Thursday, February 26. 2004

If you are having problems with your RSS feed of this site, I recently moved the blog from the main http://www.coggeshall.org to http://blog.coggeshall.org to make room for some changes I'll be making to the main coggeshall.org site. I think I've got the critical components of the blog redirecting so you shouldn't even notice, but if you run into any problems please e-mail me and let me know.

Thursday, February 26. 2004

If you are having problems with your RSS feed of this site, I recently moved the blog from the main http://www.coggeshall.org to http://blog.coggeshall.org to make room for some changes I'll be making to the main coggeshall.org site. I think I've got the critical components of the blog redirecting so you shouldn't even notice, but if you run into any problems please e-mail me and let me know.

Monday, February 23. 2004

Well things are getting back to normal here at coggeshall.org, so I thought I'd start things back off again by sharing my opinions on the numerious PHP conferences I've attended as a speaker. Seeing as I'm trying to make plans for upcoming conferences, I think this is as good as time as any.

The thing that is bothering me when it comes to conferences is how much money I end up spending out of my own pocket in order to go do a job (speak at the conference) as a speaker. I mean, its usually not a huge amount of money, but I have to wonder -- if it us speakers which are the centerpiece of the conference, why is it that we are putting money out of pocket at all? I'm not talking about making money, I just think speakers shouldn't end up dropping anywhere from $200->1000 dollars (not including personal expenses like eating, etc.) to go speak.

I've spoken in the past with others speakers about this, and the standard response I get to justify why we are paying is "Well, conference XYZ isn't making any money so they can't afford it." Although I completely understand that concept, I have to wonder how these things aren't coming out ahead. Every one of them has tons of sponsors (and when I did a little research, its not cheap to be a sponsor either), and each individual attendee can pay thousands themselves just to attend -- and that's not even counting tutorial sessions that cost extra. This is especially curious when you consider how the Vancouver conference was able to charge a mere $150 CDN or so, take care of all of its speakers' travel expenses, host one of the best conferences I've been to, and from what I've heard actually come out ahead in the end. Perhaps other conferences should look to Vancouver PHP and follow their lead -- if they can do it why can't the others?

I guess if I don't like the situation I can always stop going to conferences and giving talks.. I doubt many people would miss me anyway ;) I guess as long as I see a value in it beyond the conference itself (going new places, seeing friends, etc.) then its worth it. However, if I'm completely off-base here, I'd love to hear why.

Monday, February 23. 2004

Well things are getting back to normal here at coggeshall.org, so I thought I'd start things back off again by sharing my opinions on the numerious PHP conferences I've attended as a speaker. Seeing as I'm trying to make plans for upcoming conferences, I think this is as good as time as any.

The thing that is bothering me when it comes to conferences is how much money I end up spending out of my own pocket in order to go do a job (speak at the conference) as a speaker. I mean, its usually not a huge amount of money, but I have to wonder -- if it us speakers which are the centerpiece of the conference, why is it that we are putting money out of pocket at all? I'm not talking about making money, I just think speakers shouldn't end up dropping anywhere from $200->1000 dollars (not including personal expenses like eating, etc.) to go speak.

I've spoken in the past with others speakers about this, and the standard response I get to justify why we are paying is "Well, conference XYZ isn't making any money so they can't afford it." Although I completely understand that concept, I have to wonder how these things aren't coming out ahead. Every one of them has tons of sponsors (and when I did a little research, its not cheap to be a sponsor either), and each individual attendee can pay thousands themselves just to attend -- and that's not even counting tutorial sessions that cost extra. This is especially curious when you consider how the Vancouver conference was able to charge a mere $150 CDN or so, take care of all of its speakers' travel expenses, host one of the best conferences I've been to, and from what I've heard actually come out ahead in the end. Perhaps other conferences should look to Vancouver PHP and follow their lead -- if they can do it why can't the others?

I guess if I don't like the situation I can always stop going to conferences and giving talks.. I doubt many people would miss me anyway ;) I guess as long as I see a value in it beyond the conference itself (going new places, seeing friends, etc.) then its worth it. However, if I'm completely off-base here, I'd love to hear why.

Thursday, February 19. 2004

Thank you to those who have taken a moment to e-mail me and let me know about odds and ends which weren't working on the site. The Fun PHP image creation things should be up and running again. Unfortunately until further notice the photo gallery is offline.

