RSVP here: http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/

The blurb from ZendCon08:
Terry Chay, the original PHP Terrorist, is well known for his criticism and ridicule of the Ruby on Rails framework. He criticizes, mocks, and f-bombs his enemies into surrender. In this discussion, Terry will share his ideas and thoughts on making frameworks better.

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room. Please RSVP if you are attending so that I can prepare enough snacks and beverages.

Look forward to seeing you there!

This event can be found at:
http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39294579201
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1195581/

The last few weeks I’ve been hearing a lot of what I’d consider attack ads by the McCain campaign.  I have to say I am *very* disappointed with him.  I’ve always had a lot of respect for John McCain even though I do not always agree with his political views.  He has always struck me as someone who stands up for what is right and as someone above the muck throwing.  Well, until now that is.

As I said above I want to know what you and your vp candidate stand for and why you are better than your opponents.  I understand and somewhat agree that who you associate with reflects on someone’s judgement.  But how far do you take it?  What matters is *McCain’s* policies and opinions, not the person he is associated with.  The same goes for Obama, Biden and Palin.

I could say McCain has bad judgement by associating himself with Bush.  But that doesn’t matter because he may not agree with him.  However, when McCain says he agrees with Bush, then it is McCain’s opinion we are discussing.  If Obama says he agrees with Ayers in regards to what Ayers allegedly did year ago then yes it would be fair game.  But he didn’t and I doubt he ever would.

As for you Obama… I don’t care who throws the last punch.  Don’t do it!  Stick to the issues.  It is working for you.  Yes, some people are influenced by the mud but not those who will swing the vote one way or another.

I WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE ISSUES!!!  Please… both of you… get back on track and address the issues and concerns of myself and the American public.  That’s what’s important.  Deal with it.  If you can’t, you shouldn’t be president anyway.  That’s my 2-cents anyway.

Beyond the normal perverted male thoughts I can image a million and one practical applications for this. Not to mention then billion and one ways to exploit it. I think the Hollywood movie industry would be the first adapters of this technology in the public sector (CIA/NSA/DHS/etc. in government of course). You could theoretically wrap a camera or person in this gear and not have to worry about keeping them out of the shot. I wonder though if it would be less “see-through” for HD cameras due to the higher pixels resolution/counts.

I’m going to have to set a reminder for myself to pick up a copy of Nature or Science for the details of this thing. I don’t remember who said it but I’ve always agreed with the saying “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.” This type of research and technology continue to blur the line between science people will understand and what others will call “magic.” I’m all for that. We could all use a little more magic in our lives.

My favorite is probably this one from the set pictures Denise had done at Sears.

I already have next month’s talk/speaker lined up.  Aaron Newton from Iminta.com (formerly CNET) will be giving us a preview of his Mootools talk titled “Mootools: An Overview” that he has planned for the upcoming AJAX Experience conference.  Aaron has a Mootools book coming out that’s available now via pre-order on Amazon.

So after my email earlier this week to Rana, he responded and said that he thought about it too and wanted to work out the transfer to me.  I’m glad he changed his mind.  Maybe he had a change of heart and realized the errors or his way.  Or maybe it had something to do with the 20+ people that emailed him and complained about what he was doing.   I guess whichever it was doesn’t really matter.  I’m now the official organizer and I’m really looking forward to where the group is going. 

My email announcement to the group after everything was worked out:

Hi everyone.  I wanted give a quick update on the status of the group and its leadership.  There was quite a bit of confusion over the last week that should be clarified.

First, the resignation email over the weekend was not about me.  That was sent because the official organizer (used to be Julian Triber) stepped down.  He & I have been talking on several occasions about his stepping down because he did not have time to focus on the group due work related time constraints.

Second, after a bit of confusion for the first part of the week, the group has been transferred officially to me.  As you know I’ve been setting them up and hosting them for the last 9 months.  The group has come a long way over the last year and I’m proud to say that we now average well over 60 people for the last 5 months.  (According to meetup.com anyway; personally I believe it to be a lot more.  There is no way Terry’s OO talk only had 71 people.  The room was overflowing!)  I’m really excited about how the group is growing and how we are reaching more and more people every month.  We’re the largest PHP Meetup they have!

In addition to me becoming the organizer of the group, I’ve assigned Mariano Peterson to be the assistant organizer.  For the last several months Mariano has been a great help in planning recent speakers & topics.  Thank you Mariano for your great work.

Finally, I’ve made a few changes to the setup of the group on the meetup.com website.  A) I’ve expanded our group’s topics to include Software Developers (ranked 3^rd), LAMP (1^st), and Web Technology (20^th).  We usually cover these topics each month in addition to our core PHP (1^st).  This will expand the reach of our audience and hopefully bring in more members.  B) I’ve opened up the message boards so that we can now communicate there in addition to the mailing list.  I’ll be clearing out old job postings and antiquated topics over the weekend.  C) I’m updating some of the default group fields & pages like group description, about us, why someone should join, adding an optional new user introduction, and a few others.  If you have any suggestions let me know
and I’ll try to work them in.

Thank you all for your participation and support for this group.  I look forward to seeing you all at the August 7^th meetup where Joe Stump from Digg will be talking about deploying code with a PEAR channel.

Thanks,

Mike (aka Touge)

P.S. If you have any requests for topics, please let me
know.

