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.

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.

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! :)

As you might know I'm active in ballroom dance sport for years now and (if time allows) I'm going to contests, too. While time was rare for this in the past few years, I'll be competing this year again, thanks to my very good friend and trainer Marc. When Marc came to me last year in November, begging me (almost on his knees) to join the A team (the best one, currently competing in the second national league), I decided that I need to help my friends and agreed to return to professional dance sports.

The result of many, many hours of training was presented to the public last Saturday for the first time: A completely new music and choreography on the topic Pirates of the Caribbean. The press was impressed by our show and wrote a very good article (German) about it. We hope the best for our first tournament tomorrow in Oldenburg. If you want to see us, there are 5 chances all over Germany:

• 2008-01-12 Sportarena der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
• 2008-01-26 Oberfrankenhalle Bayreuth
• 2008-02-09 Walter-Köbel-Sporthalle Rüsselsheim
• 2008-02-23 Sporthalle Godehardstrasse Göttingen
• 2008-03-08 Großsporthalle Auepark Kassel

The league overview and detailed information about the competition can be found on the website of the DTV. Would be nice to have some fans so far away from home, so come and join us! :)

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.

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

I usually do not write much about my private life. Most entries are work/technology related. I recently found a picture shot by a photograph on one of my latest dancing competitions, which I really like.

Sadly I'll leave the eZ Systems headquarters in Norway tomorrow direction Dortmund again. It really was an amazing time for me in all aspects: Work, people, country and whatever else matters.

We almost finished the work we planned to do during my stay here (some small peaces will follow on Monday, but that's all) and it was really amazing teamwork. By now, we designed the most important eZ Publish Enterprise Components and discussed every single bit of the design in a 5 people team. The work was amazing fun, since all of us joined the team with a completly different background (like Derick, with the C- and PHP-core-background, Amos, who already dealt with the migration of eZ Publish from version 2 to 3, and me with a PHP library background - meaning PEAR). We sometimes seemed to get lost in endless discussions on sense & nonsense, habits and techniques. But after all it's a very good feeling, if really all of us agreed with the picked solution. You will definitly read more on that, next week, wenn eZ Systems publishes a Community Report on what we did in the past 3 weeks.

Beside that I enjoyed Norway pretty much from a non-tourist perspective, which was really cool, too. I got to see the exciting natural environment here (like I went to watch & try to photograph shooting stars with Derick) and learnt to know many original and choice Norwegians which are all really nice people. We went out for lots of party on the weekend (although alcohol is very expensive here and bars close at 3, people know how to make great party) or for the beach when weather was ok (I never saw a one-time-grill before...*g*).

All in all i really enjoyed the time here and would definitly like to come back for some weeks in the nearer future (if managable). When time fits I'll write some more on this topic later on here. So, stay tuned and remember to visit Norway once in your life! It's an amazing country. So far, have a nice weekend! :)

Over the last weekend, I completly refurbished my ne appartment in Dortmund and on upcoming Saturday I will move there. I'm pretty much looking forward to that. Because of the bunch of preperations to do, I will not have that much time for open source stuff until April 8th.

Does anyone need a skilled PHP developer near Dortmund as a part time job? Please email me!

^{Ok, a small one: We found that in Darmstadt City.}