Advogato blog for wez

Slides: PHP / Cocoa / Objective-C

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:04:33 GMT

Here are the slides from my Cocoa talk:

view presentation (tags: php objective-c cocoa)

Virtualization on OSX

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:07:00 GMT

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.

Slides: PHP Streams

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 05:06:23 GMT

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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Slides: PHP and COM

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:08:05 GMT

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

Slides: Best Mailing Practices

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:07:05 GMT

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

Slides: PDO

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:07:06 GMT

[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

First impressions of virtualization on Solaris

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:05:45 GMT

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.

OSCON 2008

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 17:11:17 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at OSCON again. I have the pleasure of co-presenting an Extending PHP tutorial session with Marcus Boerger, giving a new talk entitled Hot Chocolate: Creating Cocoa apps with PHP, and the tried and true PDO Talk. As always, I'm looking forward to catching up on what's going on outside of my usual stack of software, meeting up with friends and making a visit to my favourite restaurant. I hope to see you there :-)

C and Test Engineer Jobs @ Message Systems

Fri, 1 Feb 2008 21:05:53 GMT

I've got a couple of full-time positions open on my engineering team. We believe in a fun but focused development environment: open-plan, flexible hours, and great benefits. Our customers include Fortune-500 companies, hot startups and tier-1 telecommunications carriers. Our software helps those customers deliver billions of email messages per day.

Email Infrastructure Software Engineer (x2)

I'm looking for one mid-level and one mid-to-senior-level engineer with strong "C" programming skills (3+ years of professional experience). These roles involve design, implementation and testing of our flagship email server product. E-mail encompasses a very broad range of standards and specifications which in turn means that our code base touches on a little bit of everything; it's both interesting and challenging. [Full Job Description]

Gozer (The Destructor)

I'm also looking for someone with a knack for breaking things. This person would be dedicated to dreaming up ways to make the product stress out, panic and fall over, and distilling that abuse into test cases to run in our white box, smoke testing, stress and soak testing environments. This position requires strong Perl skills and 3-5 years industry experience. [Full Job Description]

PDO 2 and CLA

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:07:37 GMT

You may be aware that we're starting discussions on the future of PDO; despite being pretty good for many common uses, it isn't perfect, and we want to improve it. One of the items to be discussed is whether we can or should adopt a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which will make it simpler for the database vendors to work together with us on PDO.

The discussion is aimed chiefly at the "core developer" community, that is, the people that are working on the internals code for PHP, because the CLA would impact how they contribute to PDO. The broader PHP user/developer community would not be affected by a CLA (if we were to go that route), as it would not affect their ability to use PDO in their applications.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, you might be interested in reading the transcript of a conversation I had on IRC this evening; you can find it below. It's between myself and a few members of the PHP Community IRC channel on FreeNode (used with their permission!), and I think it does a good job of explaining in fairly simple and somewhat unbiased terms a couple of the main arguments for and against the CLA. I'm not saying that this is all there is to it, just that these are likely to be the main points that the core developers need to discuss first.

It would be premature to say that you are for or against PDO 2 at this stage because we are yet to define what PDO 2 will actually be; that is the purpose of the discussion on the PDO mailing list.

If, after reading this, you have questions or comments of your own, then please read the email that Andi and myself put together, take a look at the FAQ, and if your question is still unanswered, join the discussion on the PDO mailing list (read the archives first!) Browse it via the web, over NNTP, or subscribe via email.