i'm in ur inboxes, announcin ur events!
Calling all web developers:
Applying Good Practice to a Misused Language ============================================
Date: Wednesday 15th November Time: 20.00 Place: Comlab, room 051
Over the past few years, PHP has become the tool of choice for aspiring web developers everywhere — picked up and misused by millions. As a language that is easy to get started with, through examples and code snippets across the web, it is cut and pasted to death, leaving a legacy of unreadability and insecurity and a reputation as a 'bad' language.
David and Katherine Goodwin of Pale Purple[0] will discuss some of the pitfalls of PHP development and introduce a range of tools and techniques that can be used to transform a lacklustre PHP amateur into a polished professional. It will focus mainly on applying good design and testing to projects, and introduce some of the popular tools that will help developers to achieve clean, secure, maintainable code.
[0] http://www.palepurple.co.uk/
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Computing_Laboratory has some information about Comlab (in case you're not familiar with it). There is a door into the basement to the left of the door into the main reception, which we will be using.
This talk is fresh from LinuxWorld Expo a few weeks ago (where Katherine was also a judge at the 2006 Linux Awards[1]). Should be enlightening!
[1] http://www.linuxawards.co.uk/
The true date of Murray Stokely ===============================
Last time I mailed you all I said:
Also, while I'm here, Murray Stokely (of Google)'s talk in 7th week has been moved from Friday 24th to Wednesday 22nd.
This is, in fact, a lie. It was originally on Wednesday 22nd, and is now on Friday 24th. That'll teach me to write emails in a hurry in a coffee shop without actually reading what I've been told.
Pizza for breakfast ===================
Before, during and after Andy Stanford-Clark's talk, people were performing calculations on pizza. Suppose you have a θ-degree sector of pizza (which I believe is colloquially known as a "slice") and wish to share it evenly between two people. The sensible thing to do is of course to bisect the angle, but we don't care. Where should you slice the pizza horizontally to create two pieces of equal area?
Correct answers from people who weren't at the talk get a copy of Linux Magazine pidged to them! I hope you don't get stuck at calculating the area of a triangle like I did...
Enough. Oh, and if you didn't understand my greeting, you could read http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/11/i_am_in_thy_library_.html and be enlightened. I never get bored of photos of cats.
wjt -- Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President http://www.ox.compsoc.net/