by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Last Facebook and Twitter book giveaway

OK, this is it. The LAST giveaway for “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” The giveaway will occur at the end of the day on Tuesday! This will also be the second last giveaway for the User Group library. The rules still apply; if you win I will ask you to cover shipping costs. See one of my previous posts on what that looks like.

So, to win

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

This week’s book giveaway

This Friday I will be giving away the second (technically 4th and 5th) copies of my book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” The rules still apply; if you win I will ask you to cover shipping costs. See one of my previous posts on what that looks like.

So, to win

Tweet this posting. I will change it up a little and say that it needs to contain the bit.ly link for this page. I will make the drawing based off of who bit.ly says has tweeted it. The ywtdwwphp hashtag was a little wierd.

Become a fan of my Facebook page and Like this posting. The Like will be how you will be entered. But remember, the winner will be asked to cover shipping costs.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Encrypted session handler

A little while ago I had come upon the problem of having to store sensitive data in a user session. The solution that I (and several others came upon) was creating a mechanism for storing encrypted data in a session. But what we wanted to do was build something that didn’t have a single point of failure. We also wanted to build something portable. What we built was a simple Zend Framework session handler for storing sensitive data.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Getting good PHP programmers

One of the interesting conversations I had during Zendcon was while talking to a recruiter. She asked what questions she could ask to help guage how strong a PHP developer is. The best one I could come up with was “name 6 of the 10 variable types in PHP”. I’ve had the pleasure of being able to interview several people for working at Zend and that is usually one of the first questions I ask and I can usually get a good feel for how long the conversation will be after that. It’s an esoteric question but by asking it I can guage a) how well that person knows PHP, and b) how easy it will be for me to work with them. If they know the answer (and correct it) they know their PHP. If they don’t know the answer but get flustered or angered by it, then they will probably be harder to work with.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Top 25 Bad Book Titles

I’m sitting here waiting for a half terabyte drive to format on Vista (apparently quick format should be “quick” format). So I’m trying to figure out what to do. It’s towards the end of the day and there’s not much my brain could do right now that would be worth starting. Yesterday, there was a trend on Twitter about “boring movies”. So, why not do something on boring/useless/pointless/wrong book titles?

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

I need 10 reviewers for my album

Big news for me today. Yesterday I uploaded my album to CD Baby, which will be sending it off to iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.

But, I have a problem. I know what I like about it, but that’s just me. I don’t expect that I will get rich, or famous off of this album. And, honestly, I don’t want to be famous. Rich, on the other hand… 🙂 But what I really need is people to give their perspectives on it so I can a) quote them on it, and b) properly position in for others. The way I describe it isn’t so much what it is, but what it isn’t. It isn’t rock. It isn’t dance. It isn’t orchestra. But it has elements of each in it.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Read first, then tweet, for a free book

A few weeks ago I blogged that I was going to give away 9 copies of my book, You want to do WHAT with PHP? Well, today is the day to start. There are a few ways you can win.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

@DragonBe is awesome

After I posted my slides for use by user groups Michelango van Dam of PHPBenelux posted on the Zend Facebook page that people could use his too. They are CC-licensed so you are free to use them as well. So I asked if he could provide the PPT versions so I could post the full deal for people and he agreed. So here are three presentations that Michelangelo did that you can use for your user group as well.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

How chickens and programming are kind of related

I believe that everyone should work on a working farm for at least a month. There are a few reasons for that. Firstly, it would probably make a bunch of people shut up about a bunch of pointless things. I heard one person say “a chicken is a person too” once. That person has clearly never been around chickens in their full glory. The person who said it had about a half dozen pet chickens. “Pet” chickens (wearing diapers, for what it’s worth) are not what chickens are truly like. Chickens are vile creatures that poke in their own fecal matter looking for a scrap of something worth eating. They are also cannibals. Thankfully, they are yummy too and so they do have some redeeming qualities, none of which are present in their live state.

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by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Free slides for user group meetings

One of the problems I have heard that user groups have had is that it is quite difficult to get content. Some of the larger, or more active ones, may not have as much of a problem with this but a lot of the smaller ones that I’ve talked to do. So what I’ve decided to do is, in effect, open source a lot of my presentations for re-use at user groups. What that means is that if you are looking for content specifically for a user group feel free to use some of my stuff to help you along. No warranty or support will be supplied, and they are provided “as-is”. What that means is that if you see something on there that is weird or perhaps even “wrong” I was probably using it as a keyword or reminder for something I wanted to say. So, if I wrote something that was spot-on, it was intended, if I wrote something that was wrong or inaccurate, I was trying to prove a point. It’s called nuance. 🙂

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