Jim Plush's Programming Paradise

So I've started biking to work 4-5 days a week for numerous reasons. It's actually been great and I was compiling a list of the benefits I've seen so far. I'm lucky enough to have showers at the office I can use so that helps out a lot!

biking to work stats

6 miles each way

38.28 lbs carbon per day reduced from the air by not driving

585 calories per day

1.97 gallons of gas each day saved ($180 a month saved!)

$15 a month insurance discount for limited vehicle usage.

So all in all I'm easily saving over $200 a month, helping to clean the air and getting a great workout. No looking back now.


Here are some tips I've gathered over the month.

1. Bring extra clothes - you'll be sweaty most likely so I'll have shorts and a shirt to bike in on. My work shirt in my backpack and a shirt to bike home in.
2. extra pair boxers
3. Ride in with shorts, change into pants
4. Helmet
5. Tube/tire lever/co2 air pump
6. Gel seat
7. Keep a stick of deodorant at the office
8. Replicated work environment at home so I don’t have to lug my laptop :)
9. Clipless pedals knocked 7 minutes off my commute(makes uphill so much easier)
10. Blinking reflector to wear on ride home if it’s dark
11. Can of mace in case someone tries to take your bike :)

I'm going to start coming by on the weekend, dropping off a weeks worth of lunch, clothing and towels and biking in lighter during the week.

The two ladies arrived tuesday. We just got out of the hospital yesterday and ohhh what a first night of no sleep :(

anyway, here are some introductions to the twinkies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCiCB8KEwJ4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J884Xy1hnvY

1. Linux - Linux is for people with lots of time on their hands that want to spend all day trying to make something work

2. Mac - Macs are for people who just want apps to work so they can get something accomplished

3. Windows - For people who haven't tried a mac yet.

I did a quick little screencast on how to get rolling with the MyBic 2 Firebug PHP Debugger.

SCREEN CAST!

I'm proud to announce to official 1.0.0 release of the MyBic AJAX framework. MyBic has been stable in production for months now with 0 memory leaks and 0 outstanding bugs known to date. MyBic has been successfully flying in some of the worlds top aircraft with 0 supervision in kiosk based devices.

A major addition to this release is the firebug debugger support. The ZIP Download now contains a firefox extension that when installed with firebug allows you to send PHP debug data directly to firebug! Please see this post for more information: http://www.litfuel.net/plush/?postid=164

I will be documenting exactly how to play around with the mybic debugger. The basic overview is that you'll be able to call the $mybic->render() function and have a nested tree show up in firebug with all your profile and debug data. I've been using it for the past month and it's saved me a ton of time. Enough with the var_dumps!

get it while it's red hot!

http://www.litfuel.net/mybic






SCREEN CAST!

I tried accessing my intranet this morning at work. Since I'm on a mac I'm kinda screwed eh?

Pure ignorance I suppose, led me to believe seal clubbing was banned years ago. I had foolishly thought mankind had done something positive by banning the practice of clubbing and skinning seals for their fur. Apparently, this practice is still alive and well and actually being increased in Canada. If you actually have an ounce of compassion you'll visit the site below and help take action. In this day and age animals shouldn't need to be removed from the planet in the name of fashion.

http://www.stopthesealhunt.com

If you wish to help promote the cause:
Stop the Hunt Promotion

Sad Quote:
"Throughout my career as a veterinarian, I have seen animals die in slaughterhouses, research labs, and animal shelters, and I can assure you that the cruelty existing in the seal hunt would not be tolerated in these institutions." Dr. Mary Richardson

Little excerpt:
Canada’s 2007 commercial seal hunt starts today - 270,000 seal pups are set to be slaughtered

(Charlottetown, PEI, Canada – 2 April 2007) – Canada’s annual commercial seal hunt opened today, with total limits set this year for 270,000 harp seals. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has staggered the start dates this year, opening the hunt in the southern part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence today, while it has announced that the remainder of the gulf will be open for hunting from Wednesday, April 4, 2007. Conservationists worldwide, including experts with IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare – www.ifaw.org have condemned the hunt as cruel and unnecessary.