The problem with the photo gallery is simple -- since I was forced to move servers anyway I decided to be forward-thinking and am currently running the latest CVS HEAD of PHP 5 on coggeshall.org. Yes, that's right -- PHP 5. I'm doing this for a number of reasons:

1) I think PHP 5 has a ton of awsome stuff in it I wanted to use
2) I'm writing a PHP 5 book, so I wanted to see for myself how difficult of a time people would have running PHP 4 code on PHP 5
3) Someone has to actually try it eventually :)

So far, I have experienced very little in the way of problems with software packages -- save for Gallery. One of the new features I installed during the move is a Wiki where you can find a Complete list of all of the problems I've encountered running my PHP 4 based Coggeshall.org on PHP 5. Feel free to contribute your own problems as well to the Wiki page!

So, in short, pardon my dust -- I'm still getting myself settled in!

Thursday, February 19. 2004

Thank you to those who have taken a moment to e-mail me and let me know about odds and ends which weren't working on the site. The Fun PHP image creation things should be up and running again. Unfortunately until further notice the photo gallery is offline.

The problem with the photo gallery is simple -- since I was forced to move servers anyway I decided to be forward-thinking and am currently running the latest CVS HEAD of PHP 5 on coggeshall.org. Yes, that's right -- PHP 5. I'm doing this for a number of reasons:

1) I think PHP 5 has a ton of awsome stuff in it I wanted to use
2) I'm writing a PHP 5 book, so I wanted to see for myself how difficult of a time people would have running PHP 4 code on PHP 5
3) Someone has to actually try it eventually :)

So far, I have experienced very little in the way of problems with software packages -- save for Gallery. One of the new features I installed during the move is a Wiki where you can find a Complete list of all of the problems I've encountered running my PHP 4 based Coggeshall.org on PHP 5. Feel free to contribute your own problems as well to the Wiki page!

So, in short, pardon my dust -- I'm still getting myself settled in!

Friday, February 13. 2004

For those of you who visit my web site on a regular basis (I believe there are a few of you at least!) You surely noticed that for the past 4 or 5 days coggeshall.org has been down. Why? Good question. You can ask the folks at Webpipe.net why it was down, why it took so long to come back up, and why they never actually "called me" to let me know what was going on. While you are at it, you can ask them why they put long-time paying customers on hold for 20+ mintues, and what happened to cause them to lose all of my IMAP e-mail a few months ago.

Oh, and while you are at it, ask them where was the backup they said they had, too.

That's all I'm going to say about the subject, but regardless as you can see the problems have been resolved -- my solution was to cancel my account and move my domain to a new server. In fact, my server is now being hosted on a donated machine courtesy of PHPDeveloper.org! Over the past few days I have been configuring this new server and getting the DNS moved over and it appears that things are ready to go! So why don't you go check them out, send the webmaster an e-mail to thank him for his kindness!

Also, despite all of the problems the web server was having apparently my e-mail never went down -- even after the DNS moved I was able to get a new mail server up and running before hand (it was neat to get e-mail on two different servers for the same address as the DNS propagated throughout the internet). Thank you again to PHPDeveloper.org!

Friday, February 13. 2004

For those of you who visit my web site on a regular basis (I believe there are a few of you at least!) You surely noticed that for the past 4 or 5 days coggeshall.org has been down. Why? Good question. You can ask the folks at Webpipe.net why it was down, why it took so long to come back up, and why they never actually "called me" to let me know what was going on. While you are at it, you can ask them why they put long-time paying customers on hold for 20+ mintues, and what happened to cause them to lose all of my IMAP e-mail a few months ago.

Oh, and while you are at it, ask them where was the backup they said they had, too.

That's all I'm going to say about the subject, but regardless as you can see the problems have been resolved -- my solution was to cancel my account and move my domain to a new server. In fact, my server is now being hosted on a donated machine courtesy of PHPDeveloper.org! Over the past few days I have been configuring this new server and getting the DNS moved over and it appears that things are ready to go! So why don't you go check them out, send the webmaster an e-mail to thank him for his kindness!

Also, despite all of the problems the web server was having apparently my e-mail never went down -- even after the DNS moved I was able to get a new mail server up and running before hand (it was neat to get e-mail on two different servers for the same address as the DNS propagated throughout the internet). Thank you again to PHPDeveloper.org!