Keep the disclaimer at the start at the front of your mind.

This tool is fragile and not ready to be called alpha quality
It is definitely not ready to be useful on large programs
We will release it under an OSI license … soon

SNAP Presentation (PDF)

Striving for Less Ugly Charts and Graphs From PHP

James seemed kind of underwhelmed at being assigned a canary.

To be honest, I can see why. As mascots go, canaries are not an A-list animal. If half the other mascots would eat yours, and the other half could accidentally step on it and kill it, then you have not been well served.

Sure, there are only so many A-list animals to go around. It is not so surprising that the lions, tigers, elephants are already taken, but B-list can be fine too. Perl has adopted the camel with an enthusiasm far beyond what camels are used to. Hugh and Dave got a good one for their PHP and MySQL book. The platypus is a great animal for PHP. Sure, it looks like it was put together out of parts of other animals, but it is reasonably attractive, and has the kind of street cred you get from being poisonous.

But really, a canary? A scallop? A sand dollar? A moth? A beetle? It is hard to find glamour or prestige in mollusks and other invertebrates that that spend their short lives munching on decomposing waste.

I wonder if many of the people who get an invertebrate or a puny vertebrate ever write a second book for the same publisher, or if they quietly slink away and hide their book inside a Harry Potter dust jacket.

best_practices.pdf

If this site is slow, you can try http://www.laurathomson.com

The other speaker is Chris Burgess on Building Secure Web Applications.

His blurb:

This presentation expands on a presentation given at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in December 2006 titled “Web Application Security – Tools, Techniques, Tips and Tricks”. I will explore some of the original material for those who were unable to attend, taking a look at the plethora of Open Source tools that can greatly assist developers and testers of web applications. In addition to this, I will discuss techniques that can be used to harden web applications.

George Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson, Luke Welling, Theo Schlossnagle, Chris Shiflett signing books at OSCON06. Photo by Mark Taber.

OSCON is my favourite conference. I really like the way it brings people passionate about a whole range of things together. Sometimes of course, they choose to concentrate on their differences, but for the most part somebody who is interested in one technology is more likely than average to be interested in others, and likely to have a great deal in common. Contrary to popular opinion, PHP does not officially stand for “People Hate Perl“.

Remind me next year that at the end of every OSCON I always wish I had spent more time outside the PHP track.

Highlights included
Rasmus, demonstrating how his name became a verb (and profiling a PHP app with Valgrind).
Terry Chay’s ongoing struggles with Tourette’s syndrome.
Zak Greant’s lightning talk on how PHP is saving the world a variety of unusual ways. (Hopefully he will write it up as a blog post or similar)
Cal Evans‘ PHP’s Most Wanted cards, which you can download if you want your own set.

measuring open source popularity.pdf

I will put up a cleaner verison of the code in a couple of weeks, but here is today’s verison. It comes with an iron clad guarantee about its bug free status. I just won’t tell you exactly what I am guaranteeing.
poker.pdf
poker_0.1.zip
The mysqldump of the database

This year I am doing a tutorial (with Laura) called Building an Asynchronous Multiuser Web App for Fun … and Maybe Profit and a session called Measuring Open Source Popularity.

OSCON is always great, I don’t imagine this year will be an exception.

I have been hoping to hear Alistair Cockburn (pronounced “Jones”) speak silently about cube farms for some time.

Tagged Waterfall2006 Luke Welling conference April 1