Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …

Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …

Considering the few posts made recently, regarding Telecommuting, I thought I’d put in my $0.02, adjusted for inflation.
See Cal’s Post and this awesome job opportunity.
I want to discuss the various tools and options available to the telecommuter in 2008.

Disclaimer: I don’t want to make this another post on the benefits of Telecommuting, as I strongly believe there is no silver bullet for the problems an individual or a company faces. There are many drawbacks to telecommuting, and the positives don’t always neutralize the drawbacks.

Background: I’ve been telecommuting since 2003, that’s when I decided to quit working for the ‘man’. I chose a laptop to give myself …

So, this past week I was in Montreal attending the annual PHP-Quebec conference. It was my first time up in Montreal and I have to say, it's a fun place! It was great meeting so many interesting folks and my session was jam-packed and a lot of fun.

One of the most interesting conversations at the conference was regarding PDOv2 and what, if anything, is going on with it. Lukas Smith raised the spectre of PDOv2 (after a tiny little prod from me. ) at the Database Panel discussion with me, Kitman Cheung from IBM, Kuassi Mensah from Oracle, and Bob Bernier from PostgreSQL. It seems that …

It was good 2 days at PHP Quebec Conf here in Montreal.

A lot of great sessions!!!!
My highlights:
- Great session by Eli White – High Performance PHP & MySQL.
- Really nice 2 sessions by Marc Wandschneider (The I18N and memcached sessions)
Some sessions I’ve attended were really really bad. I’m not going to name names
But overall, I guess it was worth taking 2 days from work and going to the php conf.

Here is the part about Sun and PHP:

At the end of the conferance, there was a small QA session with the conferance speakers. At the begining everyone was shy to ask questions. So some asked phunny questions like, “What’s the next big thing you’d be developing in PHP 6? Is it PDO2?” things like that. Everybody started laughing and I’ve (tried) to make a joking …

Maybe I'm just out of the loop - but I had no idea IBM had an incubator project on PHP. Nice.

And not just a data charmer:

"Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergmann to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of this session you will wonder how could you have survived for years without unit testing.
PHP programmers, mark your calendars!"

My presentation on PHPUnit is his …

My wife has a site that needs two WordPress blog installations. The URLs differ by a subdirectory name. Both blogs need to be (URL-wise) subdirectories of /blog/. They need to be completely independent of each other, yet use the same custom theme. And there used to be just a single blog, which was not in a subdirectory; its permalinks must not break. (It has nice URLs with the date and title in them, not post ID-style URLs). And because I’m the husband, I get to maintain it, so tack “easy to maintain” onto the requirements (it must be easy to upgrade WP in both blogs, for example). In this article I’ll show you how I did it with a single .htaccess file, a single copy of WordPress, two MySQL databases, and a single configuration file.

Fixing URLs

As I mentioned, there used to be a blog at /blog/ which must not break. Suppose this blog was about dogs and my wife has recently started blogging about cats. She wants two …

The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …

The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …