On the flight back from the PHP Works conference in Atlanta they had to reboot the screens on the back of everyone’s seats. This caught my attention when I saw the words “RedBoot” followed by the familiar Linux penguin. I would have liked to report that this was normal, but apparently they where having some “technical difficulties”, luckily for us we got an old fashioned demonstration of how to use a seat belt. Damn good thing too, as I really was having trouble figuring out how one end went in the other.

I’m excited to be speaking the PHP Works 2007 conference this year in Atlanta. I’ll be giving my updated “APC @ Facebook” talk which will hopefully be of interest to the performance/scalability minded peeps out there. My cohort in all things PHP, Lucas, is also also giving a talk titled “Facebook Performance Caching“. I have to take the last all night flight after my Japanese Language test on Wednesday, so hopefully I won’t be too out of it for the talks that day!

I’m also interested in hearing “7 (or more) PHP Myths Defused” by Derick, “How PHP Ticks” by Sarah, “Graph-Oriented Programming with PHP” by Sebastian, “PHP::$unicode->i18n()” by Sarah…. ah crap those last two are both at the same time…. it always comes down to this….

About 6 months ago I purchased a new FastMac extended battery for my MacBook Pro, I was really happy with the little bit of extra time it gave me on my power hog of a laptop, but lately it would barely last the 45-minute trip on Caltrain from SF to Palo Alto. So I hooked up the miniBatterLogger app. According to this great bit of software, it seems the battery capacity is at about 50%. Not a very good life expectancy, considering the original batter which is at about the same number of cycles is at 90% and about twice as old as well.

My conversation with FastMac then went something like this….

——- (contents dumped from memory, so this isn’t the exact conversation)
…

FastMac: Well for a MacBook Pro this sounds like a reasonable reduction.

Me: [pause] 50% in 6 months is reasonable?

FastMac: Well yes… well let me ask someone in tech support please hold.

Me: [hold]

FastMac: I’ll tell you what’s happening. The software you’re using to measure the cycles in the battery isn’t changing from one batter to another. The cycles listed is what was on your original battery. Yep that’s definitely what’s happening.

Me: The software is telling me my battery cycles have changed when I switch out the original and the new one, so I’m pretty sure it’s counting the cycles correctly. If you want to tell me that 50% over 6 months is reasonable,

FastMac: please hold

Me: No wait! Let me finish… If you say it’s reasonable then we can forget this RMA but I won’t be buying any more of your batteries in the future.

FastMac: Oh, well these batteries are funny things. I mean the numbers and everything are really just jibberish… hold please….

Me: [hold]

FastMac: Sorry about that…

Me: Well the battery life is pretty much half of my original batter, that’s why I started measuring the capacity in the first place.

FastMac: Right, that’s exactly what we where going to ask you. … Well again it’s really hard to tell with these batteries, but it does sound like you actually have a problem here….

Me: [continues with RMA]
…

——-

I wanted to mod my Digg button with a USB power source so it wouldn’t waste batteries, but didn’t really like the splicing of cables as demonstrated on the originial site. Instead I opted to get a couple mini USB female adapters from SparkFun. I didn’t use enough glue the first time so I went back and added a lot more on the second round. I also tried to use a conductive pen to trace +5V and GND connections, but I wasn’t really happy with how it looked or the conductivity so I went with wires. (If anyone has suggestions on making new traces on boards please let me know, could be useful in the future). Happy with the results now, and the glue seems to be holding. On to the next electronic project, which is getting my AVR Dragon up and running and re-programming the Digg Button chip to do whatever I desire…

The “pearl” on my blackberry pearl hasn’t been working so great lately. Because it’s such a core part of the phone this is really disabling, and I really only want my phone to last until the iPhone comes out. I decided to take it apart and do some cleaning, to my dismay it’s a very good lint (and who knows what else) magnet. After some cleaning (and breaking a couple plastic parts that aren’t really necessary), the pearl works like new!

While I didn’t do nearly as good of a job as the original, I’m pretty happy with my new moleskin drive. If I had to do it again,

I’d have to make sure that I cut a big enough whole and that I took a little more time. It’s a little tedious and having to go back to clean up and trim doesn’t make it much better. I had to move the led around a bit, but that was a pretty simple process, and let me configure them however I wanted. I’m a little concerned about it being a fire hazard, but it doesn’t run hot and I never leave it home alone.

So we all got drunk and did a podcast, which was a lot of fun and cost a lot of bribe money. (Sometimes it’s just good to still have a job and know you’ll have to sponsor the next thousand PHP conferences.) The recording talks about how to pronounce “PHP”, APC@Facebook, security, brewery pubs, cities in Canada for 500, and CSRFs. All around it was a pretty good time, although some people had a bit more of a “good time”. Gotta go buy drunkfacebookguy.com now and tie up some loose ends….

Just finished my very first PHP talk at PHP Tek 2007. Went well, but could be improved some too. Slides and the handout are up here and here. Looking forward to adding more information on this and hopefully presenting again soon.

I’ve added very crude support for Python to the libm40h library. I’ll continue to refine this into something stable, but for the time buing you can build using the “python setup.py build” and “python setup.py install” commands.

I’ve fixed a few bugs in the Monome m40h library, so it should be at least usable now.  After compiling the main C library with ./configure && make you can run phpize in the php directory followed by the standard ./configure && make && make install.  Python is next on the list, after that I’ll clean all this up a bit so the build is more friendly.