I have just come back from an excellent PHP NW 2009 conference. Yes it was great because of the content, the atmosphere, and the people; but it was also great as I considered it a very female friendly conference. I’ll be blogging about the conference elsewhere. This post is about how conference organisers can support and encourage women at their conferences using the conference as an example of good practice. (more…)
I like snakes. This weekend I will be collecting my new snake, he’s a baby Royal Python. I have been worried about the temperature in the vivarium I will be housing him so I built an ethernet enabled monitoring device to do a science!
Yahoo! Open Hack Day Taiwan started October 17, 2009. This is an event held for members of the Yahoo! Developer Network (not Yahoo! employees). As part of the entertainment they employed lap dancers at the event! (more…)
A few months ago I bought a PAYG T-Mobile 3G USB dongle. I have to say it hasn’t been the smoothest ride ever. My good friend Sara, visiting the UK from the States, also got one recently to use while over here and she had even bigger problems than I did as it breaks Snow Leopard. (more…)
My first degree was in Physics. There were only two or three women on the course. After University, partly to keep my father happy, I became an accountant. Again women were in the minority. It was not like science as at least two of my managers were women, but it still had a boys club feel to the industry. I returned to University to study a Masters in Computer Science and again I was one of the minority. And so on…
Its that time of year again when we all encompass our inner pirate and let it roam free. Thanks to Yahoo! there’s a neat little tweak you can make to your web pages to make them all piratey. Just add the following line to the end of the HTML.
<script src="http://l.yimg.com/d/lib/ydn/js/pirate1252961643.js"></script>
More about it on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
Last Sunday I woke early so I started on a project I’ve had in mind for a while but not gotten around to doing. I built a power supply module that plugs in to a breadboard. There are a few kits for these kind of things around from Adafruit and others but I had slightly different requirements.
The first Tuesday of the month is the PHP NW meeting in Manchester. This month I was the warm act for PHP celebrity Derick Rethans. Due to traffic issues Lornajane and Derick were late so I gave my talk first. It was one in a series of talks on Design Patterns being given by various members of the group. Mine was on the Decorator Pattern. The slides from the talk are available for download.
Derick’s very interesting talk was on Test Driven Development in a PHP environment. Derick is the author of XDebug and an expert in PHP QA. It covered the concepts behind Test Driven Development and why it both improves code quality and makes code development more efficient over the long term. It covered the use of PHPUnit, XDebug and CruiseControl. As a fan of quality reusable code this is a great way to develop.
Next month is the PHP NW 2009 Conference held in Manchester. The you can see Derick and some of other great European PHP conference speakers doing their thing. Its fantastic value for money and you get a year’s subscription to PHP Architect Magazine too. Bargain!
Well I have a name for my project of getting ethernet on to my BBC Microcomputer. Its now called Beebthernet. After some prototyping on copper strip-board and testing I revised the schematic for the interface.
In March I went to the first Makerfaire in the UK. The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Makerfaire was part of Newcastle Sciencefest. Its not that far from where I live so I drove up there for the day.
There were lots of kewl stuff as you’d expect. I particularly liked the electro-mechanical fire breathing horse robot. Amusingly I met one of the Microsoft guys who’d demonstrated the Microsoft interactive table at PHP London. He was there with his cheap, home brew, version of the table which used back projection of the image and a camera to detect the finger position. The guy with the UK101s who I’d met at Techadventure was also there.
Naturally there was an O’Reilly stand as they are publishers of both Make and Craft magazines. They had a pile of kits from Adafruit including the boArduino. This is an Arduino clone designed to plug in to a breadboard. There are two versions. One with a USB to Serial adapter on board and one which has a power supply onboard but requires TTL level serial which can be easily supplied by an FTDI lead. I bought one of the latter.
The kit languished on the shelves at my computer workstation until about a month ago when I decided to solder it together and play with it. Its a through hole double sided board which is relatively packed and so requires some experience of soldering. Apart from stupidly soldering in a LED the wrong way around and then having to desolder it and obtain a new one I had no problems. It worked first time! Limor aka Ladyada, who designed it and runs Adafruit makes good stuff.
I videoed it using my G1 phone (hence the poor quality due to low light). I have the Arduino IDE running on my MacBook. The FDTI lead is based around a common part with easily obtainable drivers for Windows, OS X and Linux.
