Naturally it’s been over a month since I’ve updated and rather than posting something techincal I feel I should be a little selfish and announce that:

I’M GOING TO BE SPEAKING AT ZENDCON 09!

I will be giving my talk on automated deployment techniques with Phing.

To say that I’m excited is quite an understatement. Nervous now probably tops excitement as now I have to make sure I give a damned good talk and not make Eli White look like a fool for having picked me for a slot.

Time to go bury my nose in Power Point and research!

Hey everyone, my brother is actually blogging! Check out Eric Cousineau’s blog. Right now it’s looking like the focus of his posting will be about Digital Mars D programming language. Everyone go give him some traffic and encourage him to keep posting!

Just made a few changes to the blog. I added a recaptcha to the comment system as well as subscribing to the comments via email. I also updated the code highlighter so we get the pretty boxes and line numbering (and the code will look much nicer on skinnier browsers).

I also added my résumé for those interested in me. If you have any suggestions for improvements on the résumé feel free to let me know.

The code highlighter was a big enough change that I think sometime in the future I’ll be updating the blog design in the future. However for now I’m just going to try to come up with stuff to post!

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Smith mentioned on twitter that PHP 5.3′s new garbage collector is based on a paper written by a man named Bacon (pdf here). We now have Bacon’s garbage collector…

Announcing PHP 5.3: Now With More Bacon!!

Spread the meme.

PHP 4′s end-of-life is today.

With that I bid adieu to the half-assed OOP support and general primitive nature of the platform.

However I cannot be so callous as my first forays into PHP were with 4.0 releases…

Now the question is how much faster will the dumping of PHP 4 (and 5.0/5.1) be and the adoption of PHP 5.2? Granted most major services are already at the latest/later versions of PHP 5.2 (5.2.5 seems to be most common, but quite a few have 5.2.6 installed), I hope the prevalence extends even further as I’m writing an app that requires 5.2.3+ (damn you Doctrine and your shiny ways!)…

I apologize about the month without updates. Our business manager and lead designer (“Director of Operations” and “Creative Director”) both had to go to the hospital at about the same time and the shortest stay was almost 2 weeks. They both pulled through just fine and everything is back to normal.

I hope to be back sometime later this week with some visible signs of awesomeness on a side project of mine.

In the mean time I’ve been playing with Flex Builder 3 (hooray for free Educational licenses) and while it’s cool, so far the documentation is hindering my development efforts. I have a project planned where I intend to have an AIR client and am evaluating using Flex instead of HTML+JavaScript. We’ll see how far that goes.

And finally I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed and have an account setup. I, for one, welcome our new stalker overlords.

I’m currently out for the weekend, brother’s graduated high school!

When I get back I’ve got some updates for the hierarchical data post, and should have a post ready on using rsync and phing for remote deployment.

In my previous article (Microsoft Access and PHP), I discussed getting mdbtools setup and dynamically interacting with a instance of mdb-sql. Well it turns out somewhere in the pipeline (probably mdb-tools), we’re either not getting an EOF or reading an EOF right and as such I can read lines from the program’s STDOUT stream, but as soon as I hit the end of the output my script hangs indefinitely waiting for something and all my attempts at detecting an EOF failed. Sorry to disappoint.

On lighter news, my coworker got the greatest error ever:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

Turns out according to these guys it’s Hebrew and refers to the double colon (::) operator.

Right…

My (Our, Chris included) slides have been featured on the front page of SlideShare’s website!

Small time success yes, but success none the less. Take that Ed Schipul, my slides are right next to yours! (Btw Ed, I still think your presentation you gave to refreshBCS was good, but I still disagree with your thoughts on work days and work weeks).

Power went out at work today, infact power was actually out for a good couple of blocks (street lights included).

Not much you can do as a programmer for a web development/design firm with the power out…