Well, I wanted to get this post done last night but had a late night and was too tired to get it done. Day 2 of ZendCon was really successful. It started off in the morning with the keynote address from the CEO of Zend - Harold Goldberg. Then immediately after one of my closest friends and mentor, Brett Harris, gave his presentation about Facebook Development using the Zend Framework. The turn out was awesome and the presentation was great. Congratulations Brett, you did great!

After that I attended various sessions about the Zend framework given by the Software Architect, Matthew Weier O’Phinney. We had a catered lunch that was good. During the afternoon I attended a really good presentations on PDO by Wez Furlong, The State of Ajax by Paul Reinheimer and ended with Test Driven Development by Derick Rethans. After the session were over, Brett and I attended the welcome reception which had an open bar…sweet. Then he and I went for some sushi and gin & tonics. BTW…if you have never tried sea urchin…don’t. Trust Me, it was like licking the bottom of a fish tank. We then decided to hang out in the hotel planning out today’s schedule. At some point we got hungry and had to walk to a near by gas station where the shady attendant was paranoid and only allowed one of us in to shop. I think we finally crashed at around 3 am. Overall it was an exciting day. Stay tuned for Day 3.

Well, Brett and I have arrived today at the Santa Clara Convention Center to attend ZendCon. I have not blogged in a while so I am going to try and update with little bits and pieces of how the conference is going. Today is the pre-conference where they are offering a couple of tutorial sessions. This morning I took the session on Introduction Object Oriented PHP, because I never really had an official class on it. It was a great crash course with a lot of information. It was almost overwhelming, but luckily we were able to download the slides and I will be reviewing the information later. The presenter was Marcus Burger, who works for Google in Zurich. The afternoon session was about better and advanced techniques for using SQL query language with specific to mySQL. The presenter is actually someone who works for mySQL, Jay Pipes.

Tomorrow, Brett will be presenting right after the opening keynote speech. His topic will be about Facebook Development using the Zend Framework. If you know Brett or even if you don’t, please wish him luck! Well that is it for now. I will try to keep everyone updated as the conference goes on.

About a month or so ago, I attended a Microsoft event at a local New Horizon’s learning center. The biggest reason why I attended was to sit in on a session about Windows Server 2008. Being an IT professional, I feel it is my responsibility to make sure I stay on top of the new technology so that I can effectively recommend the best solutions for my company.

In 2006, I moved our company from their legacy network of NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 to server 2003 Exchange 2003. This, as many of you know already, is a big jump in term of performance and functionality most of which provided the tools we needed to better mange our users, policies and resources. Though the next release of Microsoft’s server OS took a little over 5 years to release, some of the new features and changes made will be the next step for our company in the next year or so.

After the session, I was able to get my hands on a year trial of Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. I decided to give it some trial runs as a virtual machine on my Mac Pro and wanted to share some of my thoughts on the product thus far and some of the new features in 2008.

• Installation - One of the biggest differences that I noticed between installing 2008 versus 2003 was that it was able to install in no time flat. The basic OS install took no more that 15 minutes total. I was amazed but also baffled as to why it was done so fast. As I logged in for the first time, I realized why the install went so quickly. Only the base os was installed; no roles, no services, not even the sound drivers were loaded. Microsoft decided to make the install easier by allowing the administrators to install only what they need to install instead of having to uninstall components they don’t need or keep everything installed causing an unnecessary load on the server.
• IIS 7.0 - Microsoft new version of their web server. It is supposed to have support for newer ASP and PHP based applications.
• Virtualization built-in - Dubbed Hyper-V; This will allow organizations the ability to run multiple servers on a single hardware configuration. Hyper-V was designed specifically with the Intel architecture in mind for true compatibility and performance. Also includes new tools to help manage the virtual server environment.
• TS Remote App - Like terminal services? Want to access just individual applications instead? Want to run thin clients? This is the answer. Remote App gives you the ability to create a shortcut icons on remote workstations that allows applications on the server to be run remotely on the clients.
• Server Manager Console - we are all used to this already, but Microsoft wants to take it a step further. The server console is now the single source for ease of administrating your server. From it you will be able to launch and configure all of the necessary roles, services and administrative services.
• PowerShell - this scripting language has been getting popular for a few years and is now built into Windows Server 2008. I am planning on studying this language more in depth.
• Support for cross-platform environments - i.e. UNIX
• Server Core - the return of DOS? Possibly, server core is a bare minimal installation of windows server and I do mean bare. No GUI installs what so ever. The first reboot after installation you will be greeted by a familiar black window with a C:\ prompt. All of the administration and configuration will be done via the command line. The idea is to only install and run the necessary services needed and help minimize threats and attacks.

I will be continuing to explore 2008 more in depth as I evaluate it for my company and I will continue to post updates on my progress.

Wanted to take a moment and congratulate my best friend Brett for being accepted as a presenter at ZendCon 2008. He has worked hard to develop his toolset primary for Facebook development titled the FBFramework that is built on top of the Zend platform.

Brett and I have been friends for more than 5 years and I am glad to see him succeed in what he loves to do. Head on over to his website for more in depth knowledge of the framework and updates on his presentation at ZendCon 2008.

Chris Pirillo has been working on a new free premium wordpress theme for the community at large. After months of work, he has unveiled the new theme, code named WicketPixie after his two dogs. He spent a lot of time focusing on making a theme for people who are not as experienced with developing themes for wordpress and built in a lot of customization options that will be available via the admin page. However, the biggest addition to this theme is the “Social Me” content widget that allows you to display and integrate all of social networking profiles together in one place for everyone to see. I feel this is great because there are dozens of these sites out there and it is overwhelming at times trying to keep up with all of them. Now with this feature you can link your website to post all of your updates in one place. He has done a in depth screencast about this new theme which I have embedded in this post. There has been no definite word on the release date for the theme; the latest update indicates that he would like to get it ported over to wordpress MU for lockergnome.com before he releases it. As stated earlier this theme will be free, and most likely be release under the creative common license but he is looking for donations so that he can continue to fund and develop on the project. I will be downloading and testing this on my site when it released so definitely check back later.

Read more about the theme from Chris’s post here.

As I was updating my site design and adding some social content links and I realized that I have not update my blog since Christmas. I have been extremely busy since the beginning of year with work and taking classes online.

I am going to try to keep up with posting something to my blog at least one a week but I cannot make any guarantees. You can also keep up with me via other social outlets such as twitter, facebook or friendfeed. All my links are going to be added to the sidebars on my site.

Well that is all for now but keep checking back for updates.

Merry Christmas to All!

I recieved an email from Rob Peters form Now Public . a news website. asking permission to use one of my first snow storm photos in an article about this eastern storm hitting Canada. Check out the article and see my photo in the slideshow.

It is way too early for it to start snowing this season but we ended up with 6 - 8 inches of snow from a storm that stalled right in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania.