After recently passing my Zend Certification Exam I felt that it was time to set myself another challenge.  This one is sure to hurt me a lot more but I know it’s definitely achievable with a little hard work in the evenings! So after seeing the hundred push ups website it’s time to jump on the bandwagon of people attempting the same challenge. Give it a go, even if you simply double your push up total that’s a good thing right! I think at the moment I would be able to churn at least 50/60 out in one go but I’ve kind of hit a plateau and not really improved on that number for a while now.

My advice to anyone looking to improve is to train to absolute failure when doing your push ups. That’s how I used to do it when I was 14/15 and could only manage a measily 5-10 but found that I improvements came around very quickly and my maximum number of reps improved each week.

Go and join up people and get involved!
Let me know below if you decide to step up to the challenge.

BTW I’m glad they call this exercise as a push up, calling it a press up doesn’t make sense! If you remember gorilla presses from the WWF days and shoulder presses in gym you shoulder know that’s done over your head, so there!

Happy days, last month I passed my Zend Certification exam on the first attempt, Carlton Dickson is finally in the Zend Yellow Pages for ZCEs.

The things that I would recommend looking at if you’re planning to take the exam are

• The PHP manual, this is a must, any serious PHP developer shouldn’t need to be told about this bad boy. Don’t think that the exam is simply about remembering the various functions…you really need to understand the language types, operators, control structures, etc
  For me the language reference section is very important.
• I bought the Zend Certification study guide and found it to be a fairly decent aid but don’t think that alone will help you pass because it definitely won’t!
• Practice tests - I thought these were pretty good value and would definitely recommend them as a purchase. When you think you’re ready for the exam take one of this tricky buggers and you’ll probably crash and burn on a few topics, an indication that it’s time to go back to the manual.  It’s a shame they don’t tell you the answers at the end so you know what questions you messed up on.
• Other PHP developers - I found it really helpful to read about the experiences and advice from people that have already taken the Zend Certification exam…
  1. Will Fitch - http://www.phpfever.com/zce-what-to-expect.html
  2. Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/blog/2004/oct/preparing-for-the-zend-certification
  3. Ben Ramsey - http://benramsey.com/archives/passing-the-zend-php-certification-exam
  4. Sidrit - http://sidyou.blogspot.com/2007/03/zend-certification-exam.htm
  5. Jure Merhar - http://www.merhar.si/php/taking-the-zend-certification-exam
  6. Alex Netkachov - http://www.alexatnet.com/node/129
  7. Josh Zerin - http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6659647964&topic=4846
  8. Mr “I like PHP” - http://readtheweb.info/2008/01/02/passing-the-zend-php-5-certification-exam
  9. Mahmud Ahsan - http://mahmudahsan.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/now-im-zend-certified-engineer
  10. Robert Peake - http://www.robertpeake.com/index.php?/archives/102-Zend-Certified-Engineer.html

So far my career hasn’t progressed at the speed of light, but then again I didn’t expect it to. Studying for the ZCE has really strengthened my knowledge of PHP in a wide range of area, so applying all that has been learnt to future work will only improve the quality of my work, as well as my performance in interviews as I will be much more confident that I know my PHP.

A nice example of how the ZCE has affected another PHP developer’s life can be found at Richard Harrison’s website.

My question to any other Zend Certified Engineers is how has becoming a ZCE affected your career progression?

BTW…I have ONE practice exam left…I’ll donate it to the first person to send me a pic of them with a copy of their study guide, just so that I know you are really going for the exam :)  Contact me on gmail using carltondickson as the contact address or just leave a comment below.

Now for another challenge…

After discovering a few Google I/O conference presentations on Youtube something that grabbed my attention were the Google App Engine presentations.  The Google App Engine allows developers to run their apps on Google’s infrastructure and not have to worry about server-related issues such as maintaining fast response times, reliability and scaling should your site suddenly receive a shed load of traffic.  This is surely great news for startups who believe they will be big sometime in the future but aren’t willing to pay a silly amount of dough for the architecture to support their idea up-front, kinda like pay as you go…did I say the first 5 million page views and 500MB storage were free??

It’s not as flexible as Amazon’s Web Services and currently the Google App Engine only supports apps written in Python at the moment, a bit of a pain of the ass for me considering I’m a PHP developer.  The PHP community seems pretty gutted Google App Engine doesn’t have a PHP runtime but when you consider the main man of Python (Guido) works at Google and PHP isn’t allowed to be used inside the walls of Google, it makes sense Google initially decided to support Python, adding shoddy PHP runtime support just to shut up PHP developers up won’t help anyone.

If you’re a PHP developer then check out the post about lack of PHP support in google app engine by Manuel Lemos,. Manuel mentions the ways you could let Google know you are litterally dying for PHP support, and also something pretty important, don’t be a beeyatch and get into language wars saying how PHP isbetter than Python or vice versa. Surely just give Python a try and see if it’s works for you and your particular task…I know I’ll be working through the GAE (one of the most unfortunate IT-related abbreviations I can think of, know of any others?) getting started guide.

Having previously missed out on the 10 000 developer signup for the beta I’m off to grab a piece of this much hyped GAE action while I can. Watch this space for my first GAE app.

Update: Adam Charnock made a post on his blog about ongoing talks between Zend and Google about adding PHP support to GAE. He suggests Zend is release some new products in Autumn so I wouldn’t expect them to release anything GAE-related before then, but you never know!
http://porteightyeight.com/archives/201-PHP-for-Google-App-Engine-in-the-works.html

So I decided it was time for me to get my own shed, not the wooden sort used to get away from a nagging other half or fix the mower, but instead test out things that may come in useful in future projects or that look interesting. At the moment this only consist of an example of the Youtube chromeless player I threw together, press the play icon for some soulful grooves.

Seeing how Dustin Diaz labelled his area ‘basement’ and YUI calling there’s ’sandbox’ I felt I should come up with an original name of my own, so my basement/sandbox/playground/test area will be called the shed…what do you call yours? Expect to find some interesting tests to accompany tutorials in the future!

Loving this advert by the way, thank God i’m not at that stage of my life just yet!

Just started a project for a friend of mine showcasing their design work and one piece of functionality that I’ll need is a JS based lightbox in order to display the work in a nice way.

My requirements for the lightbox were…

• Small file size for all included files
• As few HTTP requests as possible, i.e. for images, CSS, JS libraries
• Support for image sets
• Preferably uses a JS library I have used before (YUI, scriptaculous, mootools)
• Degrades gracefully if the user doesn’t have JS

I have found a cheeky little comparison matrix of lightbox alternatives, meaning I can stop running around the net using the various names that people have given their spinoffs of the first lightbox, check it out, it will definitely save you a lot of time!

After spending 5 mins setting up my Wordpress installation and then half the evening figuring out how to get syntax highlighting working (duh), I thought this post might come in handy for other newcomers to Wordpress.

Read more »