I'm still catching up but now that I've hit the stride for the music portion (see http://h0key.net), I can catch up a bit in the morning. Day 4 for the Interactive portion of the conference saw myself hit up a PHP themed workshop, a couple of mobile web talks, and some interesting thoughts on authentication and privacy on the web. All in all it was fairly fun, even so some the of night time stuff was a little light.

First up I hit up a workshop about BigData and PHP. Some of the luminaries of the talk included the Mozilla lady that wrote the PHP and MySQL Web Development book I own. The focus for the talk regarded strategies to employ when dealing with BigData. BigData are either large chunks of data, large amount of miniscule data, or tons of processing for data in a short amount of time. The CAP theory made its presence known as well.

The next couple of talks I'll group together. In Mobile Opportunites for the Entrepeneurs in 2011 talked about how developers can build more useful tools for mobile technology. The Future of Mobile Gaming/Entertainment had the Angry Birds guy there talking about how awesome the game was and how it was a crap shoot to begin with. He also stated that mobile gaming needed to be taken seriously, with his game getting almost 2% of the total yearly US viewing average compared to television. Lastly, it was Designing for Mobile Web and it had another Sencha Touch representative there. I'm going to use Sencha Touch with PhoneGap real, real soon.

The last talk of the day was fantastic. OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices was more than what I expected. The speaker went though the session pointing out some historical and current issues with authentication and privacy surrounding it. The gist of the talk was, you need to be conservative with the data that you collect so you don't make it feel creepy. Also, please make the login process as simple as possible.

The night time was alright. My girlfriend and I hit up the Wired Happy Hour, which I won a lot of schwag at last year. Unfortunately I didn't win anything this time but I did enjoy Texas' own Lone Star beer. After that, it was time to go the GDGT party and I have to say it kind of stunk. The schwag was drool-worthy and I did get a chance to play with the Motorola Zoom, the line was terrible and inside was too packed for music. So after that, we just hot-footed it to Zen Steakhouse for some tasty Japanese fair.

So that's the quick run down for day 4. I purposefully did not go into detail because I will be talking about each topic on its own after I recover. In the meantime, I've got one more Interactive day to gush about. Look for that tomorrow. Now on to some Irish craziness!

Before I rolled out the relaunch, I spent a good month trying to figure out the right kind of development environment for tools the I had available.  I have three laptops but all of the batteries are toast and the motherboard on one of them has gone the way of the dodo.  I convinced myself to develop exclusively off of a big ole Western Digital 80 GB Passport USB external drive.  First step done.  After doing some research I decided on XAMMP to drive my environment.  It was nice but there were some issues.

My real focus for this development environment setup was to be able to plug in the hard drive and code directly off of it.  I work off of multiple platforms at home and at the office.  Almost all of the apps do not have a single application to launch.  I already run some portable apps that support clients in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors, like KeePass.  XAMMP advertised clients for each platform so I decided to give it a try.

XAMMP is a fully integrated web application development server.  The purpose of XAMMP is to roll out a fully workable, out of the box *AMP stack.  The packages include an Apache2 server, PHP version 4 or 5, MySQL 5, and a torrent of management utilities and open soruce libraries/modules.  There are some differences between platforms for the package set, however.  The beauty behind it is that you can pick and choose what you want and start work within minutes.

At first, I wanted to setup all of the platform packages on the flash drive.  Due to the desire for cleanliness on the drive, however, I tried to install the software locally on all of my workstations.  Most of my time is spent on these machines anyway.  Linux was the easiest to turn out, mainly because it just dropped everything into the '/opt' directory.  I could change the doc and database links and move forward from there.  Windows was also a snap as I could modify configuration and turn services on and off with the included XAMMP control panel.  The Mac OS X client was not so easy.

The installer package for the Mac does not allow for choice.  It scans you computer to see if it's okay to run on and then drops it straight to the Applications folder.  The folder it installs to is not entirely encapsulated.  When the configuration points to the database files on the flash drive,  the service will crash upon startup.  I've already been exposed to issues on lock file management on Mac OS X Server, and the workaround didn't work for this issue.  The Apple puts the lock file in a directory other than the MySQL default setup.  When I symbolically linked the lock file, the database would start up.  This was not working with XAMMP.

After spending some small time here and there for about two weeks on it, I ended up just letting it go.  Attempts to find out on their forums page led me nowhere.  Also in my research on this topic, I discovered a Portable Apps version of Xammp but it is Windows only.  Not much help there.  Maybe one day the devs on the project will look for better portable support.  Until then, I'm focusing on version management and working off my lil server in my apartment.

I'm still coming to terms with getting distracted on small setup roadblocks.  I really didn't need to waste the time figuring this out when what I really needed to do was to turn out this blog and other projects.  Struggling with Xammp taught me that sometimes the perfect environment will trickle down from actually working on things first rather than focusing on a perfect setup for work that hasn't started yet.  Plus it's alot more fun when you actually have projects in progress instead of dreaming of working on projects.