phpVikinger

Two weeks ago I attended phpvikinger in Skien. I have been on vacation so I have not had time to blog about this event.

For me the event was very insightfull. Derick has already written a very nice wrapup.

Personally I liked Kores introduction to CouchDb and his phpillow wrapper framework.

So thanks to all that participated at phpvikinger!

Social experiment at ezConference: Help some fellow developers get espresso!

At a barbeque party after the ezConference this year I started a social experiment in the PHP/ez community. Will the community help out Josh and Max at VisionWT so that they can get their espresso at work?

If you want to read the story behind it, see the signatures I got at the party (scanned as pdf) or sign the petition yourself head over to bjartek.org/espresso.

Development Related Podcasts

I really like podcasting for getting my latest fix of development related information. I can listen to it while commuting to work or while working out. In this post i will detail what development related podcasts I listen to and why.

Newest in my que is PHP Abstract. I really like what Cal Evans has done in this podcast. A short introduction and then straight to 1 person talking about content. No chatter and no noice. Very nice.

I also listen to php|architects PRO PHP Popdcast. This is more of a traditional "talkshow" podcast where one or more hosts discuss new items and do interviews. There are lots of nice content here. Personally i do not like to have to much chitchat in a podcast, and this one sometimes has a little bit to much of it.

That is the two php related podcasts that I know of and that I listen to. However i also listen to podcasts about other programming languages such as.

Ruby on Rails podcast. This podcast normally just have 1 host and he talks about news in the rails community and does some interviews. I like to follow what goes on in the rails camp allthough i do not use rails myself.

The Java Posse is a excellent podcast about Java and the JVM. It is hosted by normally 4 great guys that has a lot of insight into tech. The production of this podcast is normally top notch. I started listening to this podcast while i worked with Java and have continued on after i started doing PHP work again. Nice to know what goes on in the Java camp aswell. Stuff like Scala looks cool.

And that is pretty much it as for me and Tech Podcasts go. I listen to some other podcasts as well, like TWiT and CrankyGeeks as well but they are not directly dev related.

Do you listen to some podcasts that you think I will find interesting? Please leave a comment on this post or contact me on IRC. My nick is meus and i hang out at freenode.

PHP Vikinger

PHP VIkinger was a blast. I was going to blog lots about the content there, but then i talked to Knut on IM and he sent me the link to php.no´s amazing page about PHP Vikinger. That is some nice reporting done there.

PHP VIkinger was not quite what i expected it to be. Two co-workers of mine attended last year and then it was more dicsussion-like and not so much talks like it was this year. When we had the topic suggestion i suggested "version controlling content / audit system" since this is something that I think would be very cool. I also suggested IoC and had planned to talk about how perhaps we could try to use eZ Components SignalSlot for it. I do not think Derick got that last part, but i decided not to mention it again. I was kind of understanding already that this was going to be more talks and not so much discussion.

Still even though it was not quite what i expected it was totally awesome! If you have 45 minutes of free time you should jump over to zaks amazing presentation and watch it at once. If you do not have free time, make some free time. It is amazing. I listened to it for the second time and it was very nice both times. I even think part of the points around Martin Luther was better the second time.

In the first break I was feeling the coffee-adict in me having some pain so I went with Toby and Mikko to get some coffee. I bought 6 premade cups and 2 bags. I even got the local-school-slave (no pun intended) to make some coffee in the pizza break. Ahh feeling better after have given something back to these amazing people.

After vikinger finished we were going to Bakkestranda in Skien for a barbeque. I bought some hamburgers, salad and a bucket of marshmellows! (They were really nice, right Jani?) I got some non alcoholic stuff to drink as well since it was blastingly hot.

We headed out to the park/beach and had a really nice barbeque. People come and went and it was in total a very nice gathering. When we left the beach around midnight I headed home to Høyers since I was tired. I think the other guys went out to Mets afterwards.

While at the party I also got to taste Kossucola. I tasted atleast two bathces. I liked the first one better, the second had a little bit to much Kossu in it. Unfortunatly i did not catch the name of the nice finn that made Kossucola so i cannot thank him here. Jani also tried to teach me to count to 5 in finnish. :P

All in all a very very nice day.

eZ conference 2007

Last week i attended eZ conference 2007. It was my first ever PHP conference and it was a blast. We arrived at Skien on wednesday and saw the Norwegian nationals team (football) score 5 nice goals (i predicted this! to bad one of them was wrongfully disallowed). We took a early night on wednesday to be ready for the conference.

Thursday was a really nice day. I got to get to know the people behind many of the IRC nicks as well as some new people. I attended the open source track the entire day.

First i heard Damien Seguy talk about php tips and tricks. I knew most of the stuff but there was some nice things there I will look into. like extract and compact.

While at the conference floor I also got to test out the massage chairs there. We also talked to a very nice columbian guy called Fellipe.

Then i listened to toby speak about ezComponents. I have not looked much at the ezComponents and i found it very interesting. I plan to try them out on a future project quite soon.

Then we had a nice lunch and got to meet some new people. Some guys from EnterNett in Stavager and some from ObjectNet in Oslo.

I listened to Paul Borgermans keynote but did not find it that interesting. Then a talk from a investigator from KRIPOS about security. Some of it was well known, but I still found it interesting.

I was pretty tired now so i decided to head back to the Høyers Hotel for a nice nap and dinner before the awards. We (Espen and I) had dinner with the guys from EnterNett at Høyers. I had a lovely steak with cream stewed potatoes and a beer. The awards and the party after was nice, but i do not understand why they always must have so loud music. It is impossible to talk.

