[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are mine, go get your own.]

I’ve just returned from my first ever “Microsoft Web Development Summit”. Reflecting back, I think the summit was a success on Microsoft’s part because it did change my perception of the company for the better. I won’t be giving a blow-by-blow accounting of all the sessions, I’m sure other attendees who were paying more attention will be able to do that. Instead I ruminate on a few of the things I picked up.

Microsoft’s self-stated goal of MS WebDev is to engage the PHP community in a conversation. To that end, I believe they succeeded for the most part.

Microsoft is schizophrenic

On the one hand, we were treated like royalty while there. The hotel was beautiful, the alcohol was plentiful and other than the fact that the employee cafeteria had wonderful smells coming from it yet we ate standard buffet fare from Microsoft Catering, the food was good. Each day had at least one really good session in which I felt the presenter was there more to listen than educate.

On the other hand we had presenters that I considered “Trojan Horses”, like the MS Office guy that gave us a history lesson instead of a frank discussion on how to create/edit MS Office documents in PHP.

Microsoft really is reaching out and I do respect them for that but I was upfront with them when I told them that trust will take time. My distrust of Microsoft stems from a long line of events, buying FoxPro to OOXML and I won’t even start on DRM here, there are many things I do not like about Microsoft. I give them props however, for their efforts in reaching out to the PHP community. That takes a lot of guts and I respect at least this little portion of Microsoft for making the right steps.

For the most part the presenters were much more like Laren Cooney’s session in which she first demanded that we close our laptops (so we couldn’t talk about her in the chat room) and then proceeded to host a session interesting enough to keep my laptop closed.

Even though I teased that the MSSQL session was “um…unproductive” After it was all over, the presenter (and I do apologize since I’ve obviously lost his card) came up to me and we had a very productive discussion over a drink. I won’t say we solve world hunger or anything but we agreed on a good first step.

Microsoft is Trying

For all their problems (most of which seem to stem from their legal department) at least the parts of Microsoft we talked to are honestly trying to reach out. They really want to know how they can help. They are severely hampered in what they can do (see aforementioned legal dept.) but within those bounds, they want to help. I was impressed by their sincerity and their willingness to listen, even when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. (For some reason, telling them what they didn’t want to hear became my job…I’ve got to learn to keep my mouth shut)

The summit was opened and closed by Sam Ramji. The opening set the tone, “We want to listen”; the closing was a great wrap-up, “We heard what you have said”. Sam also crawled up onto a nearby table, sat down, crossed his legs and with his body language, set a very informal tone to the closing. (Note: In the opening session, I found it very funny that he wore a T-shirt that said “Obey Propaganda”, not sure if anyone else notices but I giggled about it)

In the closing he went over some of the things they had heard and then asked up for other ways that they can improve, not improve PHP on Windows but improve Microsoft. I don’t know Sam enough to know whether he was sincere or just stroking us but he did seem to be sincere and time will tell whether he was or not.

Parting thoughts

Overall, I am cautiously optimistic about Microsoft. If they can just get out of their own way, there are some great people there that are trying to change things. Mentally, my default image of Microsoft is slowly changing from “Balmer’s Monkey Dance” to that of Lauren, Sam and Karri, the jury is still out on whether that is a good thing.

So I’ll leave you with a list of memes for the summit. Those of you reading this that were there will smile, those of you who weren’t there, will just be confused. :)

• StickerBoy
• Mimosas
• RockBand2
• Mac Reboot Sound
• OOXML
• …and of course…teabag

Thank you Joe for inviting me, I really had a great time.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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The problem

For the past year I’ve been looking at the way I develop web based projects and how I can make it easier, better, faster, more stable, but most of all, portable. Like many PHP developers out there, I work on multiple projects at the same time. It’s not unusual for me to have three projects under development at any given time with an additional five projects that I’ve abandoned that I’m not yet willing to delete. I’ve developed a way of working with them that works for me. I’ve even written a Zend Framework based cli tool that sets up my work environment the way I like it.

