Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category.
24th July 2006, 01:08 pm
On Wednesday George and I are moderating the PHP Lightning talks at OSCON. The Perl ones have been running for years and are a lot of fun.
If you have something PHP related to talk about, please come and talk to us about it. The talks are really short (5 minutes) and minimal preparation is required. If you have never given a conference talk before, this is a great way to start. Or, if you’ve given lots of talks but really need to rant about something, this is your opportunity.
Email a really short description of what you’d like to talk about to lightningtalks-oscon2006@omniti.com and we’ll put you on the list.
Hope to see you there!
24th July 2006, 01:01 pm
I’m here at OSCON in sunny, sunny, Portland, and I was just discussing with Nat Torkington my long standing concept of the T-Shirt Index as internet economic indicator. He pointed out that I should blog about it, so here it is.
The first year I came to OSCON - I now can’t remember if it was 2000 or 2001 - was at the end of the dot-com boom. That year there was a huge sense of excitement around the place, lots of parties, lots of enthusiasm about Open Source. On the exhibit hall floor, I collected a total of 14 vendor tshirts. They were giving them away like candy on Halloween.
The next year, after the crash, I went home with one tshirt, and hence the T-Shirt Index was born.
It’s gradually been on the upswing ever since: in 2005 I went home with 12 shirts. This year there are a huge number of people at OSCON, the enthusiasm is palpable, and I suspect the T-Shirt Index will be high.
I’ve always been interested in weird economic indicators: at least since I read Robert Heinlein’s Friday, where the protagonist correlates the length of beards, the length of skirts, and the price of gold. This one is my contribution.
26th June 2006, 02:12 pm
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.
2nd June 2006, 06:29 pm
We’ve cooked up a special offer here - anybody who signs up for one of the OmniTI ApacheCon tutorials by the early bird date (Tuesday June 6), will receive complimentary copies of these books:
Our tutorials are:
Look forward to seeing some of you in Dublin.
26th May 2006, 07:35 am
I will be speaking at the New York PHP Conference in a few weeks (June 14-16), on the topic of Writing Maintainable Code, a personal bugbear of mine. I think of it as an anti-The-Daily-WTF talk, and it should be more entertaining than it perhaps sounds. (If you’ve never read the WTF, I strongly recommend it both for entertainment and enlightenment.) I believe in terse, elegant code that gets the job done, which perhaps reflects my origins as a C programmer rather than as a Java one. (That ought to get me some flaming comments 
)
Hope to see some of you in New York.
4th May 2006, 07:59 am
I will be giving a tutorial at ApacheCon Europe 2006 titled "PHP and MySQL Best Practices 2.0". This is a brand new sequel to the best practices tutorial I’ve delivered in the past, with all new material. I’ll cover techniques for creating robust,
maintainable, scalable applications on an Apache, PHP, and MySQL
platform. In this 2.0 version of the tutorial I’ll specifically look at
the challenges of applying these principles in the Web 2.0 sphere.
Topics include:
- Best practice architectures for LAMP web apps
- Design for growth
- Managing legacy applications
- Testing and debugging (focusing on Web 2.0 apps)
Attendees should walk away with a better understanding of engineering
large web applications.
There are some really interesting talks in the schedule. My colleague at OmniTI, Theo Schlossnagle, has two tutorials, one on "Scalable Internet Architectures", and a new one, "Production Troubleshooting". Chris Shiflett will give his "Essential PHP Security" tutorial, as well as talks on security and testing. I also look forward to seeing Christian Wenz, Andrei Zmievski, John Coggeshall, and of course Rasmus giving their PHP talks.
25th April 2006, 09:06 pm
These slides [ppt] are now available. The talk went ok, but I cut stuff after realizing how short the time was. I could have talked for a lot longer.
25th April 2006, 10:08 am
I’ve now put these slides [PPT] online. I think the tutorial went ok. Mike Hillyer wrote an extensive recap in his blog, too. Thanks, Mike!
23rd April 2006, 03:08 pm
I’m just waiting for my ride to the airport for the MySQL Users’ Conference. I’m really looking forward to it. My tutorial (Secure Your MySQL and PHP Web Applications) is first thing tomorrow morning. I understand from O’Reilly that they intend to record parts of the tutorials, so hopefully even if you can’t make it to the conference you might be able to catch up on some of the materials.
I’ll blog from the conference over the next couple of days. I’m especially looking forward to catching up with some fellow Aussies over a few refreshing beverages. 
If you haven’t met me please come and introduce yourself. I shall be easy to spot - on crutches - wearing a black OmniTI shirt.
18th April 2006, 07:03 pm
Mark Taber prompted this post by saying, "If you didn’t blog it, did it really happen?"
So I popped my knee two and a bit weeks ago walking down the stairs. Looks like I have torn the meniscus and may require surgery. If you see me at MySQL UC next week, I’ll be the one on crutches! (Although I’m trying to wean myself off them.)
Can I just reiterate once again what nice people the folks at OmniTI are? It’s not
until you have your colleagues/friends driving you to the ER, carrying you around,
and tying your shoes for you, that you realize what good and generous people they
really are. Thanks guys, you rock.