Premature Optimization

Yesterday we had the first meeting of the newly founded Israeli group of PHP users, or “Kvutzat Mishtamshey PHP Beysra’el” as one might say.

The meeting was held at Zend offices, and there was a pretty good turnover - ~20 non-Zenders showed up with ~10 more Zenders joining in. I gave a presentation (slides are in Hebrew but you can get them here if you read that funny language) about the past, present and future of PHP. There was also a trivia quiz (yes, I stole some ideas from a PHP Norge meeting I attended some months back) and we gave a book and a couple of T-Shirts (and a PHP stress ball) to the winners.

Boaz took some pretty good pictures as well.

It was lots of fun and good socializing which was exactly what I hoped for. The general idea is to have a meeting once a month or so - hopefully, next time I will be sitting and asking questions and not presenting.

Thanks everyone for coming, and if you happen to be in Israel, and do PHP - you should come as well!

A few days ago my work Thinkpad T43’s screen started flickering (not flickring, actually flickering). I immediately dismissed it as some kind of broke-my-Gentoo thing I always do, but after rebooting to Windows (yeah, it’s still there - IT demanded I keep a Windows partition), I realized it’s a hardware problem - something is fucked up with the backlighting or something. It got worse until a couple of days ago it started going blank for hours, and only coming back randomly for 5 minutes every time.

Now, this would all be fine if I wouldn’t be in the middle of a training engagement in India - and a week from returning home. Projecting still worked - so I could go on training, but I couldn’t do anything except for that - plus it doesn’t really feel nice that during breaks all your students can still watch your desktop

Anyway while not giving up to hardware, I found out that if I apply pressure at certain points on my screen, it goes on - that made me spend hours massaging my screen trying to get it working, but whenever I got my fingers off it it went dark again.

I almost thought of giving up and started thinking about finding an IBM service center or something (or is it Lenovo?), but that soon realized as impractical. Since doing customer engagements for Zend away from home always feels a bit like a military operation (that’s an Israeli thing: Israeli men tend to compare hard / exciting / surreal situations in their lives to military related experiences - even if they don’t admit it out loud…), I suddenly remembered something one of my officers used to say whenever we complained our equipment or supply is crappy: “This is all we have, and that’s what we’re going to win with!”. All motivated, I started MacGyvering, trying to get my screen working back with a toothpick and some chicken curry (that’s mostly what I have here).

Finally, I came up with this solution:

In case you’re wondering, that’s one of my Zend business cards I always carry and hardly use

Off topic: yes, I’m in some kind of photo-taking craze. Perhaps I was bit by a Japanese vampire or something.