Hey Everyone,
I am looking to pick up some extra work that can be done in the evenings and on Saturday’s. I need to come up with some extra cash to catch up on some bills. You can see My Resume and that contains all of the contact information that you need. If you have or know anyone who is looking for an advanced PHP Developer I would appreciate it if you could contact me.
I am happy to announce that I have hit the first milestone for this site, i never thought it would be after the second month of being live. My goal withing the first 4 months was to get 1000 visitors here in a month. In August we had about 500 readers, and in September we jumped to just over 1000. I want to thank all of you who read this site and look forward to making this site even better over time. I hope that the content i provide will be enough to occupy your free time ;)
Everyone needs to power up the software update tool in OS X. 10.4.8 was released today and has a slew of updates. You can view everything that was done in 10.4.8 at this page.
When I bought my PowerMac Quad G5 Apple computer, I was pricing the hard drives, it was quite expensive for 2 x 500gb drives to be configured, plus I wanted to find something that would be hot swapable. I took a look at the LaCie drives, I was really looking for a drive I could connect to my router and read from any computer on the network. Initially I was looking at the LaCie Ethernet Disk 1TB however this is pretty much a computer in it’s own. It has Windows XP embedded onto the drives and that is not something I wanted. I wanted to have a drive on the network that did not have ANY OS installed. LaCie did not offer a drive like that.
I ended up looking into the 1TB Big Disk with a triple interface, it supported USB, FW400 and FW800. I purchased the drive and installed it immediately. I am happy with the drive for the most part, being that it is an external drive it does run a bit slow. When you first access the drive it takes a few moments to show the directories and files. I wish it was a bit faster however I have it connected via FW800 so there is no getting faster unless it was internal. The disk has been good for backing my items up however is it setup in RAID 1 so if one drive fails I will lose all the data stored on the drive. If you are looking for a good drive to use for backups and not just external storage I would not recommend this drive. Instead I would look for something setup in RAID 3 or 5.
I am happy to hear that there is a php upload progress extension for PHP 5.2 You can read more about it here. On the mailing list Rasmus Lerdorf brought up a good concern and that is about the storage mechanism. Will there be 1 extension that will deal with all methods of storagesuch as mysql, pgsql, oracle, files, etc. or will there be an extensionfor each method. I think there should be 1extension, yes the code might get a tad messy but having an extensionfor each method would be very unorganized and messy. I think the best way is to go with 1 extension.
So a few months back I wanted to learn more about web development. Currently I am focused on PHP however i would like to be more well rounded and know more than just PHP. I bought a few books about JavaScript and also a book on DVD. I have been able to preview some of the Total Training videos for Photoshop, and they were very informative and they get the instructions through to the end user. They were also very fun to watch, you could tell they were not low budget videos. The book on DVD that i bought is called Beginners Javascript Programming on DVD by DV Press, Inc. although I bought the item from Amazon.
I would never recommend this book on DVD to anyone. The content (from what i was able to watch) seemed to be decent however i could not sit through the instructor. He is so boring and bland and blah. I am not quite sure how to explain it. You would have to see it to understand, and I am sure that posting a bit of the course on here would violate copyright laws so I cannot do that. You would think that if a company was going to record something it would not be so bland. It’s so bad that i could not get passed chapter 3. The guy talks in the same tone constantly, it will just about put you to sleep. I have this DVD sitting on my desk and i think i will throw it away. I would put it on ebay but i would feel bad actually selling this to someone whether i know them or not.
I cannot speak about other DV Press, Inc books on DVD however if they have the instructor Harold Davis i would stay away from them. DV Press, Inc. really needs to get some people who are not only good programmers but whom are good on camera as well. In the future i may try another DV Press, Inc. book on DVD but it wont be with this instructore, and if the next is just as bad I won’t purchase another DV Press, Inc. product
So are you getting prepared to take the new PHP 5 Certification Exam offered by Zend? I have yet to see any books released for the preparation like i did with the PHP 4 exam, however there is something new and very cool. php|architect offers a Mock Tesing Environment which is powered by Vulcan Web Testing System. It is a Java based system that is very nice and easy to use. The mock exam is comparable to the Zend Exam because it will give you a 90 minute window to complete the exam, the same as Zend. The questions are not the same as the one’s on the Zend exam however they have made the Mock Exam a bit more difficult than the Zend Exam. If you score well on the Mock Exam you are ready to take the Zend Exam. I have purchased a 5 slot exam so that i could write this review. I must say that the questions on the Mock Exam are directly related to PHP 5 and the new features such as PDO and SimpleXML. If you plan to cram for the exam do not just focus on the internals of PHP but also study the most popular extensions as well. PDO, SimpleXML, MySQLi, SPL, etc.
I would highly suggest that you take the Mock Exam before you go to take the real one ;) You can purchase the exam from php|architect in a single exam, 5-slot or 10-slot exams. If you have taken the Mock Exam let me know what your thoughts are. I firmly believe that it is well put together and will be a successful for helping people prepare for the new exam offered by Zend.
I am a supporter of Bernie Sanders over Rich Tarrant however something on the news tonight got to me. Bernie said he would set a law restricting US businesses from using people overseas as contractors. I totally agree that large corporations should not be able to run sweat shops. However I have a few people in other countries who do work for me, they do good work. I am not saying that US citizens do not do good work. Why should we be penalized for using people overseas who do GOOD work… Also Bernie needs to think if he disables us from employing any of them, how much work will we lose. I know i get work from Canada and the UK so if we cannot employ thier citizens why would they use US businesses for thier needs? In IT there is more to think about than what he is.
The reason i choose Bernie Sanders over Rich Tarrant is because Rich started with the negative ad’s and thinks his money can get him whatever he wants. Also if you check Bernie’s record for voting you will see that the reason he voted the way he did is because they bundle several things together. I am not a very political person nor do i really care about it, but when it effects my life i care. As for the Amber Alert Bernie does support it. But when they bundle several things like let’s let more people live on welfare and also support the Amber Alert what do you do? Why bundle them together just vote on each item, that would take care of things.
So the other day i stumbled accross something called PHP-IRC, it is a full blown PHP 5 IRC Bot. I know there are some people out there who say now why would you use PHP for an IRC Bot. The more important question is WHY NOT? This bot is coded really well, it will work on windows, linux, mac, probably any OS that can run PHP. I have it loaded up and have began looking over the plugin structure and it is really nice. When i say this is a full blown IRC Bot i mean it. Some of the features are listed below.
I am looking at making a few plugins for this bot, and will release them on this site when they are done. Think about the ability to have the bot store channel statistics in a database, or reach out and check your RSS Feeds for you. There is a lot you could do with this feature and you wouldnt have to load up a webpage to do anything, it can all be done in IRC via DCC Chat
My son will only use one type of pacifire, it has to be a Playtex Ortho-Pro. He lost his blue one the other day and we could not find the other spare green one. We went down to Price Chopper (the only place local to get them) and they were all out of the blue and green pacifires. All they had were the purple and pink. Now as you can imagine as a father i do not want my son to have a pink or purple pacifire. However he will not sleep without it, so we had to get him the pink and purple (they are sold in 2 packs). He has it at home but everytime we go into public i am quick to snatch that out of his mouth. A boy should never be seen with a pink pacifire (i am not homophobic so dont start that debate :D). Today however we were in the car just after i had taken the pacifire from him and he fell asleep without it. My girlfriend seems to think this is a good way to break him of the pacifire fixation. If i am always taking it from him he may get used to not having it. We are going to keep trying this method (unless i break down and buy a blue one, which has a good chance of happening) and maybe it will work?
