Author Archives: lornajane

28 Feb
2013

PHP and Gearman: Unable to connect after upgrade

I upgraded PHP and related pecl modules on my development machine today, and ran into a problem with Gearman. Actually I ran into more than one! Firstly the challenge of getting the newest pecl version working with a gearman version. Then an error where my existing PHP application couldn’t connect to gearman after upgrade.
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27 Feb
2013

Talking about ZCE at PHPNW March

If you’re interested in becoming a Zend Certified Engineer and are local enough to make it to the next PHP North West User Group meeting on Tuesday, 5th March in Manchester (UK), then come along! I’ll be giving a talk and welcoming questions and discussion around becoming ZCE, why you might bother, what is involved, some tips for the exam itself, and pointers to resources to help you (yes the slides will be online afterwards, check the “resources” section on my site on Wednesday ish).

The details are on the Upcoming page for the event, see you on Tuesday 5th!

25 Feb
2013

How To Write 800 Blog Posts

This is the 800th published post on lornajane.net. It’s my personal blog and I started it in early 2006, when I moved to a new city with no job. I think I got the blogging bug just because I had nobody else to talk to at the time! Over the years the blog has recorded recipes, craft projects, the story of buying and refurbishing the house (a decision that a previous employer described as “brave”) – and of course the vast swathes of technical snippets that are the regular content you see here.
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14 Feb
2013

Study Days: Keeping on Top of the New Shiny

One of the biggest dangers in this industry is getting left behind as the tools evolve very quickly. For me, working alone or as the most senior person on a project in most cases, this becomes doubly hard as there’s nobody in my office to show me a new trick or share an idea that he or she learned in a previous job. So how do I deal with this?

I take “study days”.
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11 Feb
2013

Learning to Speak

I don’t mean learning to talk, I mean learning to address an audience, coherently and without dying of fright (actually I think I have clinically proven that it isn’t possible to actually stop living as a result of fright). There are a couple of things that I’m involved with that may help you, if you’re looking to improve your successes in this area.

DayCamp4Developers

This is a virtual conference, held a few times each year. I’ve spoken at some of the previous events and been really impressed by how smoothly something quite intangible can run! The next event is on Friday 22nd March and is about public speaking – but aimed specifically at developers. If you want to speak at a user group or conference, or be able to get through presentations at work without stress, then this session will give you some good pointers. The speakers are three excellent conference presenters – and me :) I love this format, what else are you doing on a Friday (especially for Europe, where this doesn’t start until our afternoon)? You can register and find out more about the event here http://daycamp4developers.com/. Did I mention that tickets are $40? You can also sign up to get the recordings if the date/time doesn’t work out for you.

WeAreAllAweso.me

There’s been lots of fuss lately about women speakers at conferences, or the lack of them. The low percentage of women in technology and a missing tendency to put ourselves forward for things means that this isn’t going to change any time soon. However if you’ve been thinking about speaking, then you should know about an online group WeAreAllAwesome which is a meeting point for women speakers to brainstorm ideas for topics, put abstracts together, and share experiences on how to give a good talk. Our office hours are 6-7pm UK time on Tuesdays, and I’m one of the mentors in that project, so if you might speak or just want to join in chatter with women who do, then you know where to find us :) Continue reading →

07 Feb
2013

Endpoints for HTTP Testing

While working on a book (“PHP Web Services” from O’Reilly, not out yet but soon!) recently, I was looking for some place I could make HTTP requests to, to show off how to make different kinds of requests with different tools. On my own machine, I have a couple of scripts that chatter back giving debug information about the requests that were made, but I wanted to get the tools examples going without any additional dependencies at all. I hadn’t used anything like these tools before, but I found quite a few alternatives, so I thought I’d share what I came up with. Continue reading →
30 Jan
2013

Printing PDF Bookmarks List

I work with PDF a lot, and it bothers me that I can see an outline view when I open the document, but I don’t seem to be able to grab just that view. My presentations are mostly PDF and the titles and section headings show up nicely. Today I figured out how to get an outline view, so I’m putting that information here while I remember how to do it!

I used a tool called pdftk which is excellent, I’ve used it before for doing various other PDF-related things. To grab metadata such as bookmarks, use the dump-data command, like this:

pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data | grep BookmarkTitle > outline.txt

The above line takes all the bookmarks from the PDF (this was a slide deck created using powerdot and LaTeX, the section and slide titles nest appropriately), and outputs a bunch of information about the document and the various PDFs. The grep command just gets the lines containing “BookmarkTitle”, then the whole thing gets written to a file. I cleaned that up and now I have the outline of my course, so I can add timings, notes for the exercises and so on.

28 Jan
2013

Fabric Bags

This weekend I decided it would be good to spend some time away from the computer, but the weather wasn’t really good enough to get out and do much, so I needed a “rainy day” project. I remembered that I’d signed up for a free introductory Craftsy class a few weeks ago, so I logged in to take a look at what was involved. Continue reading →
24 Jan
2013

Zend Webinar on PHP 5.4: 19th February

I am pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting one of Zend’s webinars in February, on Tuesday 19th. The topic is “The PHP 5.4 Features You’ll Actually Use”, and the session is my opportunity to round up the best of the new features that came in with PHP 5.4 and illustrate the ones you’ll want in your codebase with some examples. You can find out more about the session and register for the webinar on Zend’s site: http://www.zend.com/en/company/news/event/1188_webinar-the-php-5-4-features-you-will-actually-use.

See you there!