Scattered Thoughts

Hotspot Shield is my new favourite application. Its main aim is to make your public web browsing more secure by connecting you to a VPN (virtual private network). Sounds pretty normal, however while doing this, it very nicely provides you with a US IP, which means that suddenly you are able to access all the US only content on sites like Hulu and Pandora!
I’ve spent the weekend catching up on a few US shows and watching a lot of ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart‘ and The Colbert Report…..aaah, Good times.

All good things must come to and end, and unfortunately, so must Zendcon.
Today was the last day at zendcon, and the conference came to a close around lunch time. I attended

1. Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML and Javascript in AIR by Edward Finkler
2. End-to-end web testing with Selenium by Stefan Priebsch
3. I need more servers! what do I do? (Scaling a php application) by Maurice Kherlakian

The talk on AIR was interesting, probably not of huge help for work, but it is something I am getting more interested in, so figured it would not hurt to learn more about it. Learning more about Selenium was great too, especially since this is another one of the technologies that I’m keen to try out at work, integrated with PHPUnit and and possibly PHPUnderControl.
The closing keynote, was by the American Cancer Society, talking about their latest project, Sharing Hope, an online social media site (built using the Zend Framework) where cancer survivors can post their stories of hope and inspiration.
Once the conference was over, I walked to the Intel Museum, which was pretty cool and an ideal way to say good bye to Santa Clara. Tomorrow, its back to San Francisco for a day and a bit before I get on my flight back to Sydney!

Day 2 of Zendcon and once again it was a little hard to get up in the morning, but decided to head to Zendcon early to get my hands on the breakfast at the conference.
The day began with another keynote, dealing with new age PHP applications. The presentation was given by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner on Magento, a new open source ecommerce application.
The initial talk I wanted to attend, got cancelled at the last minute, so that altered my schedule slightly. My schedule for the day was:

1. Architecting for PHP5 - Why “Runs on PHP5″ is not “Written for PHP5″ by Elizabeth M Smith
2. Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications by Stefan Esser
3. State of AJAX, the keynote by Ben Galbraith
4. Security-Centered Design: Don’t Just Plan for Security; Design For It by Chris Shiflett
5. Quickstart to Continious Integration by Sebastian Bergmann
6. High Performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques by Eli white

The keynote by Ben was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. The presentation was incredible and I am sure most people like me were disappointed when he ran out of time. I would have been happy had he continued for a little longer.
the talk was about the future of web apps, specifically using technologies like Google gears to bring web applications to the desktop.
It was great listening to Sebastian Bergmann, the author of PHPUnit, talk about continuous integration in PHP using PHPUnderControl. This interestingly was something that we were looking at using at work, so it was nice to learn a bit more about this. Eli White’s second presentation was excellent as well, although this time there was no Hoff

The day ended with a small party thrown by Yahoo!, I hung around for a bit, tried solving an impossible Yahoodoku puzzle and got a to drink a Yahoo-tini (plus keep the purple glow when placed in water ice cube).

The official kickoff of Zencon, started with a keynote by Harold Goldberg, CEO Zend technologies, and Andi Gutmans. They announced a new partnership with Adobe and the release of Zend Studio 6.1.
Once the keynote was finished I attended :

1. Of Haystacks and Needles by Derick Rethans
2. Tiery Eyed by Kevin Schroeder
3. PECL Picks - Extensions to make your life better by Elizabeth M Smith
4. The Knight Rider Methodology To Software Development by Eli White
5. State & Ajax - How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World by Paul Reinheimer
6. (In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP by Christian Wenz

The talks by and large were pretty good although a few of them were a bit more beginner level than I expected. I do however have to specifically point out the talks given by Eli White and Christian Wenz.
True to the title, The knight rider methodology talk showcased a lot of interesting tools that a good PHP developer should consider adding to his arsenal along with clips from the Knight Rider, complete with 80’s hair, 80’s fashion and The Hoff!
Christian Wenz had one of my favorite talks of the conference, covering the various insecurities that PHP developers overlook when making AJAX rich websites. He covered the popular SQL injection and cross site scripting as well as the more interesting (to me) Javascript and XML attacks.
I’m glad I fought through the jetlag just because of that talk

Finally made it to Zendcon08!
After spending a couple of days in LA and San Francisco, doing the touristy stuff like visting Hollywood Blvd, a twilight tour of Alcatraz and cycling 15km from Pier 39 across the Golden gate bridge to a little city called Sausolito, I caught a train to Santa Clara for the conference. (pictures of the holiday on flickr, facebook and here)
Day 0 was yesterday, which consisted of a few mammoth 3 hour sessions. The ones I attended were :

1. PHP Developer Best Practices
2. SQL Query Tuning: The Legend of Drunken Query Master

Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Mike Naberezny took the first session, and the talk did cover a lot of best and suggested practices, most of which I was happy to see we were (my company) already practicing, like having a separated dev, staging and production server, unit testing, having and maintaining coding standards etc.

The second talk was by Jay Pipes on tuning MySQL and was the best of the day. I knew some of the stuff, but it was good to get a refresher. There were some revelations though, like for example

in a table INT(1) and INT take the same space! The (1) is just a zerofill, it makes no difference to the size.

When storing IP addresses in a table, it is better to use a big int field and convert IP’s to numbers and vice versa using INET_ATON and INET_NTOA.

All in all a pretty good day

Thats right, I’m heading to Zendcon 2008! I head for the US on Thursday, 11th September, making quick stops in LA, San Francisco and finally to Santa Clara for the conference.
Zendcon is one of the largest gatherings of PHP devs in the world, and sessions are presented by the people who have literally written the books on PHP. I still have not decided between the various sessions and presentations, but am leaning towards the ones on scalability and SQL, topics like “Scaling Mozilla’s websites with PHP” and “I need more servers! what do I do? (Scaling a php application)“.
There is also a chance to sit for the Zend certification exam (although I have not even started preparing for it yet!).

Thankfully, not the entire trip is going to be centered around learning new things in PHP. I’m planning to do all the sight seeing I can while not at the conference, including visiting the Golden gate bridge, Alcatraz Island(already booked a tour) and spending some time in Beverly Hills and on Hollywood Boulevard. Any other famous sights I should see?

PS: Did I mention that this trip is being paid for by work!