code meets music

It was good. The end.

Ok, not quite, there’s a bit more:

The speakers were all interesting- in the order they appeared:

Cal Evans (he’s the Editor of Zend’s DevZone) walked us through connecting together the UPS package-tracking API and a Google map. He was an entertaining speaker, and made for a good start to the day, even if the talk didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know.

Simon Laws (a member of the Open SOA group) then explained how the SCA Pecl extension can be used as a way of abstracting access to ‘services’. It seemed like quite a good idea, but I can’t really see myself having much cause to use it. The guy giving the talk seemed to know what he was talking about, and seemed quite passionate about it, but I didn’t feel he did the best job of introducing the subject. Perhaps it was just down to the limited time available, but a bit more background and context would have gone down better with me, rather than the focus on code examples.

After the break for lunch, Kevlin Henney (a consultant/trainer/writer specialising in OOP, Agile development, languages and patterns) answered a series of questions (sent, I believe, in advance) regarding OOP, and how it is implemented in PHP. The main theme of the answers was that he is ‘surprised’ by the way PHP introduces elements of Statically typed languages into its primarily dynamic class system. Kevlin was the most entertaining speaker of the day not just because he made a lot of amusing comments but because he was clearly very passionate about the topic. It’s a shame he only had 45 minutes, I could quite happily have listened for a lot longer.

Immediately following Kevlin was the ‘big name’ of the day, Rasmus Lerdorf whose talk entitled “Fast and Rich” dealt, briefly, with getting the most out of a PHP application. There were some useful points that I took away from the talk, but I was disappointed that the 2nd half of the talk was mainly giving reasons to upgrade to PHP5. It was interesting to hear him speak, and if hearing the message coming from the horse’s mouth means more people stop using PHP4 then that’s great, but I can’t help but feel that his time would have been better spent going into some more examples of improving performance.

The final talk of the day, Desiging for the Curious Home by Bill Gaver of Goldsmiths College, had nothing to do with PHP. It was about interesting devices that Bill and his team have developed to put in peoples homes and observe what they do with them. They made a coffee table that contains a screen showing aerial photographs of the UK. Placing weights on parts of the table affects the direction of ‘drift’ over the map and so over time, the view through the table changes. One of the people they gave this too seemed to get quite into it, carefully placing rocks and referring to an atlas in order to travel around the country finding friends’ houses. Another project involved placing sensors around a family home, recording things such as noise levels, which doors were open and where people sat in order to try and determine the mood of the house as a whole. With this, each day a horoscope was printed for the family to read- they were aware of the sensor-boxes (they were bright orange!) but not of what they were doing, or of what the project was trying to determine. A TV crew, also with no knowledge of the project, were brought in to talk to the family members and review the progress, and it was quite interesting seeing the theories and thoughts ranging from paranoia about being monitored, through to curiosity about what was going on.

The day as a whole was well worth the trip down and I hope I’ll be able to go again next year. It was well organised, there was plenty of coffee and the food put on for lunch was pretty good. There were a lot of people though and while everyone just about fit in the lecture theatre, it was a bit cramped in the gallery area in between the talks.