Canada has allowed over one million seals to be killed in the past three years. With this year’s commercial total allowable catch limit set at 270,000 seals, this becomes the fourth consecutive year in which the government allocation has exceeded the amount of seals that can be removed without causing the population to decline. Last year, the government set the limit at 335,000 seals, while the total number of seals actually killed was more than 354,000, based on official government figures.

I've just interviewed probably my 200th php/web candidate during the past three years that I've been involved with staffing. I've come up with some criteria that I look for to get a real "senior" level developer position filled. I'd say 98% of people don't seem to meet even half the criteria. How many do you meet?

Without further delay, here they are:

PHP5 vs PHP4
You should at least three major features that separate PHP5 from PHP4

Networks
You should be able to do some basic socket programming or at least understand how you would connect to other machines

OOP
You should have a deep understanding of OOP and be able to answer simple questions like how private and protected methods differ. You should understand the following concepts(not really critical you use all of them but at least know why you would need them)

* interfaces
* constructors
* private, public, protected
* inheritance
* polymorphism
* static methods

Database
You should know what a normalized database is, you should understand primary and foreign keys,

Design Patterns
You shouldn't say "huh?" when I mention design patterns. Again, not critical you use that many, but important you understand why they're helpful and know at least a couple.

Source Control
You should be well versed in at least one major source control system (ZIP FILES IN TEMP DIRECTORIES DON'T COUNT!). bonus points for being able to name at least one reason cvs is a pain in the ass.

Unit Testing
You should understand what unit testing is, and why it's important (bonus points for test driven design, knowing how to unit test javascript, or how to use selenium).

Part of the Community
I should be able to find all sorts of good things on google that you're doing with php or web technologies, It generally is a red flag when I google you and nothing comes up(bonus points for having a project of your own or contributing to one).

Javascript Skills
You should know the methods use to manipulate the DOM (appendChild, removeChild, nextSibling, etc...), you should know how to create your own classes in JS (FORM VALIDATION IS 1999), bonus points for being able to show how to make a private variable in javascript.

CSS Skills
You should know the box model inside and out, understand css selectors and how to use inheritance

Passion for Improvement
I want you love what you do and not be looking for a bare minimum, what's the least I can do to get out of here at 5 job. You should be looking to build your skill sets and become more valuable.


Those are some of the minimum things I'd look at for a senior developer. Sadly, most seem content to be the bare minimum developer, which leads to bad code and bad teams. I see it here all the time. You get great developers paired with someone who likes to sleep at their desks from 9-10am(don't laugh, I have pictures of people here sleeping in their cubes). It brings the whole level of the team down. People start checking in code that breaks the build at 4:59pm and leave at 5:00pm. Luckily, our web team here is strong and everyone gets along but those c guys.. man I'll tell ya!

I'm heading out on a trip tomorrow on my boat to Catalina island off the California coast. The official website I was checking out was very nicely laid out. Everything was nice and clean. So you know what? I decided to email the staff and let them know they did a great job on the website. (how many times do people actually compliment you on your site???). So I filled out the form, wrote a nice comment and hit submit:


The page you tried was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly. You might find what youíre looking for in one of the following areas:

ain't Irony a bitch?

PHP Meet FireBug - PHP Debugging for the Web 2.0 World

I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.

It prints to the screen, it writes to log files and yes folks, it can send data from the server to firebug. All you need is the MyBic firefox extension and firebug installed. It can read in an xml file directly, render objects as trees, multidimensional arrays, etc. It has a profiler so you can write profile statements to try and spot bottlenecks that might be in your scripts.

You do not have to use the mybic ajax framework to use this debugger. They are completely separate for now. The debugger will work in php4 and php5 and will be included in the "debugger" directory of the mybic download.

I plan on launching version 0.01 sometime in the next week or two. I look forward to all the suggestions that can help make it a truly valuable tool for php developers. You'll be able to hook this into your local network and get real time data from your servers streamed right to your firebug console. Watch what your users do live.


SCREEN CAST!






Here are some pictures.....








How about sending your system processes to firebug??? You can virtually now send any data to firebug.