and was pretty good! I picked up a cheap CD and hung around listening to them for a while while enjoying a cup of coffee.
When back at the hostel we grabbed a taxi down to the Caltrain station to take the train down to Santa Clara. We quickly grabbed a taxi when we arrived and headed over to the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara hotel. I had read some reviews of the hotel before we left and some of them were not that positive. I have been to better hotels but it’s a typical business hotel I guess. It’s also connected to the Convention Center which is very convenient. I’m really looking forward to going to sleep here though. It’s been a while since I have had a good night’s sleep in a good bed…
After unpacking we went out to find something to eat. We walked around outside of the hotel for a while but quickly found out that there was not really anything at all around here. We went back to the hotel and ate in the hotel bar instead. I started talking to a nice guy called Jacob from Minnesota who’s here for Zendcon as well. He had also figured out that there was not much going on around here. Well … enough about that! I’m back in my room now and the bed is waiting! The conference starts tomorrow at 0900 and I plan to attend PHP Developer Best Practices by Matthew Weier O’Phinney and either Quality Assurance in PHP Projects by Sebastian Bergmann or SQL Query Tuning by Jay Pipes.
Now I better try out the bed before I fall asleep on the laptop. Good night people!
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