For the past nine months I have been organizing the San Francisco PHP Meetup group. During this time I was always under the impression that when the official organizer of the group resigned that the group would transfer to me so that I could continue running the group. Unfortunately this weekend the previous organizer resigned and did not transfer the group. Because he did not nominate a successor the organizer position became open for grabs for anyone. That’s right, for whatever reason, meetup.com feels that it is better to go to a first-come, first-served system rather than giving the assistant organizers a chance to run the meetup first. I’m sure you can tell where this is headed…

So when the group became open on Saturday someone else, Rana Singh, was able to take ownership of the group before I could. Initially I thought it was just a misunderstanding. I thought that perhaps he thought it was I who resigned not Julian. I definitely couldn’t fault him for thinking that, could I? So for the next 24 hours I attempted to contact him and straighten the situation out. To my overwhelming surprise, it was not a misunderstanding. He purposefully and willingly took ownership of the group and did not think there was anything wrong with not setting things to how they should have been. I was absolutely shocked that someone who had no involvement with the group for the last year could take over the group. As I talked with Rana over the phone Sunday night i could not believe the things that he was telling me. First I had a problem with how he told me he would be able to take the group to a level that I could not. This from someone who’s other groups cannot manage to have more than 20 people attend. Second, he wanted me to continue to setup and run the groups for him! I think that is that point where I started to feel insulted and taken advantage of.

After the first 24 hours of frustration I decided to contact several of the meetup members in hope of soliciting their support in explaining the mistake in the situation. Rather than have an open discussion of the matter, Rana choose to disable group emailing and replied to people’s complaints/concerns in a way that implied he was in the right because other people misunderstood the situation too! This seemed like very week reasoning to me (as well as to a few others in the discussion).  After almost a full day of heated discussion, I decided that it just was not worth it. I did not want to continue down this negative path. My hopes of Rana realizing the bad form of what he did slowly dwindled. Rather than continue to create more frustration and divide, I decided to not pursue the disagreement any farther.

This was my response:

I did a lot of thinking about this on my way home tonight and I’ve come to a decision. It is not one that I’m happy with but it one I can live with. I appreciate everyone’s support in this matter but I’ve decided to not pursue this conversation any farther. This started by what I thought was a simple misunderstanding and has since escalated into something that I do not want. Rana, I thought that after hearing the thoughts and support of the various members of this meetup you would reconsider you decision on what to do about this meetup. At this point I believe if you were going to change your mind you would have done so by now. I don’t want to continue to beat a dead horse and continue down this path of frustration. This group has always been about making the PHP community better and I’ve supported that fully. I’ve realized that by continuing this disagreement I am going against that principal and I would be creating additional frustrations and divisions. I do not want that.

That being said, Rana, I wish you the best of luck with this meetup group. Unfortunately I will not be able to support you as an assistant-organizer. I feel cheated out of something I worked very hard on and cannot in good conscience support this type of behavior. I cannot support someone who would think there is nothing wrong with what has happened here, ignored the wishes of the community and who has placed restrictions on the open communication of the group.

Thank you very much to each of you who took time out of your busy schedules to participate in this discuss and express your support of me. I truly appreciate it and value your friendships. Chris, thank you for your help with mediating this disagreement. It could not have been easy for you and I appreciate your patience and willingness to work with all parties involved.

The last nine months have been a time of immense joy for me. I have enjoyed the group and the lively discussions and even the occasional rants. Yes Terry, I’m talking about you and your thoughts about Ruby on Rails. With this group I’ve felt a sense of belonging and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together. I’m particularly pleased how with each of your support (especially you Terry) we were able to take a small group of people (<10) and turning it into something much larger. Having 75-100 techie/programmers meet monthly to discuss their passions and to learn new things has never ceased to amaze me. Programmers tend to not be the most extroverted people I know. I have learned a lot from the speakers and other group members as well as made some good friends. Don’t worry, I definitely plan on keeping in touch.

As I am not able to communicate to the group as a whole, if you could pass on my well wishes to the group and/or the individuals you know I would appreciate it.

Thank you again for all of your support,
Mike

Title: PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Description:
PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

When: Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7pm
Where: CNET Networks: 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA  94518

You can RSVP on the SF PHP Meetup’s site or just show up.  I always like it when people RSVP so that I know how much food to buy.  But it isn’t a prereq or anything.

EDIT: I just saw that Terry mentioned PB&J and I like the idea.  So PB&J it is; plus the usual chips, sodas, candy, etc. of course. 

If you’re interested in renting in Rohnert Park, CA shoot me an email or call me and we’ll talk.

Address:
1440 Gold Way
Rohnert Park, CA  94518

Rent:
$1600/month due on the 1st; late on the 5th.
$1650 security deposit.
12 month lease; co-signers are okay.
Water & Garbage are included.
Proof of insurance required.

Amenities:
Dishwasher, fridge, new oven, 1 car garage, washer & dryer, public pool, quite neighborhood.
I prefer no pets, but I’m fairly flexible for small pets like cats.

Craigslist posting: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/apa/736809109.html

Must Have:

• Expert PHP skills, bonus for RoR
• 5-7 years of real world experience engineering web solutions for LAMP stacks
• Strong relational DB knowledge (table optimization, query optimization)
• Ability to prioritize and lead multiple simultaneous projects effectively
• Excellent understanding of OO software engineering concepts
• Ability to arhitect solid, scalable, extensible solutions for SE needs
• Excited by working on high-level design and architecture
• Comfortable mentoring junior engineers
• Expereince with formal release processes
• Strong verbal, written, analytical and communication skills

Bonus for:

• Admin experience with MySQL, Apache, SVN
• Background developing in a more structured language (C, C++, Java, etc)
• At least 3 years experience in high-traffic/high-availability web sites
• Strong UI experience with javaScript and AJAX using mootools or other JS Frameworks
• Experience with following technologies: Memcached, Smarty, SOLR, Lucene, Zend Framework

If you think you have what it takes, head over to our Jobs site and apply: https://careers.cnetnetworks.com/joblist.html

If you want to discuss the job in more detail first, please don’t hesitate to send me an
at michael[
]tougeron[
]cnet[
]com.