May 31, 2008 in Random
Registrations for National Ride to Work Day (October 15th) have opened over on the Bicycle Victoria website, http://www.bv.com.au/join-in/126/. Obvious health benefits aside, commuting by bike has a positive impact on the environment, helps protect from the inanity of public transport, and it’s also good fun. You should go sign up!
May 31, 2008 in PHP
Arjen Lentz, though Open Query, is hosting a training seminar with Sebastian Bergmann:
I’m proud to announce that after significant wrangling (just suggesting did the trick, actually ;-), I’ve found Sebastian Bergmann willing to visit Australia, and teach a 3-day workshop “Quality Assurance in PHP Projects” (http://openquery.com.au/training/php_project_qa).
It’s scheduled 4-6 August in Melbourne.
The three-day workshop will introduce the attendees to writing unit tests for the backend and system tests for the frontend of a web application as well as managing the quality from development to deployment and maintainance using tools such as PHPUnit, Selenium RC, phpUnderControl, PHP_CodeSniffer, and PHP_Depend.
Sebastian (http://sebastian-bergmann.de/) is the author of PHPUnit (http://www.phpunit.de), and long-time contributor to PHP itself.
Pricing is AUD 1695 + GST.
Since this is a workshop, the number of seats will be limited to 10-12.
Registrations before June 15th receive $50 off.
Around the course dates Sebastian will also be available for consulting and/or in-house training in the Australia and New Zealand region, simply contact Open Query to discuss.
May 31, 2008 in PHPMelb, Presentations
Thursday June 12th, 7pm
580 St Kilda Road Melbourne
Databases & PHP - Tristan Penman - 7:00 - 7:45 pm
Tristan Penman will be presenting a guided tour through the database facilities in PHP, including the PEAR MDB2 library. Not only will Tristan be showing you what happens when the library works, but what happens when it doesn’t - he will show how to avoid some of the issues that he has experienced while using MDB2 for a pet project involving databases and AJAX GUIs.
Tristan’s computing background involves programming in numerous languages, with a preference for C and C++ (although he also has a soft spot for x86 assembly language). He organises the MySQL User Group, and often throws industry buzzwords together to see what ideas he can come up with. When not programming, you may find Tristan contemplating how strange it is to write about oneself in the third person.
Self Healing Databases: Managing Schema Updates In The Field - Jon Oxer - 8:00 - 8:45 pm
Database schema update management is a problem that is overlooked by many web application developers initially, but once you have a number of deployments in the field it rapidly becomes a major headache to propagate schema changes in synch with your PHP, Python, or Perl application code.
Internet Vision Technologies has developed a technique for “self-healing databases” for the SiteBuilder web application suite, allowing updates to occur automatically in the field whenever new versions of the application are pushed out. This technique has been used successfully on a number of large scale deployments such as the Siemens intranet which runs on MySQL and uses over 2500 tables. The talk covers the overall methodology with specific examples from the SiteBuilder codebase.
Socialising & Networking 9:00pm onward
Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitwise.
May 19, 2008 in OSX
Debian package maintainers botched up ssh; I need to *dist-effing-upgrade* to fix the problem.
I buggered the *firmware* on my MacBook Pro; OS X fixes *itself*.
OS X++
May 11, 2008 in Random
The Call For Papers for this year’s Open Source Developers Conference has just opened:
http://osdc.com.au/2008/papers/cfp.html
I’ll probably be submitting a paper, but yet to decide on a topic.
May 11, 2008 in CI, Conferences
CITCON (Continuous Integration & Testing Conference) is a free conference being held in Melbourne this June. CI certainly seems to be a hot topic at the moment & I’m hoping to pick up some tips for my own efforts with PHP Under Control.
Here’s the official release:
Melbourne is hosting a free technical conference in June. The conference is called CITCON, Continuous Integration and Testing conference. There is no cost, we just want people to contribute to discussions and presentations.
The Open Information Foundation, co-founded by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius, presents CITCON Asia/Pacific 2007 in Sydney, Australia.
CITCON (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) brings together people from every corner of the software development industry to discuss Continuous Integration and the type of Testing that goes along with it.
What: OpenSpace event discussing all aspects of CI and Testing, together
Where: TBD, Melbourne, Australia
When: June 27 & 28, 2008 (Friday night and Saturday)
Who: Everyone interested in CI and Testing
Cost: Free
I’ve also blogged on it. http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/6886
After a great conference in Sydney last year, The Continuous Integration and Testing conference (CITCON) is coming to Melbourne in 2008. It’s an open space conference where we all meet the night before to propose and vote for sessions then spend Saturday sharing ideas and experiences, presenting, discussing and demoing. It was an amazing experience last year. The Denver CITCON has just happened (http://citconf.com/wiki/index.php?title=CITCONDenver2008Sessions) and June is not far away.
The venue is being decided but it is central Melbourne. Best of all this is a free conference, running on sponsorship. Last year folk came from the US, NZ and around Australia, and everyone thought it was great. Registration numbers are a little low at the moment compared to the past conferences in Europe and the US and even Sydney, so if you want to come, register now. http://citconf.com/melbourne2008/
Venue should be announced shortly.
Please circulate this amongst interested folk….
cheers,
Erik Petersen
http://www.testingspot.net/
May 02, 2008 in PHP, PHPMelb, Random
Thursday May 8th, 7pm
580 St Kilda Road Melbourne
CodeSniffer. You need it. You want it. Be there. - Avi Miller - 7:00 - 7:45 pm
PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script that tokenises and “sniffs” PHP and JavsScript code to detect violations of a defined set of coding standards. It is an essential development tool that ensures that your code remains clean and consistent. It can even help prevent some common semantic errors made by developers.
This talk will show you how to use PHP_CodeSniffer to ensure your PHP and JavaScript adheres to your chosen coding standard. We will also look at how to create a new “sniff” that will check a particular coding standard requirement.
Avi is the MySource Matrix Product Evangelist for Squiz. As Product Evangelist, he is contractually obliged to deeply love MySource Matrix, a state greatly enhanced by strict adherence to coding standards (great plug!). Additional daily duties include pre-sales consulting, business analysis, information architecture, hand-holding, nappy changing and other professional tasks.
MySQL Stored Procedures - Ben Balbo - 8:00 - 8:45 pm
A recent addition in MySQL 5, stored procedures allow us to automate or program our way out of many tasks directly on the server rather than having to write external scripts to do complex manipulation of data. Stored procedures can also be used to simplify data validation or enforce access control. In this talk, Ben will use a few simple stored procedures and views to demonstrate their power and usefulness, not to mention the benefits that can be reaped when the database needs refactoring.
Socialising & Networking 9:00pm onward
Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided
with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitwise.
