Thursday, May 27. 2004

Lately I have been thinking a lot about e-books, and their possibilities on the Internet. O'Reilly is publishing some of my articles as a security-focused PHP e-book, php|architect has been publishing a PDF magazine for some time now and PHP Magazine has recently jumped on board as well.

The question I ask to you is this: Are E-books valuable? I do a lot of writing, and if I put out 10 focused E-books on PHP related topics (PHP and security, PHP and databases, PHP Basics, etc.) would you want to buy one? Is there a credibility issue associated with E-books? Would you rather purchase a $50 dollar print version of a book that contains everything, or a considerably cheaper (perhaps a magnitude of 10 times cheapter) e-book that teaches you exactly what you need to learn?

Let's hear some feedback!

Thursday, May 27. 2004

Lately I have been thinking a lot about e-books, and their possibilities on the Internet. O'Reilly is publishing some of my articles as a security-focused PHP e-book, php|architect has been publishing a PDF magazine for some time now and PHP Magazine has recently jumped on board as well.

The question I ask to you is this: Are E-books valuable? I do a lot of writing, and if I put out 10 focused E-books on PHP related topics (PHP and security, PHP and databases, PHP Basics, etc.) would you want to buy one? Is there a credibility issue associated with E-books? Would you rather purchase a $50 dollar print version of a book that contains everything, or a considerably cheaper (perhaps a magnitude of 10 times cheapter) e-book that teaches you exactly what you need to learn?

Let's hear some feedback!

Wednesday, May 12. 2004

Though Orkut, I decided that I'd actually click on one of these links I get every day:

http://www.google-watch.org

The site is largely about concerns this group has regarding google, especially privacy issues.. With the release of gmail, orkut, and of course their famed search engine, there is a whole lot of personal information being gathered under one roof.. Does google have plans to harvest all of this information into a useable format? Is it plasuible that Google would spend the money necessary to cross-reference names, places, people to gather intelligence on us all? I'm not freaking out here, but it is at least thought-provking to consider.. Though google cookies it can track what I am looking for, through what it finds on me online it can tell what I've been doing in my field, from orkut it could know who my business associates are, and if I used Gmail they'd even know who I've been talking to.

Is it an issue? Should we be concerned? Well I mentioned this on IRC to some friends and this was the response I got... I think its pretty much the best way to look at it:


<@Derick> my sis had a bright moment "I don't care if everybody knows my
credit card number, where i am at this moment, what my
purcahses are and who I call. I've nothing to hide."


Then again, since when are we as people concerned with privacy based on what we do or don't have to hide?

Wednesday, May 12. 2004

Though Orkut, I decided that I'd actually click on one of these links I get every day:

http://www.google-watch.org

The site is largely about concerns this group has regarding google, especially privacy issues.. With the release of gmail, orkut, and of course their famed search engine, there is a whole lot of personal information being gathered under one roof.. Does google have plans to harvest all of this information into a useable format? Is it plasuible that Google would spend the money necessary to cross-reference names, places, people to gather intelligence on us all? I'm not freaking out here, but it is at least thought-provking to consider.. Though google cookies it can track what I am looking for, through what it finds on me online it can tell what I've been doing in my field, from orkut it could know who my business associates are, and if I used Gmail they'd even know who I've been talking to.

Is it an issue? Should we be concerned? Well I mentioned this on IRC to some friends and this was the response I got... I think its pretty much the best way to look at it:


<@Derick> my sis had a bright moment "I don't care if everybody knows my
credit card number, where i am at this moment, what my
purcahses are and who I call. I've nothing to hide."


Then again, since when are we as people concerned with privacy based on what we do or don't have to hide?

Saturday, May 8. 2004

Wow, its been a very busy few weeks..

It occured to me that, although I have been working like a madman on a number of different projects, none of them have really found their way to the blog so that others could hear of them. So, although I am not ready to announce some of the things I've been working on here is a few things that have been happening:

• Speaker at the International PHP Conference Spring, 2004 (Amsterdam)
  I just got back from Amsterdam, where I gave two talks. The first was on Tidy in PHP 5, which you can find the slides for Here. The second talk was on Smarty, which has a few slides you can also find here, and the code to go along with them Here. If you would like to see some photos I have taken, you can find them in my Photo Gallery


• A new release of IntSmarty
  IntSmarty, the Internationalization tool based on the Smarty Templating Language has been released. The first version of this library was featued in the April, 2004 issue of the php|architect magazine and is being used as part of the PHPCommunity.org project. This version, which fixes a few bugs from the version which appeared in the magazine has been dubbed version 0.7. You can find the source Right here on my web site. I will be writing up a section of the web site for this later, but for now you'll just have to buy the issue of the magazine if you would like to get a complete explaination of its use.


• A new Announcement Mailing list has been created
  To the bottom you should see a place to sign up for a coggeshall.org announcement mailing list. This mailing list was suggested to me by an attendee at the Int. PHP Conference. I don't plan on using it very often, other than to let you know of major announcements on coggeshall.org regarding things like new articles, book releases, conferences, and new releases of software I have written. You can unsubscribe at any time, so please sign up if you are interested.

Sign up Now!

Stay informed on the happenings of

Coggeshall.org's releases and news!

(ex. john@php.net)


I'm sure there is more that I have got brewing, however that's all that comes to mind at this very moment. Stay tuned!

Saturday, May 8. 2004

Wow, its been a very busy few weeks..

It occured to me that, although I have been working like a madman on a number of different projects, none of them have really found their way to the blog so that others could hear of them. So, although I am not ready to announce some of the things I've been working on here is a few things that have been happening:

• Speaker at the International PHP Conference Spring, 2004 (Amsterdam)
  I just got back from Amsterdam, where I gave two talks. The first was on Tidy in PHP 5, which you can find the slides for Here. The second talk was on Smarty, which has a few slides you can also find here, and the code to go along with them Here. If you would like to see some photos I have taken, you can find them in my Photo Gallery


• A new release of IntSmarty
  IntSmarty, the Internationalization tool based on the Smarty Templating Language has been released. The first version of this library was featued in the April, 2004 issue of the php|architect magazine and is being used as part of the PHPCommunity.org project. This version, which fixes a few bugs from the version which appeared in the magazine has been dubbed version 0.7. You can find the source Right here on my web site. I will be writing up a section of the web site for this later, but for now you'll just have to buy the issue of the magazine if you would like to get a complete explaination of its use.


• A new Announcement Mailing list has been created
  To the bottom you should see a place to sign up for a coggeshall.org announcement mailing list. This mailing list was suggested to me by an attendee at the Int. PHP Conference. I don't plan on using it very often, other than to let you know of major announcements on coggeshall.org regarding things like new articles, book releases, conferences, and new releases of software I have written. You can unsubscribe at any time, so please sign up if you are interested.

Sign up Now!

Stay informed on the happenings of

Coggeshall.org's releases and news!

(ex. john@php.net)


I'm sure there is more that I have got brewing, however that's all that comes to mind at this very moment. Stay tuned!