Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

After some heavy discussions with Kore and others I researched about German law in respect to individual rights on photos yesterday. Thanks to Arne, who gave me a good starting point (German) for my research. In the end, Kore was mostly right with his interpretation, what made me remove about 1100 photos from my Flickr gallery. All of those showing people dedicatedly where I do not feel to have the explicit permission to publish their pictures. I'll try to explain the reasons, my personal issues and possibly solutions in this article.

It's interessting to see more people abandoning Ruby on Rails. Not that I have something against Ruby itself, but it really seems to me that RoR does not scale. Hope Twitter tries with PHP. ;)

I like Xing. I actually like some of the social networks, although I think there are far to many of them. However, Xing is useful to me for keeping my address book updated by my business contacts themselves and to be up2date about who is doing what. Nice! I'm also a "premium" (in the sense of paying) user in Xing. On the one hand because that gives me some nice additional features and safes me from advertisement. On the other one because I think paying for a good online service is a good idea.

What I really wonder is: What happens to the feature requests and support questions I address to Xing? I don't really have the impression anyone takes care in anyway. Therefore I'd like to tell you the story of 2 tiny feature requests I addressed to Xing some months ago and several times since then. I think, I did not request features that are too difficult to realize. Now, I don't have any clue about web applications, so I might be wrong in this impression. ;) I'm also quite sure that many more people out there would love to see the same stuff realized, so it's not even that they consider my questions too useless for a qualified response.

However, whenever I send them a message via their contact form, I receive an autogenerated message ala "Thanks for your request, we take our users requests serious" a few hours later. Good to hear, that their system at least received my message. Another one, probably also auto-generated, that says "We forwarded your message to the development department." flies to my inbox usually a few days or weeks. Good to see, you take care over there at Xing! Although this is the final message I received about every such request.

No, to stay seriously and keep sarcasm away, is anyone taking care? I can't believe. I requested one and the same feature 3 times now and another one 2 times already. Without any response that seemed to be written by anything else than a computer. I'm not even sure that any human being ever read my mails. Maybe they have some fancy text recognition tool that generates standard replies automatically? Is it so hard to send a reply like "Sorry, we are not able to realize this, because..." or "Sorry, we don't think that feature Foo Bar is useful to our users, because..."? Is it so hard to give a use the feeling that anyone really takes care? Possibly I just asked the wrong question. If it is that way, please let me know.

To let you finally know what I want: Xing offers an RSS feeds for a lot of stuff. From the latest visitors of my profile to any pointlessimportant status messages, I can see everything right away in my feed reader. Why the hell not the next birthdays of my contacts? Why can I see "Foo Bar likes Xing status messages" in my Torii, but not who has his birthday today? The second tinyhuge feature I requested could even be more difficult to realize: Xing let's you link additional information about you from your profile. Beside your website you can share links to other social networks there, like Flickr or LastFM and a whole load of others I did not even hear of. Why is Ohloh still missing? Guys, I'm paying for your stuff, did you realize?

Would be interessting to know if anyone ever had success with a feature request at Xing, or if they just implement what the think is useful for their users?

I've been to the Dortmund post office quite often lately, mostly because I'm never at home when the postman wants to deliver my packages. The largest German post service provider "Deutsche Post AG" also owns a bank, the "Postbank". While they did not bother me with any of that stuff earlier, their advertisement for non-postal and postal products starts getting more and more annoying. But let me start at the beginning...

While queuing inside the office to get to a counter, you need to stand between shelves that contain other stuff they sell at the post office: Stationery, cellphones, home phones and much more. Since you usually queue between 10 and 30 minutes you get enough time to read all those nice advertisement slogans. Right before you get to a counter, there is a large LCD screen that constantly shows a mixture of recent news and more and more advertisement: Banking stuff, cellphones, postal services and so on. When you finally make it to the counter, the staffer is usually unfriendly and not the fastest one. However, we are used to this for ages now and it's not the point of this article. When you are finally done hand happy to hold the latest DVD from Amazon in your hands, the staffer suddenly gets friendly: "Do you already have an account at Postbank?". A friendly "No thanks" does not work: "A just wanted to make sure you noticed...". "No, thank you!". "But it's about your future! Do you know you can save...". "I am sorry, but I already have a bank account and I do not want to change!".

After I had this situation for the 3rd time within a week now, I tend to simply lie to those people: I now tell them I'd still work for my old employer which also was a bank. This seems to work perfectly fine and they even reply with "Oh, sorry for disturbing you" and let you go. However, I wonder if there isn't any legal remedy I have against such spam? It is illegal to send me emails about drugs I'm not interessted in, but to spam me personally about banking services I don't want?

