Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

It’s been a while since I’ve done a conference roundup and even when I did them, I don’t think I posted them here. So, let’s correct both oversights at once and do a php|tek 09 roundup.

Unlike other roundups, I’m not going to describe in detail all the cool sessions I attended. In all honestly, I only attended 2 sessions start to finish, and they were both mine. I did manage to slip into Sara Golemon’s PHP 5.3:Hot or Not session and really enjoyed it. So of the sessions I wanted to go to but didn’t get to, which ones would I have attended? All of them! The schedule was packed with topics I wanted to learn more about. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked on some other things and didn’t get as much session time as I would have liked.
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Dear Reader,

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=

Dear Reader,

My breakfast buddy Bill Seaver posted a real interesting post on his blog titled “Blogs Will Kill The Web Design Star”. I started a comment to it but it quickly grew into a post by itself. So before you read this, go visit Bill’s blog and read it. (and while you are surfing, don’t forget to drop by his podcast, The New Mediology and give it a listen.

My response:

Hi Bill!

I couldn’t agree with you more. The days of paying someone big bucks for a simple site are gone. I actually covered this on Sixty Second Tech a few weeks ago in the episode The Secret to Cheap and Easy Websites. WordPress makes a great simple blog and with the explosion of good, cheap/free skins, there’s really no reason for people to pay for simple web needs. I did get some flack over on iTunes on that episode because a listener considered my approach to the subject denigrating to web designers. :)

If your needs are more than WordPress can provide, Joomla is a great next step. It’s several order of magnitude larger and more complex than WordPress but it has a great plugin structure and like WordPress it has an active community.

BTW, my favorite WordPress theme site is www.wpthemesfree.com. I’ve used several of their themes as starting points for my projects.

Also, I’ve been saying for a few weeks now that the job title to have for the next five years is “App Skinner”. Wife 1.24, The Lovely and Talented Kathy who is a web designer has been able to successfully deploy several complex sites including an e-commerce site, without having to employ a programmer. This opens up new doors for the company she works for because instead of having to hire a programmer to write yet another shopping cart, she can deploy Joomla and spend her time concentrating on developing a look and feel that will set it apart from the competition.

Bill, thanks for the post, it was great.

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

Dear Reader,

The title of this post will confuse most of you but I chose it on purpose. I hit a wall last night and couldn’t find anything on the web to help me over it.

The Problem

<?PHP
var_dump(set_include_path('./'));

Drop this little piece of code into a file and place it on your web server. What you SHOULD get back is a string describing your old include path. If you get false, you have hit the problem I hit last night. I went so far as to recompile 2 difference versions of Apache thinking (almost correctly) that it was something that had changed in my Apache config files.

The Solution

Like most Apache installs, my development server has a single config file for each domain. (In my case they are all *.dev domains, I don’t host any live domains on my cable modem) In each config file, I set not only Apache settings but some defaults for things like php’s include path for that domain. Here’s an example for my development are for calevans.com

<virtualhost 192.168.0.99:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com
    DocumentRoot /home/calevans.com/public_html
    ServerName www.calevans.dev
    ServerAlias www.calevans.dev calevans.dev
    ErrorLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log
    CustomLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
    php_value include_path /usr/local/lib/php:/home/phpinc/:/home/calevans.com/phpinc
</virtualhost>

As you can see, I use php_value to set the default include path. However, for some reason, I had started using php_admin_value to set it and other settings. After 4 long hours of banging my head on this, my friend Davey Shafik popped into #phpwomen (yes, I hang out there…its like taking “Home Economics” in high school, you do it because it’s where all the girls are) and said:

[22:54] Davey: I know what it is ;)
[22:54] Davey: php_admin_value include_path
[22:54] Davey: you have that somewhere
[22:55] Davey: you *cannot* override php_admin_value settings

Son-of-a-gun if he wasn’t right. For some reason I had started using php_admin_value instead of just php_value. php_value can be overridden in your code, however, php_admin_value tells PHP not to allow the value to be overridden.

Why is this important

If you are working with Zend Framework, then this is VERY important. Zend_Loader temporarily modifies the include_path when including things like Controllers. If it can’t do so, your apps will fail in a most spectacular way.

Wife 1.24 (The lovely and talented Kathy) says that now I know how everyone else feels when I walk over and solve problems. (I have a tendency to do that and am usually pretty snarky about it when I do)

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