Last weekend I attended the PHPUnconference in Hamburg.
The concept of an unconference was new to me. One the one hand I found the approach relaxing, the amount of free time between the sessions was really great to come in contact with the other attendes. One the other hand the selforganisation costed plenty of time and also brought some confusions. This seems to be the natural drawback of an unconference.
In Particular the talks about software-quality from Sebastian Bergmann and Manuel Pichler where pretty interesting to me. A complete list of sessions and notes of them could be found in the PHPUnconferences wiki.
Here are my impressions I got from the various conversations there:
- The php web application world goes javascript for the user-interfaces. Although it was a PHP converence, you could talk with allmost anyone about the exciting world of javascript. Many people, who started with conservertive aproches and replaced server generated HTML on the client, are now in the process to switch to real javascript clients.
- The php web application world goes to mission critical places. Where in the beginning of the php area it had the smack of a hobbyist sphere of activity, php applications do more and more mission critical computing in various business areas.
- Php web application is not a synonym for open source code. In fact as a ambassador of a high quality mission critical open source web application, I felt like a bit of an exception there. The majority of attendees is into closed sourced ‘commercial only’ projects.
- A lot of java coders switch to php. As php is not in the academic scope yet, many newcomers in the web-scene start coding in java. After their first contact with php they love the language due to it’s flexibility. Even in the open source world, one might find this tendency according to ohloh.
Finaly many thanks to the orga team for the great unconference and the extraordinary catering.
After two weeks of nice holidays, I’m back online.
My father became 70 and we spend one week together as family to celebrate this. The other week we visited friends and enjoyed our free time.
Now, back in Office, I noticed that my colleges turned Tine 2.0 an other time inside out. I had to dig through more than 300 commits. Many cool new internal features and again simplifications in the backend. So I’ll have to spend a day to adopt the tasks application to the new standards.
Really cool is the new schemaproc we have now. We can manage tables and relations in a really advanced way. We havn’t found this features, needed for a complex application design, in the existing PHP frameworks and so we are pretty exited about the results. Maybe we can bring this stuff into the Zend Framework.
Also noteworthy are the beginnings of setup and migration. In short it should be possible to install Tine 2.0 without an existing egroupware installation. Also the migration of existing data from egroupware is on the way. Maybe I can manage to finish the infolog->tasks import this week. Really exiting with this migration approach is, that we are able to migrate from different databases/versions easily. So let’s se what future brings 
Also during my holidays, the usability efforts became a lot more concrete. I even found the first interface prototype in my Inbox. Next week I’ll start to implement the first results from this in the addressbook.
As a conclusion of all this progress I take that I realy should take more holidays, as Tine develops great in those times
This happened more than 10 times today directly behind our flat. For the tree I took the pictures of, they needed about 5 minutes to chop. It took so long due to a 2 minutes delay of the man with the power saw, who had a short break.
Is it fascinating or depressing? Is it ruling nature or self-destruction? I don’t know. But what I know for sure is, that the playground behind our flat was far more attractive with the nice shadow casting trees we had till today 12 o’clock.
Last wednesday anton had to be admitted to the hospital with a skin rash. Also moni stays in hospital as assistant.
So i got promoted as the family manager. Cooking, do the dishes, tidy up, launder, aerateing, wakeup service, vacuum-cleaning, go shopping, feed the dryer, being taxi, bringing to bed, and being shuttle between home and hospital are my primary tasks, just to name the important once.
As required by Murphy’s Laws Leonie also got sick with a stomach flu. So just multiply the washing/drying items by three.
It’s a full time job, I tell you! Hats off to all the once, doing this all time. Every evening I’m glad the day is off. No time for hacking and nerd stuff.
Hopefully we can fetch moni and anton tomorrow night.
After 9 month of intensive development, we are glad to announce the immediate release of Child 2.0 aka “Anton Eric Weiss”. Many thanks to my wife Moni, as she did the hard work during the release-cycle.
We are also thankful for all the support we got from our friends and family. Moreover thanks to the midwifes and other supporters. Last but not least, special thanks to god, for the healthy and neat boy.
Official release-notes:
Name: Anton Eric Weiss
Gender: Male
Birthdate: 2007-12-24 9:57 CET
Weight: 3380g
Length: 54cm
[update]
As a childbirth at home is quite seldom in Norderstedt, and also the 24′th of December is a special date, the “Hamburger Abendblatt” made an article about Anton. The text is online, pictures the reporter took are only in the print version.
Fowl with rice and maize-salad.
As we had something to celebrate we made my moms excellence version with red cabbage.
Today we finally can say that our move from Haiger to Norderstedt is complete! After waiting more than 5 weeks our last piece of furniture arrived. Needles to say, that we are longing to see our friends and family using this sofa bed.
Just if you wonder who the green gnome is. It’s a Santa Claus Leonie got as an advertising gift from a human Santa Clause looking exactly like this one .
Flood warnings for the area of Hamburg city and port are given cause the water level reaches 5.00m (the normal level is 2.00m).
With this news today we tried to document what happens out our window. Unforunally only my collegue had a cam in his mobile phone.
This green Cadillac is parking in front our window for more than a week now. It’s owner had extreame luck.
I was about to write a post “Buried my iPhone plans” and tell the world that this device is far too expensive for me.
At the end of this post I just wanted to paste together how cheep one can have the same service with another mobile device. Really really surprised I noticed, that I was not able to find a suitable offer.
If you want to have ‘a little Internet’ on your mobile device you have to pay fees about 50 EUR per month. If you try to compose the service t-mobile offers with the iPhone contract out of the standard fees you even have to pay about 65 EUR.
So I said to myself: “I don’t need a contract with Internet flat and 100 free minutes a month”. “I use my mobile so rarely that I would have to pay far too much with such a contract, no thanks!”
To convince myself of how much I save when not having the iPhone, I grabbed my last 12 O2 bills and summed them up. Confused to see that I payed in total more than 800 EUR. On no single bill I have more than 100 minutes of phone time, and in total I consumed about 10MB of GPRS traffic.
With the current iPhone contract I would have paid 600 EUR. Is the iPhone expensive? I don’t know. But for sure I have not the right contract at the moment. As first action I buried my article about “Buried my iPhone plans”.
This is the last part of my story about fun with Gravis, as I will never again buy something in a Gravis store!
The short version: It took exactly 30 minutes and I had my money back. As I couldn’t believe that I hadalready spent so much time on my little “keyboard and power-cord” project , today I exactly tracked the time in the store. I went in at 13:32 and stepped out at 14:02.
The long version of the story is no fun to tell, so just notice that in the end 4 Gravis coworkers were involved in the process.
As consolation they gave me a little aluminium box of with about 15 Tic-Tacs inside (see picture on the left). Thanks for this.
The lucky part of my visit there was, that I had the opportunity to take a look at the new ‘iPod touch‘. This device has the same user-interface as the iPhone and I was curious to see it at work. It took me a few seconds to get familiar with the screen keyboard, but the overall impression was: WOW I’m impressed. Most surprisingly I noticed that the speed of the UI is really as fast as in the demos in the commercials.
The rest of the time I wasted to bring up my Gravis story up to the various demo computers in the store. Just to keep potential customers informed about the superior service of the store they are in