As I already mentioned earlier, I recently bought a brand new Nikon D80 and started with a new hobby: Photography. :) With this entry I'd like to share some first experiences in this direction. The D80 seems to be a very good camera, I'm really amazed about its poissibillities. It is the best non-professional Nikon camera, AFAIK, and might be even a bit oversized for a photo beginner like me. Until now I only had experiences with compact cams and the D80 is my first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera. However, I'm very interessted in photography so I'm sure I will grow with this camery quite fast. The source of my interest are inspiring photographers in my surrounding: Derick, Sebastian, Marcus and most recently also Kore and Jakob. In addition, I love great photos and always wanted to be able to take those on my own. The final clincher was the experience with Kores D70s in Berlin.

To get started with started with the subject, Jakob recommended a great book to me, which I want to recommend to you now. The book is only available in German, AFAIK, so sorry to you English only readers. "Nikon D80 - Das Buch zu Kamera" does not only give a much more valuable overview on the D80 than the instructions manual does. It also gave me some good hints on what to pay attention for in photography and some technical background. Combined with practical use cases and helpful suggestions for custom settings and equipment, I'm still getting started with a great now hobby. If you like to get more info on this book, please take a look at my recension on Amazon (as soon as it is online).

You can be sure to read some more about my photography progress and to see some more of my pictures here in future. If you want to stay completly tuned, please subscribe to my photo stream on Flickr.

Last weekend my girlfriend and me tripped to Berlin, primarily to see the musical Dance of the Vampires. I seized the chance and tried out Kores Nikon D70s camera to finally decide if I would also buy a digital single-lense reflex (DSLR) camera. Best thing first: My D80 is already ordered and will hopefully arrive next Tuesday. :)

The trip was really nice. We drove just 4 hours and had a really nice and not really expensive hotel in Charlottenburg, which is almost the very center of Berlin and just a few walk minutes away from the Theatre of the west (German) where Dance of the Vampires is still located until end of March. After a very short city trip we got ready for a very good italian dinner and enjoyed the musical afterwards. I like the music quite much (and already did before), but seeing the play was even more amazing. A very nice mixture of classical and modern theatre and very good music. Dramatic, exciting and funny at the same time. I can only recommend this, if you like theatre or especially musicals.

On Sunday we took the chance and did some sightseeing in Berlin, although the weather was cloudy and rainy. Still it was a nice walk through downtown Berlin and using the D70s was even fun under that circumstances. If you are interessted you can see some of my very first "real" photo shots on Flickr.

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund will again organize PHP @ FrOSCon this year. As usual this happens in cooperation with the PHP Usergroups Köln/Bonn and Hamburg. The Free and Open Source Conference 2008 is going to happen on August 23rd and 24th. Instead of the past 2 years, we'll not only have a dedicated project room. A dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon track will be a part of the FrOSCon main conference program.

We are looking forward to your application for a session for PHP @ FrOSCon from today on. More information can be found on our dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon website. We are again happily looking forward to this event, which already was extremly nice in the past 2 years. Hope to see you there! :)

As you might remember, FrOSCon and PHP @ FrOSCon are organized completly on a voluntary basis. Therefore we are searching for sponsors who can take over trip and accommodation cost for our speakers. In turn you will receive an individual advertisement package or similar. Thanks in advance!

From May 26th to 28th this year Software & Support organizes a new conference called Dynamic Languages World. In contrast to the usual PHP Conference, which I usually attend, this conference tries to combine the communities around PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and JavaScript. I'm pretty curious about this kind of composite event and hope to get some cool new inspirations. Despite my interesst in those other languages and the concepts they have in terms of patterns, frameworks and application architecture/design, I'll be giving some talks in the PHP area:

• 6 essential PHP development tools in 60 minutes - A summary of 6 tools that every PHP developer should know of, including short introductions to installing and using those.
• Up-2-date: The State of eZ Components - During this session I'll give an overview on the current state of eZ Components, show some interessting new features and give an outlook on the upcoming version.
• Database Abstraction with eZ Components - While the previous talk shows eZ Components overall, this one will dig deeper into the facilities of database abstraction provided by eZ Components.
• Concepts vs. Flamewar - OOP in PHP, Ruby and Python - This title should tell you everything you need to know. ;)

I'm especially looking forward to the last session, which I'll be giving as a co-speaker for my good friend Carola Kummert (alias Sammy). We'll try to sum up the differences in the OO concepts of PHP, Ruby and Python and hope for some interessting discussion (and possibly flaming) in the attending crowd. Let's see how this concept of a talk turns out.

