Author Archives: lornajane

10 Mar
2008

Grand Entrance Hall

When the rewiring of the house was done in November and our parquet flooring was a casualty of the process. We’ve spent the months since then with a hallway that looks like this:

Please admire the retro red and orange floorboards!!

Anyway, things are looking a lot better now – we’ve got a new floor!! I am so excited by this that I am providing a cartoon strip style display :)

I forgot to photograph the doormat we got – its in the porch, fitted rubber-backed doormat stuff that you lay like a carpet. So first impressions on entering our place are now quite different (so long as you ignore the holes in the wall)

08 Mar
2008

PHP London Meet and Some Heckling

I’ve been in London on business again this week (hopefully my wild travelling will calm down a bit now) which had the nice side-effect of allowing me to get to the PHP London meetup on Thursday. It was nice to see people that I met at the conference the previous week and also to meet some people who I hadn’t managed to catch up with previously.

The talk was from William Coleman of Microsoft talking about FastCGI and using PHP on Windows. He’d have done better to not say “We’re all guys here” in his opening remarks as I found myself heckling a speaker for the first time in my life!! I counted 4 women there out of 35 or so people, so a minority but a definitely existing one. He did apologise (about 17 times and after digging a bigger hole) and I had a brief chat with him later on, and gave him my phpwomen.org business card.

The talk was good and interesting, and he brought with him a remarkable sense of humour, which he probably needed since there were lots of smart comments coming from all angles. He did however impress upon us that performance of PHP on Windows is now comparable to performance of PHP on Linux, which was actually very interesting to know. Personally I have been staying away from PHP on Windows for 5 years or so but since I now work for Ibuildings who are Zend partners, then I guess I need to have more of a clue! Other than a few confusing moments where a comparison was made between running PHP on Windows against running it on Apache (what? Is Windows a web server now?) it was a good session and its nice to hear about these developments. My feeling is that no matter how stable PHP is on Windows, its the stability of Windows itself that means I’ll be avoiding it in my production servers for some time yet.

The punchline of the evening? Apparently microsoft have invented this great thing, called a shell, where you can just type comands in to your server rather than clicking on things, so you can manage servers remotely …

02 Mar
2008

Farmhouse Cake

This is the recipe for the cake I made for php london, its a “Farmhouse Cake” apparently but it reminds me of Dundee cake and keeps really well for a good couple of weeks in a tin, which can often be useful!

8oz butter
8oz caster sugar
grated rind of 1 orange
4 eggs, beaten
8oz self raising flour
half tsp nutmeg
3 oz ground almonds
14 oz mixed dried fruit
3oz glace cherries

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C, and grease an 8 inch deep cake tin (I have a great one with a bottom that comes out so the cake comes out in one piece).

Cream the butter, sugar and orange rind together, then add the eggs a little at a time. Fold in the flour, then stir in everything else and put the mixture into the tin. Cooking time is 2 hours 15 to 2 hours 30 minutes – but keep checking on it and if the top starts to burn then cover it with greaseproof paper.

01 Mar
2008

PHP London 2008

On Friday was this year’s PHP Conference in London and I must say it was a roaring success. The whole conference had completely gone up a gear from last year (the only other time I’ve attended) with a larger venue, choice of tracks, more attendees and better food.

I was there representing phpwomen.org with a stand and some t-shirts to give away as well as some information about the group. We took 30 t-shirts and they were all completely gone by lunchtime, which was a great response. Even after that the stand was buzzing all day with people dropping by to ask about the group and how to get involved/get more t-shirts/help us gain more recognition. I was surprised and pleased by the response of attendees, both male and female, I met so many interesting people that I can’t begin to list them here but it was great to chat to you all! Its great to be able to raise awareness at events like these and the phplondon committee were wonderfully supportive of us throughout the organisation phase and during the day itself.

My new employers, Ibuildings were sponsoring the event so I was also able to spend some time with my colleagues and meet some new ones. I also briefly rebranded to the distinctive red ibuildings shirts at one point, to look like part of the team while we took some photos. It was great to see the guys doing the Zend Platform demos and to be able to hang around with them – including the guys from the Netherlands who were there. Ivo Jansch (CTO over there) gave a talk which I enjoyed and was well received all round. I didn’t realise until then that I actually work in the tallest team ever! I’m one of the smallest – at 5’11” this is pretty unusual :)

Since I was doing so many other things on the day I didn’t get to a lot of the talks but what I did see was well-prepared and the audience were great, with some really interesting questions being asked in all the sessions I attended. There were two tracks, in rooms just across the corridor from one another, and the rooms were well-managed and ran smoothly throughout the day. The conference also provided a “recharge room” with juice for people and devices alike. The venue was great and was big enough for everyone without any crowding or bottlenecks.

