João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Ilia Alshanetsky gave a very interesting presentation at PHP Quebec on the new features planned for PHP 5.3.

Looks like we will finally get namespace support in PHP.

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 built a small web application specifically for the iPhone last year to search the availability of a book in bookstores. I think I came up with the idea for it when I was at a local Barnes & Noble store, couldn’t find what I was looking for, and wondered if another store close by had it in stock.

The application works by allowing the user to search for a nearby Barnes & Noble store based on a zip code, and also allows you to search the stock of those nearby bookstores for a book, given its ISBN.

Try it out now and let me know what you think.

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

Velocity is the new O’Reilly conference aimed at discussing topics related to scaling web sites and applications on the Web. It seems really interesting, and I will try to attend.

Having access to some of the industry’s experts in scaling web sites will be really useful. In fact, Steve Souders is one of the program chairs of the conference, and he is also known as the creator of the very popular YSlow extension to Firefox.