Ligaya Turmelle's Blog: OSCON CfP
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In a new blog post, Ligaya Turmelle reminds us about the Call for Papers that's still open for this year's OSCON - but not for much longer.   Anyway, here is the link for submitting a proposal and the currently listed tracks include Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Databases, Desktop Applications, Web Applications (client-side and server-side), Windows, Administration, Security, and Emerging Topics.   The deadline for entry is this coming Monday, February 5th (2007) and all entrants much submit the form for their entries to be considered.
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Users force enlightenment OSCON Sometimes being the open source software leader means distancing yourself from open source claims.â¦
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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Those that didn't get a chance to check out this year's PHP UK Conference can get a little taste of what it was like from Rob Allen's perspective in his latest blog post today.   Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.   You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.
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Now for some real Apache code Column As I write this, I'm on the Eurostar train, just returning from O'Reilly's OSCon (Open Source Conference) in Brussels. Some fascinating insights there; and even my own talk generated some interesting discussion. Some of the delegates, including O'Reilly himself, are promoting opensource ideas going beyond software and into society more generally. I've touched on that in this very column before now, but a related argument that's new to me is that the open/closed debate in software could become largely sidelined, as the industry focuses on software as a service (such as Google's offerings) more than as a product.â¦
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The O'Reilly Network has a new article posted for all of those out there that are looking to make writing large documentation/publications much simpler.
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Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".   How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.   If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.
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Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.   There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:  AJAX Optimization talks  An overview of some Flickr Stats Google's mashup offerings An introduction to  and some talk of benchmarking Ajax  Check out the full post though - it's jam-packed with links and some great event information.
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The Zend Developer Zone has made some major announcements about this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including the reveal of one of this year's keynote speakers.   Keynote - We have the name of the final keynote speaker. In case you canlt guess [from the picture], Cory Doctorow, blogger, author and co-editor of Boing-Boing will be speaking on Thursday morning at ZendCon. Speakers - We have a new speaker in the lineup. I'm pleased to announce that Chris Shiflett will be presenting his talk, "Security 2.0". Party 2.0 - Finally I'm excited to announce that at ZendCon this year, we will be hosting the very first "Happy Hour 2.0". In conjunction with Terry Chay and the Lunch 2.0 gang, we will open up the Exhibit Reception to everyone...for free.   You can get more information on the schedules and happenings (oh and register for the conference) over on the main conference website.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Portland, Oregon, is ground zero for all things open source this week, as Ubuntu Live and O'Reilly OSCON descend on the Oregon Convention Center. We'll have live updates from both shows -- Linux on the desktop, open-source development, hardware support -- it's all here.
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At last, we have the results in the Talk-to-the-Prime-Designer Contest. I apologize for the delay, which was due partly to the volume of entries (over 400) and partly to an unusual late-hour conflict among the judges. The rules of the contest were simple: Assume weâre all living in a computer simulation like the envisioned by [...].
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Christian Wenz, back from the php/db|works conference and at a break following the conference, has posted some of his thoughts about this years conference over on his blog.   My schedule was crammed right after php|works 2006, so I could not find an earlier possibility to blog. Anyway, the extended entry contains my short report on php|arch's second conference this year.   He talks about some sightseeing before-hand, Tutorial Day, XML Security demos, Unicode in PHP6, a "slight problem" concerning his laptop, and his role on the Zend PHP5 Certification Panel. Check out the full entry for all of the details and "expect a separate blog entry later" on his experience on the panel.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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The lobby of the Palace Hotel was a hub of activity after lunch yesterday. The picture to the right hardly does it justice. A constant stream of friends, a wide variety of ages and backgrounds, flowed through.  It was unlike anything I had seen before, likely because this conference was held in downtown SF, and not San Diego or Phoenix, and a facet of what we'll have when the Newsroom of the Future is up and running. Every city will have one, but San Francisco will probably be first.  Here's a video I took last week at CUNY that gives another perspective. Lots of tables, video screens, a stage, radio and TV equipment. What you can't see is that the room was saturated with wifi, and while it didn't have a huge presence on the Internet, it could have.
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Tobias Schlitt has a quick new posting on his weblog about some of the upcoming conferences, including the Itn'l PHP Con 2004.
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osFinancials is the free accounting package of the future, easy to install, impressive database capabilities with Firebird as a database. Stock control and point of sales integrated with good support and plugins. Integration with osCommerce and VTigerCRM   The new version is Born. Thanks to all who made it possible. The new road ahead will be paved again.  Things we will see in the next betas.      * Remittance on transact level to allow better remittance. We aim to have remittance reports use the date of invoice/transaction + standard debtors and creditors payment periods. The documents have the entry for payment date. This will also be used to fill the transact entries. Field WRemittanceTimes will track the remittance times.       * New openitem forms it needs restructuring (ideas and screenshots of other programs are welcome) I will use the remittance dates in the new forms and will produce a list of openitems to date but any account can be searched from there you enter the detail and you can see history and openitems.       * Adding Auditing to the system so actions and records accessed by people will be logged.   New osFinancials features from version 1.0.2.0 to 2.0.0.0      * Export import: With this plugin you can import data from VtigerCRM and an other osFinancials set of books. Currently this is just for Debtors, Contacts and Stock accounts.     * New user interface     * Improved POS interface     * 2 new pos plugins (as zip in the plugins folder)           o Alphyra pin for linking a Alphyra pin device to osFinancials(free plugin).           o Displaypole to use a second monitor as display for your customers(Commercial plugin).      * Improvements in osCommerce plugin : (I thank Clair for this).           o Importing the field for disabled items to osFinancials bdisabled for stock           o Posibility to import the barcode from osCommerce webshop to osFinancials.       * Improved export import : Added new fields to the export import and corrected the TXF output.     * TLedgerviewer : New ledger browser that allows you to click true for details on the transactions. Allows export to your favorite spreadsheet program(tab delimited export). You can select mutliple accounts / groups for detail reporting.     * Improved TAccountviewer : This improvement allows the export of the data your favorite spreadsheet program(tab delimited export).     * Documents           o From sales you can now directly create a purchase.           o Auto order in purchases for stock items that have a minimum Qty and a preferred supplier 1           o Create 1 purchase from many purchases (consolidate).   Download osFinancials 2.0 multy language:  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/osfinancials/osf2-0-MultiLang-Full.exe?use_mirror=osdn