All in all I’d like to congratulate the organisers on a great event – can’t wait for next year :)

28 Feb
2008

Offline Geeking

I don’t spend a lot of time hanging around with geeks in the real world. I spend a lot of time hanging around with them in virtual spaces and some of the people I have met there are my closest friends. Offline meets are … quite different. Lots of geeks are quite shy, for starters. Some are quite egotistical, like the guy I met last year at the pre-conference social for phplondon and was horrified to hear that I create PHP using vim instead of a “proper IDE” and said how happy I was that I had made the effort to reach out to the conference and that he was sure I would learn a lot – the implication being that anyone who writes code with a keyboard is clearly a n00b. I’m hoping to avoid a repeat of that experience. I know I don’t look like a PHP developer but the friends I meet online can’t see that and I kind of forget … until an offline meet.

Perhaps experiences like these put me off doing the real-life thing but I am honestly so excited about PHPLondon tonight and tomorrow that I can’t imagine staying away. I’ll be promoting phpwomen at the main conference and I’m really excited about that too – look out for flocks of girls in bright purple t-shirts!

(OK, maybe not flocks…)

24 Feb
2008

PHP London and Another Busy Week

I heard last week that the PHPLondon conference is completely sold out – I had a funny feeling it might be :) I will be there, this Friday 29th February and looking forward to a great event. I’ll be at the pre- and post-conference socials, if you are an online acquaintance please stop me and say hi – I should be easy to spot as I’m female, tall, and have curly hair, there aren’t a lot of us around! I would be very pleased to meet you anyway so do say hello.

PHPWomen.org will be represented there, we have information about the group plus some women you can talk to (whether you are a woman or not, we’re not discriminatory!). We will also be giving away a few t-shirts, we don’t have a lot though so do come and demand one if you want one.

Once again things are very busy this week as I am travelling on business so I won’t be online a lot. Only been back a few days and it would be an understatement to say that I’m tired but hopefully things won’t carry on at this rate forever. Anyway its Sunday which usually means I should be packing …

21 Feb
2008

Speaking at Dutch PHP Conference

A quick announcement: I’m speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference this year, my talk is entitled “PHP Deployment with Subversion”. The conference is in Amsterdam, you can find out more on its website http://phpconference.nl, and it takes place on June 14th. It’ll be my first big speaking engagement, and I’m also really looking forward to meeting a lot of Dutch friends there.
19 Feb
2008

Seaside Sunset

Here’s the view from my hotel balcony yesterday evening:

So far the Netherlands is a great experience, my colleagues are friendly and its a lovely country to visit.

17 Feb
2008

European Adventure

For once it’ll probably be pretty quiet around here next week. That’s because I’m catching a ludicrously early plane to Amsterdam in the morning to spend a couple of days in the Ibuildings Vlissingen office, and then flying direct to London to work there the rest of the week.

There are going to be a lot of firsts, I don’t fly a lot and haven’t flown outside the UK alone before – so flying through both Schipol and Heathrow in the space of a few days is going to be probably a bit scary! I don’t visit London much either (haven’t been for almost a year in fact) but I have an Oyster card and an underground map to assist me. I’m also delivering training for Ibuildings which is a new career step for me but one that I’m very excited about (as well as hyperventilation-inducingly anxious) so all in all its going to be a pretty exciting week! I’m also getting to meet colleagues from both offices and practice my dutch for real :)

(Of course, there will be lots of blog action if I find myself at a loose end and with internet connection!)

15 Feb
2008

Fetching Fingerless Mitts (again)

Last year I made these lovely fingerless mittens from a pattern called “fetching” on the knitty.com site.

I’ve made some more! After a trip to Farfield Mill in September I bought one skein of lovely local-made wool. I adapted the fetching pattern, adding extra cable repeats at the cuff, elongating the middle section of the glove, and replacing the thumb with a vertical slit which is achieved by knitting the circular knitting straight for 8 rows just before the final cables. Here’s the result:

And a little closeup on the cables, as I’m very proud of how these gloves have turned out (apart from the interesting ‘S’ shape I achieved when I did one of the cables in the wrong direction and didn’t realise until I was almost finished the glove! We call that “a feature”)