All of that is wonderful if I’m sitting here in my lair connected to my local network. However, if I’m moving around, I have two choices, setup something like Zend Core or XAMPP on my laptop and duplicate my development server. This is the model I’ve used for the past few years but what I end up with is projects on my development server that I wanted on my laptop and visa-versa. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized there had to be a better way. My current setup doesn’t allow me to do things like test PHP 5.3 without setting up a whole new server just for that purpose, or maintain an environment like my production server - it has it’s own little quirks - so that I can work on legacy code.

Here is a short list of my criteria:

• Must work on my laptop.
• Must allow me to easily test different environments
• Must let me work on multiple projects

The solution that doesn’t work

Yesterday I was browsing phpdeveloper.org like all good PHP developers should when I ran across a link to Kevin van Zonneveld’s blog post, How virtualization will improve your code. Reading it over, I begin to think he had hit upon the solution. He was using Sun’s new VirtulBox 2.0 to virtualize the development server. The only problem with Kevin’s solution is that he is running Linux as his primary OS (Host) and runs Linux as the virtualized (Guest) OS. Actually, it’s not a problem for him but it is for me since I use Windows as my desktop environment. I did feel though that he was moving in the right direction.

Installing VirtualBox is very easy and grabbing a copy of Ubuntu Desktop (Don’t use Server, it won’t work According to this thread The problem was a setting in VirtualBox and not Ubuntu itself. It may be safe to use Server if you like.) was actually the longest part of the process. Once downloaded, setting up the virtual server was actually anti-climatic. You just let the wizard get you going and then watch as Ubuntu installs.

One of the great things about VirtualBox is that it has a “shared folders” option. I simply define a directory on my Windows OS (Host), c:\web, as a shared folder and then mount that share inside the Linux OS. Once you you get it working the way you want, you jsut add the mount to your virtual server’s /etc/fstab and never think of it again.

The end result is I can still use Windows/Komodo as my development environment. My virtual server has Apache, PHP and MySQL installed so it can serve up the pages from the same directory. So far, all was going well. Here is where Kevin and I parted company though. Kevin was content to browse the work area using the browsers installed on the virtualized server. This is the easy way to do it because the browser and Apache are on the same virtual machine. I however, wanted to be able to browse the server from my Windows environment so I can test with IE, FF, Safari, etc.

Following the instructions in the Users Guide I setup a “Host Interface”, bridged it to my wi-fi card and setup my virtual server to use the new interface. (It should be noted that I know enough networking to be dangerous so the sentence above actually covered about 3 hours of running down blind alleys) Each time I tried a different combination, my new virtual server fired up just fine but failed to connect to the network.

After a lot of failed tries and a lot of googeling, I found the answer. (Which was, of course, in the manual to begin with) Most wi-fi cards are not capable of promiscuous mode. For bridging to work, Windows has to put the card in promiscuous mode.

Mine card, an Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, is capable of it but you have to have an admin tool to do it and while I can find the manual for the admin tool, I can’t find anyplace to download the actual tool itself.

Just to confirm that this was actually the problem, I snaked a cable into my lair from my server closet and bridged the host interface and my wired interface. Voila! it worked exactly how I wanted it to. But alas, since the solution is not portable, it won’t fit all my criteria.

Conclusion

Even though VirtualBox won’t meet my need as a development server, it’s still a cool toy to play with. It scratches my Linux itch while letting me keep my Windows desktop. Running it in seamless mode is a little more processor intensive but very cool. It puts the Linux toolbar at the top of the screen and Linux apps open as regular Windows windows.

I’m still in search of the perfect development environment. If I find it, I’ll let you know.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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This is really a note for me because I keep forgetting things.

