Planet Chris

Posts from colleagues and friends from today, yesterday, and the day before.

Today (Sat, 04 Jul 2009)

With the announcement of the speakers for this year’s Zend/PHP Conference it seems I’ll be giving three talks this fall (in the span of two months): First at CodeWorks 2009 (Dallas) I’ll be giving a talk on best practices, standards and tools to help with both in your PHP development: “B,S,T…Easy as 1,2,3″ The other two will be at ZendCon (in San Jose). They’re on two different topics: “Taming the Deployment Beast” - looking at some of...

Yesterday

PHP with Oracle RAC

John Lim

My article on High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP is out on the Oracle web site. Enjoy.

Four short links: 3 July 2009

O'Reilly Radar

OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter) James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compi...

The star hack in IE8 and dynamic stylesheets

Stoyan Stefanov

CSS hacks For most CSS tasks, there are only two hacks that are straighforward to use, easy to spot and maintain (delete down the road), easy to understand. The star hack that targets IE6 and 7 and the underscore hack that targets IE6. Consider this: .box { background: red; /* normal browsers */ *background: blue; /* IE 6 and 7 */ _background: green; /* IE6 */ } In normal browsers, you get red. Normal browsers ignore *background and _background because they are invalid. IE6 an...

PHPNW: Site, Tickets and CfP

Lorna Mitchell

The date for PHPNW was announced a few weeks ago as Saturday 10th October 2009, and now we've got all the official bits and bobs to go with it! In outline: The website: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk Tickets: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/register. Early bird pricing until September 11th, student tickets available - look on the website for instructions on getting student tickets. Call for Papers: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/callforpapers. Speakers wanted! If you have something to ...

Twitter Approval Matrix - June 2009

O'Reilly Radar

Last month I posted the first Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of May and different sources such as Hashtag.org, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received some help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.net and Dan Zarrella the Social & Viral Marketing Scientist for danzarella.com. They provided some great 'hard' data that allowed me to better place more items on the grid this month. A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to descri...

The Day Before

Computer Programming for Kids and Other Begininners

Nola Stowe

I got a copy of Computer Programming for Kids and other Beginners for review, I was interested because I have always thought that someday I would like to write a programming book for kids — I would have given my right arm to have this book as a kid! Here are some things I have always considered and how this book taught them: How to get “out of the dos window” ? Whenever my husband sees me typing at the console, he calls it the “dos window!” and he thinks we coul...

Ignite Los Angeles on 7/21! Submit a Talk

O'Reilly Radar

Ignite is coming to LA! As always speakers will get 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. We're going to be holding the geek event at Cinespace in Hollywood on 7/21. Submit a talk now. This will be the first Ignite in Los Angeles; it is co-hosted by LA Geek Dinner. The LA G33k dinner was kind enough to let us take over their July dinner to host the first Ignite. LA G33k Dinner, founded by Heathervescent brings people with a passion for technology and the internet together over a me...

Get thee to a nunnery

Terry Chay

Reading this article on in the Times made remember something from high school. Miss Kubic taught the top class in freshman geometry atmy high school. We figured that’s about as perfect name as you could get for a geometry teacher. Toward the end of the year over lunch our classmate, Adam, said, “Hey don’t you think Miss Kubic looks like Sally Fields in the Flying Nun?” “I suppose there’s a resemblance. You should ask her if she can fly.” “I think I will,” Adam resolved. W...

simple lock bumping unlocks most of our locks

Philip Olson

Today I stumbled upon information about Bump Keys and am worried. Two main concerns: Most every keyed lock on the planet can easily be opened by anyone I was totally ignorant on the subject, and assume I'm not alone Basically a Bump Key can be created and used by anyone (you, me, anyone) to open most locks including the dead bolts on our front doors. Others have explained these details for years so I feel it's my duty to relay the information to my friends. Here are a few of the zil...

Four short links: 2 July 2009

O'Reilly Radar

UNESCO book: Open Educational Resources -- UNESCO's first openly licensed publication, a collection of papers and reports in the area of Open Educational Resources. (via glynmoody on Twitter) ETSI 2.0 -- Paul Downey ventures into the belly of the telco beast and gives them both barrels. The whole thing is great--his talk was one of the best overviews of "how we think on the Web" I've seen. I can only imagine the sound it made as it bounced off the thick dinosaur hides of the attendees. I ...

Status Codes for Web Services

Lorna Mitchell

This the last entry in a mini series on points to consider when designing and building web services. So far there have been posts on error feedback for web services, auth mechanisms for web services, saving state in web services and using version parameters with web services. Unlike the other posts in this series, this one is quite specific to one type of service - REST - since it deals with status codes, specifically HTTP ones. The ideas are transferrable however and other types of servi...

Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia

O'Reilly Radar

Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encylopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...) Collison...

New Accessibility mailing list for Open Street Map

Ken Guest

Lulu-Ann posted to the general Open Street Map mailing list an announcement of theaccessibility mailing list . From her posting, this mailing list will be focused on the discussion of How to create non visual maps for the blind and visual impaired New tags that allow to map objects of special interest for disabled persons New maps that contain information about barriers like steps for wheelchair users Special routing, like wheelchair routing or pedestrian routing for the blind New maps that...

Scalar type hints in PHP

Tobias Schlitt

Ilia recently brought up the topic of scalar type hints again. I would love scalar type hints, but a sensible implementation is not easy. I summarize some approaches in this post and talk about the problems they raise.

The analysis of Googlebot's frugal cipher suite list

Ivan Ristic

Two weeks ago, I announced SSL Labs and my technique for passive SSL cipher suite analysis. It won’t surprise you to learn that I've been carefully observing the cipher suites used in the requests that came to the web site since. (In fact, I announced the site slightly earlier than I had planned because I wanted to get my hands on some real-life data.) One client’s SSL fingerprint immediately caught my attention, because it supported only 4 cipher suites. It was Googlebot. There were 11...

In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It)

O'Reilly Radar

Scott Berkun just posted a great rant titled, Calling Bullshit on Social Media. I suggest everyone read it. Berkun raises good points - and I agree the hype around social media warrants taking a critical look. Despite being in general agreement, there are a few areas I can't abide, starting with this statement: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. Railing against the popular lexicon ...

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