So I would seriously love to, as I know many folks are doing, switch away from paying for cable and just start using Internet based video instead. The problem is, that while there are lots of good options out there, nothing seems to just be the ’solution’ that handles it all. The current landscape has:

Boxee

A good looking solution to get all sorts of content, with the drawback of needing to dedicate a machine to it. But wait, Hulu/Boxee have been fighting and you can’t get Hulu on it, which cuts out a hunk of the major networks. That bites. Now Hulu has released it’s own standalone player. So you could install both on a machine. But you’d be left with an awkward need to switch between applications (w/ a remote control). Plus it’s primarily all ‘grownup’ content that is provided, not much, if anything, for my son.

Xbox + PlayOn + Netflix

I have an Xbox already, and I can stream Netflix to it, done deal. That’s nice. But that’s not current/new shows, and it’s missing lots of ‘extraneous’ content. Much of that can be solved via software calledd PlayOn, that will do real-time transcoding and stream content from all sorts of online sources (including Hulu) to the Xbox. There are a couple of drawbacks however. First of all I’m going to need a dedicated Windows box to pull this off. And it needs to be a fairly beefy one to handle the realtime transcoding. Secondly, the interface is a little ‘poor’, because they can’t put a custom application on the Xbox itself, so you browse it through the media browser, which is very similar to just browsing directory structures. Directory structures with LOTS of files in them. The biggest drawbacks that I see however, are that it doesn’t do HD video (yet, although even if they do allow it, it would need a massively powerful machine to handle it), and it has a smaller selection of sources, which doesn’t include any ‘kid’ shows (PBS, Sprout, etc) for my son. Now that being said, the Xbox Marketplace itself has lots of kid content, if you are willing to pay for it – Though primarily the ‘fun’ content (Scooby Doo) vs the educational (Sesame Street), though a few educational ones exist (Caillou).

Apple TV

Of course there is the Apple TV solution. Pay Apple a few hundred, walk away with a box meant ot just be hooked up and run with. This is actually a fairly compelling option, especially because it not only has tons of movies and TV shows available. But it’s one of the few options that is HEAVY on the kid content as well. The main problem that I have here, is that it’s a complete mental change. All the content costs money. $2 a show or more. Realistically, it’s duplicating the functionality I already have available via the Xbox Marketplace if I wanted to go down that route, Just w/ a broader selection of shows than Xbox. It also comes with the benefit that anything purchased this way could also be transferred to the various iPhones and iPods that are hanging around my house. Plus the box to support this is much cheaper than a powerful enough box to handle PlayOn. But again, going this route means planning on paying for each piece of content. Though maybe that would be good and convince us to watch less TV. But it does mean less chance of using TV as ‘background’ which I often do while working on projects.

Conclusions

In the end, at least at the moment, none of the solutions are perfect, and keep me paying a large amount of money for my cable. Of course part of that is because I’m paying for various HD packages to get the best quality shows, and few of the online options even come close to that at the moment.

So what am I to do? It seems the simplest and most complete solution for me at the moment, is to use the Xbox + Netflix that I’ve already been doing, and just also add PlayOn into the mix to get streaming ‘current’ video. This still requires the purchase of a good quality transcoder box, which I don’t have at the moment. Plus it means still needing to find good solutions for educational shows for my son. But it would allow a major drop in my cable bill. I just wish that instead there was a way to natively stream Hulu and similar things to the Xbox, so that I didn’t need to use the PlayOn transcoding (and so that I could get them in HD)

Though the one benefit of going Apple TV, would be owning the shows in a ‘collectable’ format that can be transferred around, saved, replayed, etc. Anything I might buy on the Xbox Marketplace, is stuck on my Xbox

I’m going to be doing a fair bit of traveling in the near future, and wanted to point out a few stops along the way:

PHP|tek Conference

May 19 – 22 — Chicago
I’ll be presenting two talks:  Highly Scalable Web Applications and The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development.  I also plan on participating in the Hack-a-thon that is being held one evening, for people to sit down and together work on enhancements to various Open Source projects, such as Zend Framework or Phergie.

Dutch PHP Conference

June 11 – 13 — Amsterdam
At DPC I’ll be giving the same talk as at PHP|tek: Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications, plus a new talk: Code & Release Management.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing a few of you there!

Ok, someone needs to explain this to me. It makes no sense how expensive digital movie rentals are. It truly boggles my mind. I have a number of ways to rent them, and they are all expensive, a quick sampling of ‘recent releases’ gives:

iTunes: $2.99 – $3.99
Xbox Live: $4.00 – $5.00
Comcast onDemand: $4.99 – $5.99

Given that on all those you are just downloading and/or streaming it, there is no physical medium, etc. Why is it so expensive?

Especially when I can go to a Redbox machine at any number of stores near me locally, and pay $1 to get a physical DVD rental.

That’s right, all these other companies are charging $3 to $6 to rent a movie electronically, but Redbox someone manages to do it for $1, while handling physical disks, having to replace them as they wear out, sending people out to restock with new movies, pay for and maintain a rather complicated machine, and give kickbacks to the store they sit in.

Something is very wrong with this picture. By comparison alone, electronic rentals should be at MOST $0.99, and possibly a fair bit less.  Is there some part of the big picture I’m missing here?  I’d love to know.

So I sit here tonight, doing some preparations to start my job at Zend tomorrow morning.  I took my family away to a resort for the weekend primarily as a present to my wife for her birthday.  Though it also served as a celebration & transition from one job to another.  Quite enjoyable even if we both left with neck/back aches because of the hard beds, and we had our gas siphoned off overnight.

