For those who like the Dilbert comics, this book will be perfect. It combines the Dilbert comics with great and completely prejudiced information, views and opinions of Scott Adams, written in a similarly funny way. The book closes with a more serious part, which I found very interesting. All in all, this was a great read.
Ever since working with JIRA at TomTom, I’ve been looking for a similar tool for my various projects. I’ve found a lot of tools done in PHP, but nothing so far has been equally impressing and useful as JIRA itself.
Now JIRA has an open source license, but I don’t really have an open source project to present to Atlassian as the project for which I’d need JIRA. I just need it for my personal projects. And since $1200 is a bit much for a tool for some personal development, JIRA is not really an option.
So here I am, asking for your help: Is there a tool very similar (preferably some type of true clone) to JIRA? It needs to work in a very similar way, and preferably be in PHP (though any other language is fine, as long as it’s webbased). And it should be free, or very cheap. Anyone?
After giving it multiple quick glances, today a co-worker of mine and me sat down a full day to work through the first part of the Symfony tutorial in an attempt to learn to work with Symfony. The tutorials are meant to take about one hour each, and that is a good approximate. After some start up problems trying to configure pear and php, we were able to work through the first seven tutorials, which are probably the most important of all 24.
Symfony is a very impressive system. It is more than just a framework, since it takes care of a lot more, including database population, complete MVC approach using the URL, and much, much more. Knowing Symfony will make developing webbased applications so much easier.
So now I’m sitting down to play with it some more, to see what can all be done to get this beautiful system working and to develop new applications with it.
Having just switched jobs (and especially the period before switching) has given me quite some moments of thinking about my future, and my career. What are my goals for my professional life?
In DOP I found one of those goals. A challenge both on the technical level as on the organizational level. The role I have there has many aspects, from the development of nice PHP applications to professionalizing the whole development process by implementing a coding standard and trying to get knowledge sharing on the road.
But as nice as the job at DOP is, it is not my ultimate goal. There are two companies where I would love to work at some point in my career. They both have a big name in terms of (open source) development and technological advancement.Google is probably high on the list of many a developer as favorite potential employer. What a great company with great products. That would be a great company to work for. The second company, which I would probably even prefer above Google, is Zend. The company behind PHP is the ultimate in the PHP career world if you ask me. Unfortunately, all the development and R&D jobs are either in Israel or in the USA. Maybe some day, they will open an office in The Netherlands, or allow me to work for their Professional Services department from here? Nobody knows.
I can dream, can’t I? 😉
Spam is a big problem, and everyone knows it. Not just the spam you get in your e-mail, these days spammers also write bots to find discussion forums and post their spam there.
Quite some time ago the Support Team Leader of phpBB, Techie-Micheal, had an idea about this. He started developing the idea in his head, and he gathered a team of people who shared his ideas. Last month, Micheal contacted me, to see if I was also interested in joining the team. After hearing what the project was about, I immediately said yes. There’s some GREAT ideas here.
The project that I’m talking about is bbProtection. The site is not yet up, but soon we hope to start with a public beta. I’m very enthousiastic about this project, as I think it has a great potential to block spammers from discussion forums.
For quite a while now, I’ve been running the Electronic Music World magazine. On that website I’ve been publishing news and articles on electronic music, as well as reviews of cd’s and vinyl and the occasional netlabel release.
Recently though, I’ve been a big fan of the dutch review website Muzieklog.rommelhok. They offer a short 3-5 line review and a rating. This approach to reviewing was very interesting. I never considered this, but I felt this to be a very good way to review music.
Inspired by that site, I’ve started a new subsite of Electronic Music World on net.electronicmusicworld.com where I also use this approach, focussing fully on netlabel/online releases. So far, I really like this approach. I’m currently doubting if I’ll return to writing reviews on Electronic Music World. I might turn it into a site dedicated to bringing news instead.
Yes, the site is rebooted. Slighty later than planned, but you can’t have it all. The new design is less standard than the previous one. I did start out with a standard template, but I started altering and customizing it. You’ll still recognize the basics, but the colors and some other details have been changed to make it more to my liking.
I hope you like it as well.
Earlier this week, the biggest dutch consumer organization declared that it felt not consumers but computer producers and software developers are responsible for the safety of computers worldwide. They felt virusscan programs, software writers and computer manufacturers should do more to prevent viruses. Basically, their statement said “people don’t know how to handle computers, so you should be responsible for their lack of knowledge”.
Now, I wonder, what were they thinking? If I buy a car from, say, Renault, is Renault responsible for the fact that I drive like a madman and kill 10 people? Is the gasoline company responsible for me driving 200 km/h on a 50 km/h road? I don’t think so. When you buy a car, and drive that car, you are responsible for what happens with it. And of course, to drive a car, you need a drivers license.
Maybe it *is* time to come up with some kind of computer users license. To get it, one would have to learn how to operate a computer, but also how to prevent viruses, phishing attacks, and other dangerous parts of computer usage. And please, do not limit this knowledge to Windows, because an incorrectly secured Mac or Linux machine can also be responsible for sending out spam, being used as a relay machine.
So who is responsible for viruses being able to get in to computers? Clearly not the manufacturers of those computers. Maybe partially the people who build the OS, but even the worst OS can be secured if you configure it correctly and install the correct software. Don’t move responsibility off regular consumers: That way they’ll never learn.
Ken has a lot of ideas. He has 59 ideas, and seemingly just as many weblogs. Well, not really, but he has quite a list of weblogs on various topics. I am subscribed to quite a few of his weblogs by RSS, and enjoy reading just about everything. One weblog especially always has my interest, and that is FreeBizWare, Ken’s weblog about open source software. Ken is able to find a lot of unknown (to me at least) open source software that is very useful, in work, but sometimes also for private use. This excellent location to discover new technology is now part of the Ufdi.net network!
Welcome Ken. Good to have you aboard.
My initial implementation of Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl has just been committed! Where before I only committed some small fixes to Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket, now I’ve actually committed a real contribution in the form of real, new, self-written code. Yay! 🙂