geek

Yesterday we welcomed home a new arrival into our family. No, not Kid 2.0 who is due in a couple of weeks, but rather a new Big Red Car. A Saab 93 SportCombi to be exact. Like a beloved family pet we had to put down our old Saab. She served us well over the years. This is my third Saab, so obviously I have an affinity for them. I did test drive a lot of other cars but kept returning to Saab. There are many reasons why I like Saabs. One of which is best summed up from this quote from Matias Cindric, a member of the Saab brand center.

"A strong element of good Scandinavian design is not really to add details or frills, but more to take way, so that you have a design that is clean and pure"

So many of the alternate cars I looked at had busy looking dashboards covered in horrid silver grey plastic. This seems to be a trend. Perhaps they think it looks modern. I'll take my minimalist Scandinavian design thanks.

The Melbourne leg of the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) kicks off tonight. My employer Hitwise is sponsoring the event, so you should see quite a few of us Hitwisers there. I'm looking forward to it.

Thursday June 12th, 7pm
580 St Kilda Road Melbourne

Databases & PHP - Tristan Penman - 7:00 - 7:45 pm

Tristan Penman will be presenting a guided tour through the database facilities in PHP, including the PEAR MDB2 library. Not only will Tristan be showing you what happens when the library works, but what happens when it doesn't - he will show how to avoid some of the issues that he has experienced while using MDB2 for a pet project involving databases and AJAX GUIs.

Tristan's computing background involves programming in numerous languages, with a preference for C and C++ (although he also has a soft spot for x86 assembly language). He organises the MySQL User Group, and often throws industry buzzwords together to see what ideas he can come up with. When not programming, you may find Tristan contemplating how strange it is to write about oneself in the third person.


Self Healing Databases: Managing Schema Updates In The Field - Jon Oxer - 8:00 - 8:45 pm

Database schema update management is a problem that is overlooked by many web application developers initially, but once you have a number of deployments in the field it rapidly becomes a major headache to propagate schema changes in synch with your PHP, Python, or Perl application code.

Internet Vision Technologies has developed a technique for "self-healing databases" for the SiteBuilder web application suite, allowing updates to occur automatically in the field whenever new versions of the application are pushed out. This technique has been used successfully on a number of large scale deployments such as the Siemens intranet which runs on MySQL and uses over 2500 tables. The talk covers the overall methodology with specific examples from the SiteBuilder codebase.


Socialising & Networking 9:00pm onward

Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitw

Something I should have mentioned earlier. The Call For Papers for this year's Open Source Developers' Conference is open. Be quick, as you only have until the end of the month to get your submissions in.

My vote for the most stupid invention of the year.
A seat belt alarm canceler.