João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language, will be in Houston in June and graciously volunteered to do a presentation to our group! Sorry about the last minute modification, but we will need to move our meeting from our usual date/time to Wednesday June 10th at 6:00pm. The presentation details below from Rasmus himself:

Architecture, Performance, Optimization and Security.

I take a look at the performance of some popular PHP applications and go
through and show the common mistakes people make and show how much of a
difference just a little bit of optimization makes.

Then, if there is still time and interest I’ll explain the current state
of XSS on the Web with some live examples of XSS issues on some local
sites. I usually like to have 2-3 hours, but I can squeeze it into less.

I hope to see you all here for this great opportunity! You can RSVP here.

–Joao

I gave a presentation yesterday about using Selenium (IDE, RC, etc) for testing web applications, and I have uploaded the PPT to Slideshare. If you missed the meeting last night, you can read the presentation below.

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location.

Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!

I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th Floor
Houston, TX 77056

Driving directions from Downtown:

1. Head north on Travis St
2. Turn left on Walker St – go 0.4 mil
3. Take the I-45 North ramp – go 1.0 mi
4. Take exit 48B onto I-10 West – go 5.1 mi
5. Take exit 763 onto I-610 South – go 1.5 mi
6. Take exit 9B to Post Oak Blvd – go 0.8 mi
7. Turn right on Post Oak Blvd – go 0.5 mi
8. Turn right on San Felipe – go 0.6 mi
9. Turn left on Yorktown – go 0.1 mi

I did a presentation at the August meeting of the Houston PHP Users Group about some of the research we did a few months ago at Alert Logic to improve our form validation code, so it’s easier to implement by making it somewhat automated and integrating it our with Smarty templates.

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So yesterday we had a great Houston PHP/MySQL Meeting at the University of Houston. We got to have our own little classroom with projectors, wireless internet and whiteboard. John Arnold who was supposed to do a presentation on his ERP system didn’t show up (maybe couldn’t find the place?), but I gave a quick introduction to Prototype and script.aculo.us to everyone.

Since we still had some free time, I went over Smarty for a bit, writing some PHP examples.

Things to improve next month:

• Send the invitation email a week before the event, and not a day before like this time.
• Ask people to introduce themselves before starting with the actual presentations.
• Include the driving directions on the event details itself.
• When sending out the invitation email, include a link to some map service.

Update:

Also, the following things:

• Post the meeting details to Craigslist.org
• Post the meeting details to PHP.net
• Remember to bring the digital camera so we can have another picture of the group
• Ask people for their name and email address so we can follow-up with them after the meeting