Sunday, May 22. 2005

In my quest to conslidate my resources and further my ability to do my job from any location on the planet with a decent Internet connection, I have decided to tackle trying to unify my contact information. So far, the best approach I can think of is setting up a LDAP server. I've started playing around with OpenLDAP, but it seems awfully complex considering this is going to be a single-user server. Does anyone have one of the following they'd like to share?

1) A good (and I mean good) no-nonsense resource for setting up a very simple openLDAP server whose purpose is only to be accessable by one user for reading/writing their contact lists... The step by step it is the better

2) A better alternative to LDAP to achieve this sort of unification? Honestly I don't think there is one since one of the requirements to this project is that it works with evolution (or other such client-side mail clients)

Eventually I'll get openLDAP working properly but I rather not waste the cycles to do it if someone already has a working solution.

Sunday, May 15. 2005

As funny as it might seem, with all the traveling I do I haven't ever gotten around to setting up my own SMTP relay for sending mail. In general I've always "gotten by" using a rather poor formula: If it's not that important, just wait until you get home. If you need to send mail, ssh to your server and send it from there. I just didn't have the time or energy to wade my way through the monster that is sendmail to get what seems like an incredibly simple task (just a simple auth over SSL to allow me to relay mail). Unfortunately, with my recent change in jobs to Zend it became incredibly important that I be able to send and receive mail reliably so I've put a considerable amount of effort in the last few days to getting myself into the 21st century on my mail. I replaced the horrible c-client imap server with dovecot (thanks to Wez for putting me on the fast track with its configuration), and thanks to this excellent guide I was able to cut through all of the fud on sendmail. If you're looking to setup your own relay I highly recommend this little gem to do it.

Now, if I could only get my Treo, laptop, desktop and our internal Intranet's contact lists and calenders synchronized automatically.

Sunday, May 15. 2005

Well yesterday was the last day of this year's php|tropics conference in Cancun. I've been to a lot of conferences, and I'm happy to say that once again php|architect has put on a great one. There were killer talks given by my fellow core contributors and friends, there was absolutely amazing service, and most of all I think it's safe to say everyone had a great time. My contribution to the conference consisted of three talks (OOP in PHP 5, Migrating from PHP 4->5, and Programming Smarty) and making sure that the free PHP Certification went smoothly. In total I think around half the conference attendees stepped up to get certified -- you all should find out in the next few weeks how you did so good luck!

For those of you who attended my talk and would like my materials, I can only provide the materials from my Smarty talk. Unfortunately both the OOP and Migration talks are a part of a 6 hour training course and cannot be distributed. Regardless you can find the smarty talk in my talks section and the direct link to all of the code right here.

Tuesday, May 10. 2005

Well tomorrow I'm off to the php|tropics conference being hosted in beautiful Cancun, Mexico! I am (of course) very much looking forward to the week I'll be spending there, which includes a few days after the conference to actually enjoy the surrounding area. For those of you who will be attending I am giving three talks despite the schedule which only lists two:

• Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5


• Programming Smarty (bring your own laptop!)


• Enterprise PHP Architecture (new talk!)

As I've noted, the Enterprise PHP Architecture talk is a brand new talk -- so even if you've seen some of the other material before that one should be fresh meat.

... now where did I put those swimming trunks...

Monday, May 9. 2005

If you're interested, I just found out that Zend is giving away free PHP t-shirts to people who fill out a survey and check out our new Zend Platform product. I don't know what the shirts look like, but gotta love the free swag.

Thursday, May 5. 2005

While I was attending the International PHP Conference in Amsterdam, I had an opportunity to stop by the Oracle exhibit and get introduced to a brand-new PHP Developer Center on Oracle's Developer Network! This is the second such announcement from a major database company (SAP recently launched a new PHP Development Forum which I am moderating as part of a SAP/Zend joint effort). Between Oracle, SAP and of course IBM it is becoming increasingly clear that PHP has moved from a thriving open source project to an enterprise solution powerhouse for web applications!

Thursday, May 5. 2005

For those of you who are interested, I have posted the slides from my web services talk online.

Wednesday, May 4. 2005

and PHP ... and guess who is going to be running it?

Yep, I am happy to announce that Zend and SAP have teamed up to help promote the use of PHP within the SAP community by opening up a PHP-specific section of the SAP Developer's Network. This new section has fairly humble beginnings (I will be maintaing a SAP/PHP blog and moderating their new PHP/SAP forum), but I think it's an important first step in introducing the long-forgotten world of SAP to what a technology like PHP can do for them.

I'd love to see anyone interested in using PHP and SAP together get involved! If you've got questions, comments, and experiences I strongly encourage you to stop by the forums and tell us what's on your mind!