Friday arrived and I was relaxed and ready for a new day. It started off with a great keynote by the head of VG multimedia Jo Christian Oterhals. He talked about what VG (the largest newspaper both deadtree and online, in norway) has done to their publication system. They are currently using the LAMP stack with the addition of Varnish and memcached. It was really interesting to hear him talking about how they want to "destroy" things.

I then listened to Sebastian Bergmann talk bout workflow. It was really interesting and i see that in large system with complex workflows it can be very nice. It was a nice talk and Sebastian obviously has prepared heavily for it. The XML syntax to describe the workflow looked a little bit verbose at the first glance, but I was told (by both Sebastian and Fredrik) that it is not verbose at all compared to other workflow engines. Sebastian also mentioned a AJAX client in the works for creating workflow. That sounds really cool.

Then it was time for a talk about Varnish. I was really looking forward to this one since i have looked a little bit at Varnish and it looks really cool. The speaker Dag-Erling Smørgrav turned out to be very very tech savvy. He held a extremely informative presentation about Varnish, and was not afraid to point out flaws in any system. As he blogs about himself the eZ publish developers were very interested in this. His talk was scheduled to last for 45 minutes. It ate away 30 minutes of our lunch as well. 30 minutes well spent if you ask me.

Then it was time for lunch and i chatted with Dag-Erling while getting some food. I told him that i thought his presentation was very nice, and he confirmed that he had heard so from many other people as well. He then told me to prepare for a blast, as he had heard Zak Greant practice for his keynote. I ate lunch and was really looking forward to this keynote.

I sat down in second row and was enthralled as Zak Greant started his talk. His presentation was soooo goog. It flowed like it was natural. The slides where perfectly suited for this style of talk and the content was golden. The title of Zak´s speech sums it up pretty good "A Visionary look at Open Source". To be short he compared the way the software business is going with how the written word progressed. If you have the chance do not miss this speech!

Then i attended Derick Rethans as he spoke about PHP internals. It was very interesting to see how the internals of PHP worked. It was getting late and i was getting tired. I started to listen to the certified extensions talk by Jostein Knutsen but i left, then i listened in on the last of Ole Marius Smestad talk about eZ Publish. He showed how he could upload a picture taken from his mobile phone using iLabs java client. Looked to be working nicely. At my work we do it with MMS. I was going to raise my hand to talk about this, that is if there are any extensions for eZ Publish to communicate to and from a cellphone, but I was to tired so I did not.

Dinner was spent at a restaurant just outside the Clarion Hotel. I had a very nice pesto marinated calf meat with potatoes. We then went to find some people to talk to and found some guys from waterproof at a barge outside clarion. We chatted with them and heard that people where gathering at New Mets sports bar at 22. The evening out was really nice. I went home at about 01.00.


As always i take to few and to bad pictures. But if you want to see them here are some of them at flickr

I will probably blog about php vikinger later on :)

My vim setup for editing php files

In a recent chat on #phpc we started discussing vim and talking about vim setups. Surripui posted a blog entry about this asking for setups. I promissed that i would post my setup so here it is.

My .vimrc contains general settings and shortcuts that i use to edit almost any kind of files.

My .vim/ftplugin/php.vim triggers when i edit php files and allows me to syntax check php files with makeprg and use the internal quickfix functionallity in vim. I also use some tabcompletion magic to be able to tabcomplete php functions. And there is some other snacks in here as well.

In adition to this i use gsnippets to get some code templates that i like to use. I have configured gsnippets leader to be .. so i write "..FUNC " to expand my function template.

If you think you know a way i can improve my vim setup for php editing please comment here or grab hold of meus on #phpc.

Sorting with usaort

Problem: You have an array of objects or a multidimentional arrays where the key of the first array has some meaning. It could be a id or something else. You want to sort the array and maintain the key=>value association.

Some may then proceed to loop the array and sort it in a loop, however there is a easier method.

Sollution: Enters the php function Uasort. This function takes an array as the first argument and the name of a comparison function as a string. If you want to use a static method in a class you can use array("ClassName", "staticFuncName"). The user comparison function takes two arguments that correspond to two elements in your array. Do some comparison on them and return 0, -1 or 1 to adjust how you want them sorted. The function takes care of looping all elements and applying the comparison func correctly.

$testArray = array(
 "testing3" => array("timestamp" => 11220022, 
                      "name" =>"testing3"),
  "testing" => array("timestamp" => 11220011, 
                     "name" =>"testing"),
   "testing2" => array("timestamp" => 11220033, 
                       "name" =>"testing2"));

uasort($testArray, "sortTimestamp");
print_r($testArray);

function sortTimestamp($foo, $bar){
  if($foo["timestamp"] == $bar["timestamp"]){
    return 0;
  }else if($foo["timestamp"] > $bar["timestamp"]){
    return 1;
  }else{
    return -1;
  }
}

This code outputs:

Array
(
    [testing] => Array
        (
            [timestamp] => 11220011
            [name] => testing
        )

    [testing3] => Array
        (
            [timestamp] => 11220022
            [name] => testing3
        )

    [testing2] => Array
        (
            [timestamp] => 11220033
            [name] => testing2
        )

)

Now that is rather neat if you ask me :)

Performancing testing

When i blog in my php blog i plan to use the firefox extention performancing. I have heard much praise about it so i look forward to seeing how well i like it. I will keep the blog informed about my progress with it.

Another option for me as a vim user is to find some console program that use vim to blog with. I will look into that as well, if anybody have a tip about such a program please let me know in the comments or on IRC.

meus out.

Started new php blog

I just started this blog to rant about random findings and experiences i have when developing php stuff. I hang out at #phpc on freenode as meus (that is why i called the blog meus on php) so if you want to say hi please join the channel and become a part of this nice community.

meus out.