I was recently informed of a bug in my turing test for comments on my site. It turned out that there was a problem that the bit addition scheme when working with IE. Since about 4% of my visitors are IE users it never really came up; until it did. 
Anyways, the way I was doing the test before was with some basic bit shifting done in JavaScript like this
Where is the cloud?
Are you hype averse? Start reading at paragraph number 4. This is paragraph number 0.
I was sitting at my computer this morning when an email came in notifying me that there was an error indexing my Lucene content. This error was generated by the Zend Server event monitoring system. I went to the site and tried doing a search but saw that the results were coming up double.
I re-ran the indexing task and the searches started coming up the way they should. Mean time to resolution? 5 minutes. Customer impact? Zero. Why? Because I knew there was a problem before anyone coming to the site did. THAT is the benefit of Zend Server Event Monitoring.
Doing some work on a little project of mine while waiting for the keynote to start. What I’m doing is writing a form that needs to make sure that a record is unique in the DB. Doing that in ZF is really easy. Simple set your validator as Db_NoRecordExists. What this does is during the Zend_Form::isValid() functionality it will query the database as part of the validation process. The only parameters you really need are the table and the field if you have already set a default adapter for your Zend_Db models. That makes it really easy to use. Here’s a slice of how I did it.
Any time someone stands up and says “y’all are doing it wrong” I take notice. Then I usually lose interest. But if that person starts to resonate with my own experiences, particularly my own frustrations, then I start to take it seriously.
I have been following Josh Holmes for a little while and he has a talk he started last year called the Lost Art of Simplicity. I took notice. But I never lost interest. His basic spiel is that we developers make complex solutions for simple problems. Nothing surprising right? Except that he attributed it to ego. Ouch. But is that true? Have you ever met a software architect?
I learned a new tip for Zend Studio. When you have a long class like Zend_Application_Resource_Modules you can get code compltion on it by typing ZARM instead of the full name in the PHP editor.
I just got out of Matthew and Lorna’s tutorial on Best Practices and my mind is swimming with all of the things I want to try. So, pretty much a normal day for me. Part 1 can be found in the related links on the right hand side.
Part 2 is basically more of the same; a list of all the things you’re not doing but probably should.
Let’s start with documentation.
End User Documentation
I am in the middle of Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Lorna Jane Mitchell’s talk on PHP Best Practices and after the 3 pages of notes I took in the first hour I wanted to get some things down on virtual paper before getting too far into it. There is a lot of information that they’re giving out.
Source Control
The first thing they talked about was Source Control. Unfortunately, I was doing my writeup on MongoDB and I missed a bunch of stuff. That said, there were two things that I had time to write down.
Today was the first day of the TEK conference tutorials. These are generally about 3 hours in length and dive into a given topic a little deeper than what you would typically get in a session. The biggest problem is that you can usually only go to one. Theater hopping, in this case, means that you end up getting less entertained.
There were 3 topics that were given.
Building a Zend Framework application
Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB
Bad Guy For a Day: A Websecurity hands-on tutorial
This year wil be my first time going to TEK-X and I will be attending as a member of the press. Therefore, I need to write press-like things. Lucky for you, I really don’t know how to. Instead, I will be talking for the next week about experiences, observations and such. But since I’m writing this from my office and not Chicago it is clear that I am not there. So what I wanted to do was write about some of the features that I am excited to see.