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Lame Excuses for Avoiding Conferences
22 September 2009
Read moreAt the moment I am getting to quite a few conferences, as a speaker, as an organiser, and sometimes as a plain old attendee. I get so much from these opportunities to learn from experts in their various fields, meet people in the flesh whose blogs I read or whom …
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Dedicated Talks Page
21 September 2009
Read moreWith increasing numbers of speaking engagements, I've decided that its time to add a dedicated page to this site just to list talks I've given and wil be giving, and link through to slides, blog posts, and perhaps some photos of me speaking (not sure about that last one). So …
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Speaking at PHPNW09
04 September 2009
Read moreI have experience of PHP conferences from all possible angles - as an attendee, as a speaker and as an organiser. At PHP North West this year I will be taking this to new heights and combining all three roles into a single one-day conference. I have a speaking slot at …
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PHPNW: Schedule and Crowd-Sourcing
28 August 2009
Read morePlans for the second annual PHP North West conference (Manchester, 10th October) are coming along rather nicely, so I thought I'd share an update and some headline news. First of all - tickets cost 50 GBP + VAT. This is about 57 euros or 81 dollars. I don't know where else you …
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First Steps with bzr-svn
26 August 2009
Read moreI'm an SVN nut - love it, use it, talk about it at any opportunity, can't physically write code without it. But as a telecommuting developer who is sometimes travelling around, I've been thinking for a while that one of the distributed systems would really make more sense. I tried git …
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PHPWomen Merchandise
24 August 2009
Read moreA few weeks ago, phpwomen.org put out an announcement about merchandise. When we first started the group (almost 3 years ago, believe it or not) we printed t-shirts and gave them out at conferences. Once the various founder members and a few benefactors had paid for a set of …
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A Bit About Burnout
19 August 2009
Read moreI've been thinking a lot lately about burnout, I've had a couple of encounters with it in the last year myself and also a few people close to me have found themselves struggling internally after working too hard. I don't really have any advice to give - the advice I offer …
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Adding PUT variables to Request Object in Zend Framework
17 August 2009
Read moreWhen I wrote recently about testing web services within Zend Framework, I missed out a really key piece of information! I didn't explain how I was reading the PUT vars in my controller code in the first place - so I'll rectify that omission now.
Its very simple: I have extended …
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Using Zend_Test for Web Services
13 August 2009
Read moreRecently I had cause to develop a web service and so I wrote some tests to go along with it - or I was about to. When I looked at the asserts available in Zend_Test, they were all geared towards HTML/CSS output - but we can test just as effectively on …
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The Writing on the Wall
12 August 2009
Read moreI'm currently redecorating in the house and have moved my office up to the top floor temporarily - I like it up here but its a flight of stairs to the bathroom, two to answer the door and three to get a cup of coffee and I also have no wired …
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Customising Screen-Profile Files
11 August 2009
Read moreI wrote a while ago about the new version of screen in Ubuntu Jaunty. Screen is an application which lets you run lots of tabs inside one terminal window, then disconnect from screen and reconnect again later. You can turn on and off a whole bunch of notifications which appear …
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Upgrading Subversion Server to 1.5
06 August 2009
Read moreI'm really excited about the magic merging features in the newer subversion versions at 1.5 and later. I'm still figuring out which are actually useful, more on those another day, but I wanted to mention something I ran into when upgrading my server.
Some time ago I upgraded the …