1. Unpack latest copy of wordpress in a work directory
2. Rename wordpress directory to blog
3. Rename blog directory to blog.original
4. Move work/blog to main directory
5. Copy blog.original/wp-content/plugins to blog/wp-content/plugins
6. Copy blog.original/wp-content/themes to blog/wp-content/themes
7. Copy blog.original/wp-content/uploads to blog/wp-content/uploads
8. Copy blog.original/wp-config.php to blog/wp-config.php
9. Copy blog.original/.htaccess to blog/.htaccess (this is the step I keep forgetting
10. Go to blog admin page and check for database upgrade
11. Check site for working theme and internal links

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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Wow, what a day today was!

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post so unless you are friend or family, you may just want to read the next summary and skip the rest.

For those in a hurry

For those who have not heard, yes, I will soon be leaving Zend and moving to Ibuildings. Yes, that means I am also leaving Nashville, TN-US for Utrecht, Netherlands. No, the lovely and talented Kathy will not be going with me immediately but will be joining me after my son graduates high school. Yes we are both very excited about it.

Why

The first question most people ask me is why? I mean a lot of people asked me that. As I’ve said to just about anyone who would listen, I have a great job! Zend is a great company to work for, they provide for their people, and I have absolutely no complaints about my time at Zend. This will come as a surprise to a few Zenders as all they have ever seen me do is complain. I’ve been allowed to create my role at Zend and that is a rare thing at any company.

I was originally hired at Zend to be an editor for DevZone and I was just supposed to write articles and code. (those of you who have seen my spelling and grammar gaffes can stop laughing now) Over the course of 2.5 years, Mark de Visser, with the backing of Andi, Harold and the rest of this awesome company, put up with my antics. They paid me to work with the PHP community. I got to travel to conferences, hang out in IRC, they even let me be the Master of Ceremonies of ZendCon. This truly is a dream job. It is so great that in the 2.5 years, I’ve turned down most offers to interview and the few serious offers that came my way. This was were I felt at home.

So back to the question, why leave a dream job at a great company? The only answer I have is “opportunity“. Most of you have never read my article “Nerd Herding” (and I don’t recommend you bother now) but in it I talk about the fact that for developers, interesting projects are just as important as a good salary. While I still love what I do at Zend, the opportunity offered to me by Ibuildings was just too great to pass up. So that is why, after over a month of thinking about it and discussing it with the lovely and talented Kathy, we decided that this was a chance I couldn’t pass up.

/me <3 PHPC

One of the great things about my job, both at Zend and at Ibuildings is that I get paid to work with the PHP community. I told someone this at ZendCon but it bears repeating here.

PHP is my fifth programming language, that means I’ve been a part of 5 programming communities. None of those communities have come close to being as vibrant, fun and welcoming as the PHP community. PHP developers should not take this community for granted, it is something special.

It is to this awesome group of mixed nuts that we call the PHP community, that I give a big hug and say thank you. Thank you for all the tweets, blog posts, IMs and irc well wishes today. Thank you for your friendship. Thanks you for welcoming me in even when you didn’t have to. You guys and gals are teh awesome and I wish I could call each of you by name and say thank you. (if I tried, we’d be here a while an even then, I know I’d leave someone out so I’m not going to try) It has been a blast working with you while at Zend and I look forward to working with you at Ibuildings!

Looking Forward

I’ve talked a lot about Zend in this post but I can’t close without saying a big hello to my new Ibuildings family. Thank you for welcoming me in such a warm fashion. I’ve never had this much attention paid to me coming to a new company. Honestly, it humbles me to think that I’m moving to a new company and country and yet I already have good friends in both. I am looking forward to working with each of you!

I am positive that Zend will be hiring someone to take over DevZone and my other duties. I know that phpc will embrace them as you did me. (because again, you guys and gals rock!) DevZone has become a regular daily stop of a lot of PHP developers and I am sure it will only get better.

As for me? well, I’m not going anywhere. (figuratively speaking) I’ll still be hanging around on Skype, IRC and IM. If you need to contact me, my contact info is always on my EPK. I encourage you to ping me if I can help you.

