The Project Importer is available for web2project!

This release can be downloaded here: Project Importer v3.0

• The most significant change in this release is that it has been updated to support web2project. In the process, backwards compatibility with dotProject was lost.
• This is a known situation and is not considered an issue or bug, it is a design decision and will not be reversed or reconsidered.  Please do not ask.
• Simplified the class structure and encapsulated more of the type-specific details away from the user and the BaseImporter class.
• Converted some of the raw SQL statements to use the DBQuery class.

This release can be downloaded here: Project Importer v3.0

In the past ten years, I've been involved with a number of startups in roles ranging from Jr developer following a few smart people to CTO when suddenly I'm expected to be the smart person. In addition, I've passed on more "opportunites" than I can count.

To be fair, some opportunities are amazing. They've been put together by sharp people with deep domain understanding and powerful industry contacts. Coming from the right person, these cause me to stop and ponder. Coming from the wrong person, they don't distinguish themselves until much later.

On the flip side, you have... well, you have these people:

I know I've said it before, but this time I'm serious... the End is Near:

web2project is nearing v1.0

We - mostly Pedro - have been pounding on bugs, features, and all kinds of shiny and nifty new bits for the last 9 months.  The most important parts are the UI, performance, and security/permissions.

First, I'm not going to go into the security fixes again, but the permissions improvements are huge.  Not only can you quickly review an individual's permissions by going to the User Permissions Information screen but the system now caches the permissions calculations.  This reduces the overall number of queries on any page by approximately 90%.  Yes, you read that correctly... 90%.

The ZendCon UnCon planning is underway.. .the second batch of presentations have been chosen.  The goal is to have about 80% of the sessions chosen before we get there.  There will be a number of slots reserved for last minute ideas, discussions that stem out of a conference presentations, or adhoc hackathons.

With no further ado, here we go:

First, we have Rich UIs and Easy XHR with Dojo and Zend Framework from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.  As one of the lead guys on the Zend Framework and intimately familiar with Dojo, he's going to get into the guts and details of things most of us have been fighting with.  Bring your code, bring your questions, and bring a few tricks of your own.

The ZendCon UnCon is underway...the first batch of presentations have been chosen. With no further ado, here we go:

We'll hear from Ruslan Yakushev about IIS 7.0 URL rewriting capabilities for PHP applications. Most of us know how to do it in Apache with ModRewrite, but IIS is a whole new world with its own rules, concepts, and equivalents. While there aren't many PHP'ers deploying to IIS for production, there are a few and learning an alternative way to look at things is almost always useful. Definitely worth exploring.

We'll hear from Matthew Turland on Web Scraping. While there are lots of organizations who implement SOAP or REST or even CSV, sometimes we have to play with sites that aren't quite so... enlightened? Matthew has some tips and tricks to pull information together and make it useful. If you've ever imported lots of data into a CMS... well, you know the need for this one.

Today is 08/08/08.  While many in the world note this as the day of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympicsin Beijing, some of us note a more important, interesting, and ceremonial date...

PHP4 is Dead. [announcement]

There are obituaries from friends, allies, and smart people such as Brandon Savage (local DCPHP'er), Stefan Priebsch, and more people than I care to link.

I came to PHP back in early 2003.  I was just coming off a major Java project and was looking for something lighter, faster to develop, and easier to deploy.  I poked around a bit and found PHP but I really didn't sink my teeth in until I found dotProject.

This space is usually politics-free. Today I take a diversion from that course to make an argument about a political backgroun from a technical perspective.

One of the best principles of software development is the idea of defensive code.  That we build code (and systems) that expect certain inputs, validate those inputs, process those inputs, and return the expected results.  When we get inputs that don't fit with the expections, our systems have to fail gracefully, limit the damage to other systems, and land in a stable state.

In many ways, a straight democratic process could work.  It's not hard to collect votes nationally, to provide some form of real-time reporting, and announce results in realtime.  The problem with this is the sheer number of vulnerable points.  It means that anyone can inject bad data into the system anywhere - Chicago, perhaps? - and cause changes in the system as a whole... aka changing the overall election results.

In steps the Electoral College...