I'm sure my more diligent readers have noticed a lack of posting for two weeks. I'm back from a vacation with the family in St. Louis (visiting my brother-in-law). I had a great time, despite the insanely-long 15-hour drive from Canada to St. Louis across the midwest. I can't imagine doing that trip all the time like some long-haul truckers do.

So anyway, I'm taking some time next week to tweak the outline for my upcoming talk (it's only two months away) at php|works to figure out where (and more important what they will be) to put the coding examples designed to illustrate ideas from Rails and how they could apply to PHP.

My buddy Derek is enthused about his new job. I winced a bit when I saw him burning some bridges at his old work with his comments, but given the way he had been treated since I left the company I'm not surprised by it. Welcome back to the world of actually creating things, Derek. :)

I've been working on a stats reporting system at work with the Zend Framework and it's been going well. I'm right on schedule and expect to deliver a beta version for testing and comments by Wednesday of next week. I found that doing all the unit tests have also revealed some errors I wouldn't have thought to look for.

I'm also spending some time to day taking another stab at using Eclipse as my development environment. Despite the lack of a working SFTP plugin, I can see how the benefits outweigh the annoyance of not being able to copy the files to the server.

Besides, I've started using my iBook as my development environment more and more. Which is a good practice to get into, as I learn techniques for generating data sets for testing and making sure my code is portable across environments.