The other day, I was chatting with a friend and colleague whom I respect and he mentioned that his idea well was dry.  That he's had lots of ideas in the past but didn't have any at the moment.  It got me wondering on something:

Why do I always have notes and ideas on another idea?

I didn't always have that.  I didn't always write down ideas, make some notes, and note questions and first impressions.  When did I start doing that?  What changed?  What made it so that I have a notebook of random ideas - don't worry, most are bad - laying about just waiting to be browsed?

Each year as I'm reviewing and closing out books, notes, and documentation for the year, I take the opportunity to make some comparisons.  Overall, it's been a momentous year personally, professionally, and industry-wide.

As always, I have some hard metrics to back each of these up, but here's the summary:

So there I was minding my own business and out of the blue, my friend - Tony Bibbs - tags me.  Does he tag me with some great terms that would inflate my ego and get my SEO into the stratosphere... or with an internet meme that I usually ignore?  Luckily, I'm in a good holiday spirit, so I'm going to indulge him and share some details.

Here are seven things you might not know about me:

It seems that at least once a week, I have a customer or see another developer ask a simple question:

How do I store credit card information?

The simplest way to attack the problem:

Don't.

Seriously.  Don't store credit card information.  There are numerous ways to work around it and groups better qualified to handle it.  For example, my goal is to and push the responsibility off to the Gateways/Processors.  They have the systems, processes, policies, security, and even insurance/legal aspects in place.

Regardless, I know lots of you are saying "But Keith, *I* have to! My application/customer requires it.  Besides, I'm so much smarter than you, I'll figure it out over lunch, crank out the code this afternoon, and will be mocking you in public forums by 5pm."

In my regular web wanderings this morning, I found something interesting.  A company that I'm familiar with just released v3.0 of their primary product.  At first glance, I was happy for them, then I remembered something odd, they released v1.0 early this year.  By all standards, going from v1.0 to v3.0 in under a year is aggressive... so I started to dig and found something interesting:

V1.0 was released in February...

v2.0 was released in July...

v3.0 was released in December...

with no point releases in between.

Wha?

That's right, they had three major releases in a 10 month span with no minor releases in the interim... which poses an interesting question about using their system:

What is compatible with what?

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The Good News: php|tek 2009 will have an Unconference!

The Bad News: I'm in charge.

(cue mad scientist laughter)

Let's be clear right off the bat:  All [name]Camps (Bar or otherwise) are unconferences but not all unconferences are [name]Camps.  The distinction - and this seems to be widely accepted - is that [name]Camp sessions should be selected day of and everyone needs to participate in some manner. Uncons can have the above but don't really have to... which is how it works at these Uncons which are attached to conferences.

Therefore, here's the (estmated) format for this con/uncon combination:

• Normal sessions start at the beginning of the day and the three tracks run until about 4 or 5pm;
• At that point, we take over and get full access to the rooms, projectors, network, and anything else not nailed down;
• We're slated to have three sessions in each room each evening, giving us a total of 18 sessions.

So here's your mission:

It turns out that I've been a bad, bad man and haven't done my duty...

At some point in the distant past, some people came up with doing a PHP Advent Calendar.  I don't know who and I don't know when, but I know that the security-guy Chris Shiflett and Canadian-guy Sean Coates are the Editors-in-Chiefs this year.