Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

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.

I seized the boring time in the past days (I've had a really bad cold) and migrated my photo gallery to Flickr. So far I hosted the photos on my own, using Gallery. While Gallery is a great tool that allowed me to comfortablly manage and present my images, it has one great flaw: I host it by myself. That means a) that serving images from my server costs quite a bit of performance, if you involve PHP and even a database, and b) that I need to take care for updates myself. The first issue is a minor one, since my server is powerful enough to serve the job and not that many people are interessted. The second topic is much more disturbing, since I need to keep track about security updates all the time and need to bring an update in place ASAP, if one occurs.

Long story short, I played with the idea of migrating to Flickr for a longer time now and the only point that was keeping me back was the migration effort. Luckily a little Gallery module, called Gallery2Flickr, exists, which eases the job quite a bit. Therefore I seized the chance and performed the migration of all existing albums by now and you can find my image collection on Flickr, now. Sorry for destroying all the external photo links this way, anyway you can still reach my gallery on http://photos.schlitt.info and through the long way http://schlitt.info/applications/gallery.

The Mozilla Development Center has a new mascot called "developer kit":

Really sweet and a nice slogan! :)

As posted before, Kore and me went to a the "Christmas Cookie Baking" event of the PHP Usergroup Bielefeld last Saturday, organized by Carola (Sammy). We were quite suprised, that we found Bielefeld so easily, although the internet told us about the great Bielefeld Conspiracy before. Anyway, we found Sammies home and had a great time with brunching and baking cookies, together with her husband and Arne from Hamburg. Afterwards we went to the Christmas Market of Hamelin, the town which is famous in Germany for its story about The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was really a great event and I want to thank Sammy for this!

When we left Bielefeld, we had to take some evidence photo, to proof that we really found Bielefeld. Sammy brought us to a Bielefeld town sign, so we could take a photo in front of it. But... see what happened:

The sign is clearly visible, but Kore and me seem really fake on this picture (click to enlarge). Beside that, you can see a really weird license plate in the background, which has the mysterious number 1337 on it... I'm kinda scared about these happenings, because we actually took 5 pictures and all have the same strange artifacts... Is it possible, that we've never really been to Bielefeld? I guess we will never really know...

Anyway, using this little mysterious blog entry, I want to thank the whole PHP community for another great year and want to wish you all a merry and reflective Christmas time! Enjoy some silent days with your families, take a deep breath and gather some energy for the upcoming 2007!

Jakob (a good friend of mine from the PHP UG Dortmund) has written a bash script to create class graphs (non UML conform, but what shalls?) from a PHP source directory. The resulting SVG is generated through GraphViz. He just ran the script on the eZ components. Here is a small excerpt:

Quite cool, I think, and it already helped us a lot to find inconsistencies in some other projects.

Read more on Jakobs blog (which I'm just adding to the Planet).

While I did not have a camera with me to this years International PHP Conference, I definitly saw lot's of flashes all of the conf. I wonder where all those photos have gone? Aaron already posted his on Flickr, but where is the rest?

If you have your photos online somewhere, please leave the link as a comment to this entry! Thanks! :)

As the result of the Helloween afterpain, PHP Usergroup Dortmund proudly presents:

Derick pointed me to these funny cards, yesterday. Really cool work, I think, and propably quite useful, if you go to a conference without knowing anybody. ;) Thanks to Cal for this great piece of artwork!

^{I hope I'll receive a version of the printed deck, somewhen... ;)}

Sitting at the Malpensa airport in Milano and waiting for my connection flight to D?sseldorf I seize the chance to work a bit. The conference in Bari was really great. I meat a lot of interesting and especially very nice people. My talk about the our enterprise PHP platform eZ components went quite well and I received a lot of feedback. Since I don't know much italien (as the attendees of my talk will probably have noticed), I skipped the afternoon talks at the phpDay (sorry Zeev ;-P) and used the chance to lay down on the beach for a bit. I even managed to go swimming in the sea. Really great. What I enjoyed most in Bari was actually the food. Italians really know how to make really good dinners. In my whole life I did not have that much anti pasti... ;)

So, all in all, I really enjoyed my trip to Bari and hope I can come back to the phpDay next year, to see another part of Italy. Thanks to all you guys for bringing me there!

Aaron has outed himself as my first fan! ;) Thanks for the blog and the great picture! :)