All news about PHP

I haven’t been blogging much lately, and for the first time since I started this blog, I’ve only managed one post all month.

There has been plenty to talk about, but I’ve been too busy with both work and play to keep up. I’ll try to recap the previous month (roughly in chronological order) for posterity.

• I saw Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová at Radio City Music Hall, which was possibly the best show I’ve ever seen. (It’s tough to beat the Indigo Girls, though.) If you live in NY, and you’re not going to ZendCon, you can see them in Central Park in September.
• I went to Chicago for php|tek, easily one the best PHP conferences each year. I got to celebrate my birthday at Shoeless Joe’s while watching the Champions League final, and I ended the day with a brief stint as a rock star.
• My wife and I took a canoe down the Delaware River with some friends, and we camped on a small island. I rediscovered my hatred for stinging nettles.
• I gave a keynote at the DC PHP Conference on the intersection of security and user experience. As with most new talks, it was unpolished, but I’ll be giving an updated, polished version of it at ZendCon. (See you there?)
• I enjoyed the Telectroscope, despite not managing to convince Matt, Lorna, or anyone else to meet up on the London side. Luckily, I managed to convince a few people that it was real, so that was fun. It was conveniently located a few steps away from OmniTI NY, and I took some photos while it was here.
• The Euro Cup started.
• My blog was featured in Smashing Magazine again, this time for the pretty blockquote and note styles Jon designed.
• Motivated by Andrei, I started the hundred push-ups challenge. This commitment also persuaded me check my various style guides to see whether it’s pushup, push up, or push-up. News spread quickly on Twitter, and there is now a group of PHPers all taking part in the challenge.
• Theo was mentioned on Radar again for his detailed post on Internet traffic spikes.
• I got to witness a colleague’s first encounter with T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, which I enjoyed far too much.

I’ll leave you with the PHP anthem from Rasmus. If you’re a Mac user, just enter the following in the terminal:

say -v Good oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ouchie

If you’re not a Mac user, Terry has an MP3.

Sing it with me…

Posted Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:44:02 GMT in Chris Shiflett’s Blog

VMware and Inspur announced an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement to further accelerate the adoption of VMware virtualization in China. Inspur is selling, distributing and supporting VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, on Inspur server systems. The two companies will collaborate on market development, product sales, professional training and customer acquisition as well as technical services. The relationship enables both companies to develop virtualization solutions that effectively meet China’s market demands, leveraging the performance and scalability of Inspur servers with VMware virtualization to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve business continuity, strengthen security and reduce energy consumption.

VMware announced that the top universities from the Times-QS World University Rankings have deployed VMware virtualization solutions to reduce capital and operating costs, increase application and system uptime, decrease power consumption and improve disaster preparedness. Harvard, which is number one on the list of 100, and Cambridge, which is tied for the second spot, head the list of prestigious schools that have deployed VMware solutions.

Continuing to fulfill and expand the Cisco Data Center 3.0 initiative, Cisco announced new products and professional services that will help customers virtualize data centers for greater operational and energy efficiency. The new offerings make the virtual network a highly efficient platform for delivering data center services-accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.

Netuitive announced new virtualization management capabilities in its Netuitive Service Analyzer product. Netuitive Service Analyzer is a self-learning correlation software for managing performance of enterprise applications across mixed physical and virtual environments. Netuitive Service Analyzer has already earned acclaim for providing the only self-learning and continuously adaptive software for automating BSM. With new capabilities announced, customers can manage the performance of enterprise applications end-to-end, across distributed servers, databases and network systems - that are both physical and virtual.

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions, has announced that vSMP Foundation Standalone, its patent-pending virtualization software, is now available for the IBM BladeCenter HS21 XM blade server. In conjunction with IBM BladeCenter H, ScaleMP claims to enable the aggregation of up to 14 dual-processor blades within an integrated chassis to create a single virtual symmetric multiprocessor (SMP). Customers are now able to aggregate up to 112 Intel Xeon processing cores and up to 448GB of shared memory.

QLogic announced that QLogic and Microsoft achieved performance results that demonstrate near-native transaction performance for a virtualized computing environment. The companies tested storage area network (SAN)-attached, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines and achieved I/O performance that closely matches the 200,000 IOs per second performance native with QLogic 8Gb adapters and Windows Server 2008. By comparison, I/O performance on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008, was at least 90 percent and as much as 97 percent of the native I/O performance across a data range for enterprise applications.

Microsoft managed to get its VMware-spooking Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization technology, out the door Thursday, which is something of an accomplishment considering that by Microsoft’s clock the thing is weeks early, having not been expected until August sometime.

VKernel announced a partnership with Xcedex. Under the agreement, Xcedex is a VKernel Gold Partner that will resell VKernel’s Suite of Virtual Appliances for analyzing and monitoring capacity, implementing chargeback, and gaining cost visibility in VMware ESX environments to its growing customer base.