So far, so good. If you did not order your tickets for Dynamic Languages World, yet, take your heels and catch the early bird before March 27th. I'm sure this will be an interessting and productive conference! See you there! :)

The PHP Unconference 2007 was one of the most amazing events of the past year, head to head with FrOSCon. Therfore I'm pretty much looking forward to the second installment of the conference, which will take place on April 26th and 27th this year. I'm sure that again a large crowd of really nice geeks will attend and I'm especially looking forward to see many good friends there again. While we already traveled there with a good delegation of Dortmund usergroopies last year, it looks like we will be even more this year. Stay tuned for the Ruhrpott invasion, Hamburg! ;)

If you did not register, yet, take your heels and sign up. There are only 120 attendee slots and it will be absolutly worth it! :) Looking forward to see you in Hamburg in April! I hope the weather is as nice as it was last year.

Since I maintain my own server for web, mail and some other services, I do not use my Gmail account much. I originally created the account just by curiosity for their UI and now use it to log into other Google services and occasionally if I need a different account than one of my main ones. What I like about Gmail is, that it seems to have a quite good spam filter. In the past half year about 10 spams got through to my inbox, while more than 900 were filtered into the spam folder (in the past 30 days, if you believe Gmail).

So, what to do with those filtered spams? Deleting them just at once is a bummer because some cute mail marketers might have wasted hours in hacking web spiders, mailing scripts or Windoze trojans for bot networks. Therefore I decided to make some more use of the nice large collection in training the bayes filter of my Spamassassin with it. ;)

If you like to do the same, you just need a .fetchmailrc configured for Gmail and a small shell script that receives the spam from Gmail and makes Spamassassin learn it. The following are my settings and the script, which you could use as a starting point:

poll imap.gmail.com with
    proto IMAP
    user 'schlitt@gmail.com' there with password 'very very secret'
        options keep ssl sslfingerprint '2E:52:DE:98:7F:07:A3:CB:43:9E:7B:77:51:60:0E:07'

This .fetchmailrc (note that I left my gmail address in there intentionally, I want more spam for training! ;) configures the gmail IMAP access through SSL. You need to use IMAP, since POP does not know about folders on the remote host and therefore will fetch mails from your inbox instead of the spam folder.

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/fetchmail -a -n -s \ 
    --folder '[Gmail]/Spam' \ 
    -m '/usr/bin/sa-learn -C /etc/spamassassin --no-sync --spam' \ 
    | awk '/Learned tokens from 1 message/ { learned++; } /1 message(s) examined/ { all++; }\ 
             END { print "Learned " learned " from " learned " messages. Thanks Google! ;)"; }'
/usr/bin/sa-learn --sync

This bash script can be used via CRON to fetch the spam mails from Gmail and inject them into the bayes filter for learning. Note that I use a global bayes database for my whole server and that this database must be writeable for the user who executes the CRON job. fetchmail calls the sa-learn command instead of a real MDA (thanks to this Spamassassin wiki page for the hint). Note, that the user executing this script also needs write access to the directory containing the bayes database files. The learning process creates a journal file, which is then synced into the database, there. To avod that a new journal is created for each mail and this journal is synched after each mail the --no-sync switch is used. I expect the synchronization re-calculates the probabilities in the database. The final sa-learn --sync switch makes the learning complete.

Looks like the spam in my Gmail account got a nice new employment. ;)

^{P.S.: I hope that the Spamassassing bayes does not use the To/CC/... headers for learning. Else all my Gmail ham might be classified as spam soonish, too. ;)}

Yesterday was the last tournament of this years 2nd national league saison. As you might guess, I'm again talking about one of my favorite hobbies: Formation ballroom dance sports.

Although none of us hazarded to guess, we really managed to do it: We promoted to the 1st national league!

With a healthy margin of 5.5 points agianst our direct competetors from Frankfurt we managed to score the 2nd place again yesterday and therefore the 2nd place overall. The first 2 places in the league of 8 teams promote to the next higher one. For us this means: The highest German, the 1st national league.

In addition this means for us the participation in the German Championship on November 8th 2008.

If you'd like to see 16 (8 standard, 8 latin) really good dancing shows and are near to Bremen in November, don't miss to come around and cheer for us! :)