It’s been an awesome 2.5 years at Zend and I look forward to a number of awesome years at Ibuildings!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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The lovely and talented Kathy (wife 1.24 for my #phpc buds out there) is looking for work. Contract or FTE (In Nashville) or telecommute (anywhere).

I’ve been working with her for 12 years on web design projects and can attest to her mad design and project management skillz. Her resume can be found here or if you prefer, by browsing her website.

If your company is looking for someone, I would appreciate you dropping me a line and I’ll put you in touch with her. (my email address is cal at calevans dot com) I’m sure once you talk to her, you’ll agree with me.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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(YES! It’s been a long time since I blogged, why is another story for another time)

elePHPant World Tour is now live! This was an idea Ivo and I came up with one day while chatting. Here’s the basic premise. It seems obvious that elePHPants love to travel. Equally obvious is the fact that a lot of PHP developers love to take pictures. So, let’s combine the two. If you spot an elePHPant while traveling, like near a landmark, or making it’s way through the airport, snap a picture. Upload it to flickr and tag it with ewt08. Thanks in no small part to a bit of Web 2.0 magic and Wordpress, we’ll steal the picture from flickr and post it on the blog.

In January, the ever versatile and talented crew from phpwomen.org will look at all the pictures posted and pick the best one. (Best being a highly subjective term) The winner will get a prize package that, while is not complete yet, is described on the about us page.

So get in on the fun. Make sure you always have your camera with you because as you travel, you never know where you will spot them. (It also helps if you carry a spare elePHPant n case you are at a picturesque site and there’s not one just roaming about)

Hey, if you work for a company trying to reach PHP developers, and want to give a little link love and good will from the community, drop me a line. We’d love to have you as a sponsor and all it will cost you is a prize for the prize pool.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)(elePHPant)
=C=

p.s. Do us a favor love, tweet this post to help spread the word? Cheers!

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Ok, you are lost on a desert island and you can only follow 5 people on twitter. (Don’t think about it too hard, it’s just a freakin’ game) Who do you choose and why?

Here are my 5.

5: @andigutmans
Ok, so I work for Andi. (Actually, I work for @markdevisser) Andi is new to twitter but has already begun to see the potential. He’s started monitoring Zend’s footprint on twitter and I’ve seen him answer people’s questions or gripes about Zend, even when they are not addressed to him.

4: @lizziekeiper
I only met Lizzy a few month ago but she’s fun and every few days she asks her “Question of the day”. I like people that make me stop and think for a minute during my day.

3: @weierophinney
I work with Matthew and we usually talk every day or so. Matthew only tweets when he has something to say. (and that’s rare on twitter) so if Matthew says something, I stop and read it and if he posts a URL, I almost always visit it.

2: @mtabini
Marco is a good friend and a really bright guy. I follow him because his posts are almost always funny or insightful.

1: @everysandwich
Fred Leo is the funniest man I’ve never met. (No offense @SoupySales) We’ve been on-line friends for about 3 years now. I help him with his blogs from time to time and in return he makes me laugh almost every day. Before twitter, Fred and I would talk on AIM every day. Talking with Fred on AIM is difficult, not because he’s hard to understand but because I hated to just blather. Since the things he said made me laugh out loud, I felt I had to be funny too. Which was fine, we had some awesome discussions but it’s taxing on my brain. With twitter now, I can get my Fredisms without feeing the pressure to be funny back. (We still talk on AIM though, just not as much) If you’ve got time, go visit his blog and listen to PETA Girl or root around till you find the story of Aunt Mary. It’s worth it, I promise.

Until Next Time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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For the first time in five years, the lovely and talented Kathy and I took a much needed vacation. This time, we decided to drag along our two best friends, Rick and Kim.

As with our last vacation, we decided to cruise, at least for part of it. Unlike last time though, we chose to cruise to Mexico instead of Alaska. To Thursday afternoon, after a nice flight, we boarded the Royal Caribbean ship, “Enchantment of the Seas” in Ft. Lauderdale and set sail. The boat was nice but not as nice as the “Radiance of the Seas” that we sailed on in Alaska. Still it was a nice boat and we soon found our sea legs and started relaxing.

The first meme of the trip came during dinner the first evening. Rick opened the butter dish to find that the gr in “grassland butter” was obscured leaving only “assland butter”. Those of you who know us know that it went downhill quickly from there.

Key West was our first port of call. We visited the Hemmingway house, did all the touristy things and then headed back to the ship because it was hot! The Hemmingway house was awesome, we had a great tour guide named Loren who made the tour very interesting.

That evening was the formal dining night on the ship so we all got dressed up and pretended we were adults for the evening. When it’s all said and done, I think we clean up pretty good. :)

The next port of call was Cozumel. For our excursion there we chose to see the Mayan ruins. Well, we thought that was the point of the excursion, it turned out to be an hour at the ruins, and a few sales pitches along the way. It was fun and entertaining though.

Since Cozumel is on an island, we had to take a ferry to the mainland to see the ruins. The ride over was a bit hairy because we sat inside, the water was real choppy and the guy one isle over lost his lunch. Luckily, they had passed out plastic baggies just for that purpose. The ride back was much better, we sat on the back deck and enjoyed the sun and spray. By the time we got back though, we were salt crusted. :)

The next day was our only full day at sea. we mainly just wandered around and did a lot of nothing. We did play TV Tune Trivia and if Rick and Kim had bothered to show up on-time we would have actually won. We were one point away from winning and they knew the first tune. Alas, they opted to take a nap and got carried away.

That evening was probably the most fun evening of the cruise. We saw the “farewell” show in the theater, played the scavenger hunt game on the opposite end of the ship and then went back to the theater for some late-night comedy. Our bartender from dinner just happened to show up at each location to make sure that we were “enjoying ourselves”. We kinda “over enjoyed” ourselves that night.

That was it for the cruise. I don’t have pictures for the dive portion yet so I’ll save that for another day. No cruise is complete without towel animals though so here are the pictures of ours.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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There are several companies, I love to hate, Microsoft, AT&T, Comcast, Sprint and Firestone to name a few. There are also companies I absolutely adore, Skype, Southwest Airlines, php|architect are all in that category. So it really chaps my ass when I have to say nice things about a company from the first list and it’s even worse when I have to say bad things about a company from the second list.  However, I am always willing to give credit where credit is due.

Recently, I got tweets from two different companies.  These were not twitterspam because they were in direct response to tweets I had made. However their approaches were totally opposite and honestly, opposite of what I would expect from each of the companies.

Comcast

My buddy Fred Leo and I were discussing Comcast. Comcast, if you’ve been following closely, is in the first list, "Love to Hate".  They are usually a pretty easy target. This time however, they caught me off guard. First, when I griped about their (now defunct) P2P Bill of rights, ComcastCares responded as he/she normally does with any mention of Comcast (and he/she posts a LOT) with a simple "We are working on it…". Kinda what you would expect and honestly, I was ready to just move on because I was just venting.  However, they they surprised me.  I got this tweet from Scott Westerman, a VP at Comcast asking me to email him.

So I did and to my great surprise (and consternation, see the part about the two lists above) he emailed me back! He actually encouraged me to keep talking to him. (Scott, I’m gonna write back, I swear, just gotta get over the shock) See, up to this point, my interaction with Comcast has been mainly through their technical support personnel. (Let’s just say it was less than stellar and move on.) But now they not only have someone who is monitoring twitter on a regular basis but someone in upper management has a real clue. (Scott, I hope I’m not killing our friendship by calling you out here) It’s really unusual for a company to have clueful upper management but to be clueful and be on my "Love To Hate" list is unheard of. So it is with great chagrin that I move Comcast off my "Love to hate" list, at least temporarily. Let’s see how things go. (oh and just so you know, it’s not Scott’s job to monitor twitter, he’s one of the rare breed of "upper management who loves technology". I wish more companies would hire/foster these types.)

