In an effort to reach as many of the PHP developers out there, the fine folks at Yahoo! have submitted this job information for a position in Sunnyvale, California:

Title: Yahoo Web Developer for Small Business
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Y! Small Business is looking for a self-motivated experienced Web Developer to join the Small Business engineering team. In this capacity, you will work closely with interaction designers, visual designers, user experience researchers, software engineers, and product managers. The ideal candidate possess a strong command of markup, PHP, CSS to level 2, JavaScript to version 1.5, practical knowledge and use of up to DOM2 methods and properties, cross-browser development techniques, browser degradation strategies, well-versed in code optimization and development patterns, accessibility 508 compliance guidelines, and experience with end-to-end high-quality development/testing. You will exercise innovation and influence in support of UI design and heuristics through your expertise in client development to enhance user experiences.

Experience working in Unix environments, CVS or source control, and bug tracking tools is highly desirable. The environment is fast-paced with numerous, user-centered, iterative design and development cycles. You will be responsible for creating proof-of-concepts/prototypes to production-level "best of breed" websites and applications. If you're interested, send an email over to teddi [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com for the complete details...

Mandy and I are getting ready for our Julebord party tonight - one of the things we are making is ice cream. Rather than buy ice cream from a store that is a mix of modified milk ingredients, carageenan gum and so on, I have worked up a very nice recipe that instead focuses on killing people the good, old-fashioned way - with fat and sugar (though I admit that the marshmallows are mostly artificial). The recipe has too much fat and incorporated air to allow large crystals of ice to form (so you get a smooth ice cream) and the marshmallows make it relatively easy to scoop once frozen. Ingredients:

• 250ml (1 cup) whipping cream
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) sweetened condensed milk
• 125 ml (1/2 cup) miniature marshmallows
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) Bailey's Irish Cream (optional)
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) chopped walnuts (optional)
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) chopped cherries (optional)

Preparation:

• Mix marshmallows into condensed milk. Let sit for an hour (this lets the marshmallows soften)
• Beat whipping cream into stiff peaks
• Beat in condensed milk/marshmallow mixture
• Beat in Bailey's (if adding)
• Mix in walnuts and cherries (if adding)
• Freeze in a covered container for four or more hours
• If you are in a rush, use a relatively flat container to speed the freezing process

Happy eating.

My friend Mitchell has a nice profile in the Economist with a great picture of her on the trapeze. For some reason I feel a sort odd, happy and lurching culture shock.

In one of his latest posts today, Mike Naberezny talks about how he optimized Zend Studio on his Mac OS X installation.

Recently, I purchased a Mac mini and started using it as my home computer. Overall, it is a pretty nice little machine but its 1.42 GHz G4 processor isn’t the fastest thing out there. On some larger applications, such as Zend Studio, it is a little sluggish. Fortunately, there are two things that you can do with Zend Studio to get an immediate performance increase.

The first of the two is simply changing an option for the time on code completion. The other, however, it a bit more detailed - it requires you to assign more memory to the application by going through some of the system folders...

Recently, I have been playing around with the rather excellent Basecamp. For a project management app, it provides a great mix of usability and features. I am even happy to pay a moderate fee to support a high-quality service that I don't have to worry about (though I admit I would prefer that it were Free Software). Unfortunately, unless it gains some features, I can't use it for my major projects. Anyone know of good Free Software/Open Source project that is similar? I have used Trac (which is excellent, but seems daunting for many users and needs further customization to be well-suited for PM) and many other Free/Open bug tracking systems.

Required Features (above and beyond Basecamp's current feature set)

• Data import and export (of all things, not just messages and comments)

Nice-to-have Features

• Revision history
• An API, so that I can automate boring tasks or things not provided by the GUI

So, lazyweb, whatcha got for me? :)

Early in 2005, one of the O'Reilly staff dropped me a line to see if I could skim through a draft chapter of a PHP book. I did and in the process gave the author a good text-lashing (mostly) over some relatively minor things. I usually behave more graciously, honest. So, it is now near the end of 2005 and a copy of PHP in a Nutshell has been dropped at my door. At a glance it looks quite good - accessible, friendly and useful. Nice work Paul! Sorry to have given you a few knocks at the start of the process.

There's This reminder today for all of those out there that would like to submit a paper for the upcoming php|tek conference - you only have 10 days left!

The Call for Papers period for php|tek, our spring conference, is rapidly coming to an end, but you still have time to submit your talk proposals.

We're looking for innovative ideas in areas of both theory of PHP development and hands-on sessions that focus on the hands-on aspects of PHP programming.

php|tek will take place between April 26 and 28, 2006, with a special pre-conference day of exclusive seminars on April 25th. As in previous years, attendees will be able to take advantage of several special deals, including a free subscription to php|architect and a chance to take the Zend PHP Certification exam free of charge (the fee for the exam will be sponsored by php|architect and Zend Technologies).

Even if you're not going to submit a paper for the conference, you can still make plans to attend! We'll let you know as soon as you can sign up!

On the Orcale Technology Network's site today, there's this look at working with Oracle to make PHP5 objects persistent.

Many developers have been won over by the elegance and efficiency of PHP5's implementation of object-orientation, and are equally drawn to the power and robustness of the world's foremost database, Oracle. However, taking the next logical step