Jeremy Johnstone

This week is a mildly complicated travel week for me (or was going to be). With the original flight plan, I would leave Washington, D.C. at 7am on Wednesday and arrive in San Francisco at 9:30am. I would then have to grab my luggage and get from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1 to then board an Alaskan Airlines flight to Portland at 11:20am. Yes, this is extremely mild in the scheme of things, but I hate having to go to baggage claim, walk a long ways, recheck luggage on a different airline, then get re-screened by security in less than 2 hours. Doable, yes, fun, no.

Thinking more about that travel schedule more this weekend, I felt there had to be a better way. The problem is, that is the best route I could come up with because two different parties were paying for my travels (FEMA/DHS on the first part, and Yahoo! on the second part). I decided to call FEMA travel back and see if they were willing to just fly me direct from Dulles to Portland as it would save me a lot of trouble. As it turns out, they have a 5:47pm flight out on Tuesday night which would get me direct to Portland. Not only is this much more convenient (no airline change), it also ended up saving almost $230 on airfare (I will never understand how flights are priced). Add in the savings on rental car and the elimination of a night stay in DC and you come up with almost $500 in savings (hooray tax payers!).

Now for the harder part, this means I would need an extra night in Portland (a city which is already packed with OSCON folks). After extensive digging, I finally found a hotel which had availability and wasn’t in Vancouver/Hillsborough. The new Shilo Inn Rose Garden had a room for all three nights (and is only several blocks away surprisingly enough, would think it would be booked). As it turns out, Yahoo! Corp Travel had a nice discount rate with them (~40%) and my room rate would be only $79.95 a night. This is a $70 a night savings from what I was going to pay before (Holiday Inn), so even with the additional day, Yahoo! is saving money. Then I needed to find a one way flight back to San Francisco, which I did, on United (my preferred airline for mileage purposes) for a meager $182. This again is a savings from before (roundtrip was $330 on Alaskan Airlines), so now Yahoo! is saving about $200 (hooray stock holders!).

So, after spending about an hour digging online and about a half hour on hold for the travel agent, I have ended up saving the government and Yahoo! combined over $700. Needless to say, I feel it was worth my effort and on the positive side, I now get 2 full days at OSCON for recruiting, an extra night to hang out with friends who are there, and about 400 extra frequent flyer miles (not much, but hey, every little bit counts).

So, in the spirit of catching the world back up with what’s been keeping me busy, here comes post #2 on the subject. As you might have gathered by my last post (assuming you looked at the photos, which you did do, right?) my interest in photography has improved immensely. It’s something I have always considered a fun hobby, just never spent the time, money, and effort as I have this year. Please look through my photos when you have time and leave comments here or on Flickr. I am always looking to learn new tips/tricks, so if you have something to share, please do. I’m also always looking for new gear, so if you have something to sell, be sure to contact me. Later this week, I will probably do a couple posts on things I have learned, so be sure and check back if you’re interested.

One another topic which has kept me insanely busy (sadly, I am still behind on), I’m also writing a book for WROX Press (the company with the red/yellow books, you know the ones) on PHP. Yet another book on PHP you say? Yes, yes, but at least the one I am writing has a little twist which makes it different than most (but not all) PHP books already in print. The book is very much an intermediate / advanced programmer book (you won’t find any history of PHP in the opening chapters) which takes you on a journey through building a community website from start to finish. I heavily cover best practices on various topics which are important to sites which might grow into something really big (aka, what many independent coders dream about, being the next Yahoo! / MySpace / Facebook / <insert name of site with lots of traffic and many users>). Having written the codebase (along with a handful of other gifted engineers) to a significant Yahoo! property with billions of monthly pageviews (sorry, can’t be specific obviously), I hope I can impart some of the knowledge the reader of the book will need to scale their sites appropriately. We of course knew from the beginning (since it was an existing site we rewrote from the ground up) how much traffic to expect, but many of the principals remain the same whether you start out big, or grow big. Two other areas which get significant coverage in the book are security and internationalization. I won’t go into all the details here (I want you to buy the book after all), but with any luck it will be worth the wait and something you will enjoy and learn something from.

In final parting is something I stumbled upon today which hopefully will be useful to others. I have been constantly trying to find a good solution to organizing the endless amount of email I receive as well as always have it available on all my devices (Mac Pro desktop at work, Mac Book Pro laptop when away from desk, Powerbook at home, and iPhone for the remaining times). While this isn’t an all encompassing solution (only covers part of the first problem), it definitely is a good step in the right direction. Check out this blog post on Daring Fireball which talks about a simple Applescript which automagically moves your read (but not flagged) email to your Archive folder. Yes, I know the script isn’t revolutionary, but sometimes its the simple details which make a big difference. Be sure and tell me what you think!

I apologize for the extremely late notice, but James Jones (also of Yahoo!) and I will be giving a talk at OSCON in Portland, OR which you might find interesting. Here is the relevant information:

Yahoo! Disaster Response: Being prepared for the next Katrina

After learning from the lessons of Hurricane Katrina last fall, Yahoo! saw a real void in disaster response which it felt sorely needed to be filled. This talk will outline the proposal of what Yahoo! plans to build which already has positive input from the American Red Cross, Department of Homeland Security, and other non-profit groups. We plan to capitalize on and promote existing open-source technologies, like Sahana, and new open data sharing standards to be better prepared for the next disaster. Come get a quick insight into the system and offer your feedback and comments.

Speakers:
James Jones, Technical Yahoo!
Jeremy Johnstone, Technical Yahoo!

Date/Time:
Friday, July 28th, 2006
11:35am - 12:20pm

Location:
OSCON 2006
Oregon Convention Center - room E141
Portland, OR

Please tell everyone you know who would be interested to come!

Update: room information posted

Got bored this weekend and decided to play around with Picasa Web Albums. After a little poking around, found the protocol was pretty basic and decided to see what could be done with it. The first thing I decided to do was to reimplement the “client side” functionality. Using the PHP code found here:

You can get a list of albums (including album meta information), a list of photos in an album (including image meta info), have the ability to create new albums, and the ability to upload images to your online gallery. I am also implementing a proxy server which will allow you to upload via Picasa to Flickr, Y! Photos, or Gallery. I should have that part online so you can download it in the near future.

This year I will be speaking at a bit larger of a conference than last year. I was invited to speak at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland at the end of July. Looking at the topics list, it is sure to be a fantastic conference again this year. My talk is entitled “Writing Your Own PHP Extensions: How & Why from A-Z” and has the title would lead you to think, it’s all about PHP Extensions. In this talk I will give a beginners guide to writing PHP extensions explaining reasons for doing so, how to start, and where to go from there. Code examples will be abundant and won’t be your typical “Hello World!” type extensions either, so be ready for useable code which will let you hit the ground running. For updated scheduling information about when the talk will be, look no further than right here. For other great PHP talks, looks right here. As happened last year, look me up during the conference and I will try and hook you up with some free Yahoo! schwag. I look forward to seeing you all there!