ComcastCares offers sympathy and help. Scott, offered dialog. He didn’t offer to fix anything but honestly, I would have been suspicious if he had.  However he did offer to listen. When was the last time you got an email from a company on your "love to hate" list offering to listen to your grievances?

Southwest Airlines

I love SWA, seriously.  I fly a lot and when they go where I’m going, I always fly SWA. I even like the new boarding procedures. SWA has long been on my "Love to Love" list. So I was pleasantly surprised when I got this tweet from them when me and my buddy Eli White (you know, the guy from digg.com?) were discussing airlines. It’s nice and polite, kind of like Comcastcares. However, if start reading tweets from ComcastCares and from SouthwestAir you quickly notice a pattern. ComcastCares, more often than not offers to help, offers information, offers insight into the company SouthwestAir offers pleasantries. "Hope you give us another chance" is about as deep and helpful as it gets. Honestly, with a free week and a case of RedBull, I could probably write a bot that could do this. (I have no idea if this is a bot or not. I don’t even know if this is an "official" representative of SWA.)

This, IMHO, is the absolute wrong way to use twitter. You may make people feel better for a second but after they realize that your not really listening, your just talking at them, people will begin to understand. SWA, if you really want to get Eli to switch over, give him a reason to switch. Actually talk to him, find out why he doesn’t fly LUV and figure out what you can do to solve the problem.  You guys/gals are so creative in other areas, it’s hard for me to believe that this is your best effort on twitter. And don’t just do it for A-List bloggers, do it for everyone! (Not that I’m an A-List blogger, I’m sure that’s not why Scott contacted me…I’m so far down the long tail that they ran out of letters and had to switch to numbers to describe me.)

I won’t be removing SWA from my "Love to Love" list any time soon because they do a lot of things right. However, we can all  learn from their (bad) example. If you are going to try to engage the twitter market, talk to them, not just at them.

Conclusion

I talk about how companies should and should not use twitter in my report "Twitter for Marketers" and I’m going to have to update it now to include this case study. Comcast, get it because they have ComcastCares and you get they idea that they might actually care. They get bonus points for having at least one VP who understands that twitter is just a conversation starter, its not the conversation. SWA does not get it because even though they are monitoring twitter, they are not actually using it to make a difference. They are just handing out "I’m Sorry", "Hope you’ll give us another chance" or "Hey! That’s Great" on a good blog post. They are not engaging their customers in a conversation. As Joe Jaffe is quick to point out, marketing is now a conversation and they need to "join the conversation".

Until Next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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Regular readers know that I am ecstatically married to wife 1.24, the lovely and talented Kathy. (She is the inspiration for all the love poems at  Cyrano’s Apprentice…and even one of the Burma Shave poems there!) "the lovely and talented Kathy" is a phrase that I started using a year or so ago and always link it back to her web site. Originally, there was no particular reason other than I thought it was cute.  However, of late I’ve been reading a lot about SEO. (trying to find anything that makes me think it’s anything other than horse crap) and for fun, I started sprinkling it liberally throughout my posts to see if I could "Google bomb" the term. Now Google is supposed to watch for this kind of thing and stop it. They do a pretty good job of that but every now and then they slip up, as they have today!

Here is a screen shot proving that, for at least a brief second, I p0wned the phrase "the lovely and talented Kathy".  The very first link is her web site!

Just so you don’t think it’s only because I enclosed it in quotes, here’s the same phrase without quotes.

It’s probably gone by the time I get this post up, it happened once before but I didn’t get a screen shot and it only lasted like an hour.

Anyhow, Happy Mothers Day my angel! I can’t think of a more geeky present to give you than a #1 ranking on Google. :)

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

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