Recent blog entries for wez

7 Sep 2008 »

testing live writer

Just testing how windows live writer does its thing.

I wonder how one goes about deleting posts in here....

Technorati Tags: blog

Syndicated 2008-09-07 04:55:25 from Evil, as in Dr.

30 Aug 2008 »

Looking for a Trainer

We at Message Systems are looking for someone to fill the position of "Technical Trainer / Curriculum Developer".

This position designs, develops and delivers online and in-person instructor led trainings on the Message Systems products and services for a variety of audiences including customers, partners and internal staff. You will design courses and instructional material for everything ranging from short informational quick-starts to multi-day workshops.

The audience for these training programs will primarily be mid-senior level Unix administrators, messaging anti-abuse operations staff, systems architects and other technical staff engaged in designing and maintaining corporate and carrier messaging infrastructure.

This is a full-time position based in Columbia, MD.

If you're interested, or know someone that might be, please read (or send them to read) the full job description.

Syndicated 2008-08-30 03:48:56 from Evil, as in Dr.

30 Aug 2008 »

I'll be at ZendCon 2008

Busy times here mean that I'm leaving it a bit late to say this, but I'll be at ZendCon this year too. I'll be giving the usual talk on PDO, but my main reason for attending this year is to sync up with other PHP folks and talk about where PHP is at and where it's going.

ZendCon has been consistently good, and I look forward to attending again this year... see you there?

Syndicated 2008-08-30 00:10:57 from Evil, as in Dr.

25 Jul 2008 »

Slides: PHP / Cocoa / Objective-C

Here are the slides from my Cocoa talk:

Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP

view presentation (tags: php objective-c cocoa)

Syndicated 2008-07-25 04:16:20 from Evil, as in Dr.

19 Jul 2008 »

Virtualization on OSX

I'm about to go on the road again and I've been getting my laptop updated to make sure I can function without internet access. For me that means that I need a linux environment. I've been using Parallels for this because it was the only option when I first got my macbook, and I'm not terribly impressed with its ability to run linux virtual machines.

First I have to say that my preferred usage for vms is to disable as much graphical UI as possible and login using the terminal; I want to avoid any excess resource usage because I'm on a laptop and I want better battery life.

Here's my gripe list:

poweroff spins the cpus up to 100% or more utilization and doesn't actually power the machine off.
The reason? ACPI is only supported for vista guests. I'm rather bemused by this statement, because the whole point of ACPI is to virtualize certain types of hardware access--it should not be targeted to a particular OS.
Parallels Tools requires X to run.
You can manually run the daemon but it spins the CPU trying to open the display. This means that you can't get time synchronization with the host unless you want to load your CPU
Shared folder performance sucks
Mounting the host filesystem over NFS is faster, but kernel panics OSX (the latter is probably an OSX bug)

Outside of these issues, it's not bad though. I'm rather disappointed about the level of Linux support from Parallels--I had all the same problems a year ago and nothing seems to have changed. It's clear that their priority is in making the Windows VM experience nice and integrated, and that's their perogative.

Syndicated 2008-07-19 15:39:41 from Evil, as in Dr.

3 Jul 2008 »

Slides: PHP Streams

Here are the slides from my Streams talk; they cover a variety of bits and pieces of streams background and implementation that may or may not be useful to you.

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Syndicated 2008-07-03 04:00:07 from Evil, as in Dr.

26 Jun 2008 »

Slides: PHP and COM

This slide deck is from php|works 2004. There's a lot of material in the speaker notes, which I've painstakingly pasted into the comment on the slideshare representation (wouldn't it be cool if it could automatically do that?).

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Just in case slideshare vanishes, the PowerPoint version is also available: PHP and COM

Syndicated 2008-06-26 02:31:14 from Evil, as in Dr.

25 Jun 2008 »

Slides: Best Mailing Practices

Here are the slides from my Best Mailing Practices talk.

While I was googling around to find the abstract I submitted with this, I discovered that there's an audio recording of me giving the talk at ZendCon 2007.

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Just in case slideshare vanishes, the PDF version is also available: Best Mailing Practices

Syndicated 2008-06-25 04:17:28 from Evil, as in Dr.

25 Jun 2008 »

Slides: PDO

[I've just noticed that the omniti.com re-design broke the various links from my blog to the slides I had been storing there. So I'm trying out slideshare; I'll be revisiting the slides I've given in the past and blogging one entry per presentation]

Here are the extended slides from my PDO talk. When I first put this talk together it was for a long hour slot, but conference sessions started to diminish in length and I had to pull out certain slides to avoid running over every time.

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Just in case slideshare vanishes, the PDF version is also available: PDO

Syndicated 2008-06-25 02:50:29 from Evil, as in Dr.

22 Jun 2008 »

First impressions of virtualization on Solaris

This article discusses some virtualization options in OpenSolaris. I was hoping to find a "silver bullet" solution for all my needs. I didn't, but it's not too far off.

We have quite a large support matrix for our software; 12 primary OS and architectures, with 4 major installation options. We test those as fresh installs, upgrades, upgrades from the previous major version and uninstalls.

Syndicated 2008-06-22 05:52:48 from Evil, as in Dr.

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