I’m looking forward to jumping into the new job tomorrow.

To have some content in this blog post, I did want to point out a few new pieces of software I recently started using, somewhat in expection of needs of the new position.  One is EventBox, which seems to be a great Mac application that pulls data from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others and organizes them together.   The second is that I wanted a more organized way for keeping notes, after a few suggestions from friends (such as evernote and VoodooPad) I opted for simply using a local installation of DokuWiki.  Primarily to stick to my PHP/Web roots, and I liked the idea that the notes were just stored as plain text files for ultimate portability.

Well, this seems to be the worst kept secret in the PHP community by the mumblings that have been going on.  So I think it’s time to confirm it.

I’ve been offered a position at Zend, and accepted it.  The official (lengthy) job title is Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief.  The short form to many people would be:  “The job formerly held by Cal Evans“

I’m extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Zend and to have the focus of my daily job to be working with the PHP community which I dearly love.  I know that any attempt to fill Cal’s shoes will be met with failure, so I hope instead to come up with my own twist on the position and to give it my best.

The job is one that wears many hats, but can be very roughly boiled down to:  40% engaging with the community, 30% writing & soliciting articles for DevZone, 10% coding, 10% podcasting, and 10% communicating information back to Zend from the community.

My first day at Zend will be January 19th.  I’m sorry to leave TravelPod behind as they are some great people; however, they understand this position is a once in a lifetime opportunity and that I don’t want miss it.

So it seems I’m not immune to internet/blog meme’s, and there is currently a game of “tag you’re it” going on in the PHP community.  People are stating seven interesting or obscure facts about themselves, then tagging seven different people to do the same.  Well, I was jointly tagged by both Wez Furlong and Ben Ramsey … so I guess I better not disappoint, and keep the game alive:

So seven things about me:

1. I’m extremely active in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA for short).  It’s a medieval reenactment organization that focuses on pre-1600 life.  In the SCA I’m known as Lord Siegfried Sebastian Faust and I dress in the form of a 16th century Landsknecht (German mercenary).  I have many sub-hobbies inside of the SCA, including full contact sword fighting, archery and brewing (beers, wines, meads & ciders).  I also volunteer a fair bit of my time to helping run the organization to that others can enjoy it as much as I do.
2. While many folks know that I’m a beer aficionado, what’s interesting is that I didn’t get into beer until later in life.  My first exposure to beer was back in college when I was handed some VERY cheap beer.  Generic store brand, 25 cents a can.  It was horrible, and I never wanted to touch the stuff again.   Every couple of years, I’d try something that someone handed me, and it would end the same way.  Until one fateful Christmas many years after I had graduated college.  My company at the time did a Yankee Swap, and I ended up with a Guinness & Bass Black & Tan kit, with beer, glasses, and the magical spoon.  I decided that since I got it, I was going to enjoy it.  I sat down one evening to make myself a Black & Tan.  I tentatively took a sip, and it was good!  I then sampled each beer separately, and found that I adored Guinness.  And therefore, my love of good beer (especially Stouts & Porters) was born.
3. I have a full woodworking shop in my basement that I use to make medieval replica crossbows, or whatever else I feel like making (such as my poker table)
4. I grew up with my wife.  We met in kindergarten where I didn’t like her because we lined up by height to go anywhere, and she was the only person in class taller than me.  In 8th grade I wrote a letter asking her to a dance but never delivered it.  Then in High School we ‘traded rings’ on a football game band trip (we were both in the marching band).  We then dated all through High School and college, and got married after graduating college.
5. My very first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a (just like Marco), and I loved writing ‘adventure’ games for it.  I later upgraded to an Apple ][c and was an Apple fanboy until the early Macintosh line came out.   Now many years later, and thanks to OS/X, I’ve returned back to Apple fanboy-dom
6. I’m extremely addicted to Video Games and usually play a little every night after both son & wife are in bed.  I’ve been playing ever since I was 3 years old and we got a Sears Pong Machine.  I even won a Doom Tournament back in college (and I had a failed attempt at becoming a professional gamer at one point, turns out that while I might have been good, other people were GOOD).  I currently have sitting in my house an Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Gamecube, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo NES, and an Atari 2600.  I also admit to caring a bit too much about my Xbox 360 Gamer Score.
7. While the current roundness of my belly doesn’t show it, growing up I had an affinity for sports.  I played baseball & basketball for my school teams as well as golf.  I was a 4 year Letterman in Varsity Golf in High School & Captain of the Golf Team.

so now, I have to tag 7 people that I want to see make a Seven Things writeup myself, So many people have already been tagged that it’s up to me to find some PHP diamonds in the rough … so in no particular order:

• Stephane Daury – @stephdau – PHP Geek who will probably mention skateboarding
• Owen Byrne – @owenbyrne – Digg coder #1 who has moved onto other things (including photography)
• Luke Welling – @lukewelling – Who will regale us of horses in his Austrailian accent.
• Andrei Zmievski – @a – We must hear from the infamous White Russian!
• Dylan Richard – @detour1999 – Coder extrordinaire for Threadless, and fellow guy who understands the need for truly 2X t-shirts.
• Harper Reed – @harper – Dylan’s boss, ’nuff said
  
• Lauren Cooney – @lcooney – MSFT-ite who is working hard to embrance the PHP community there.
  

and the rules of this ‘game’ for those that I have tagged:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Also, they are trying to keep track of all this this madness over at PHPDeveloper.org, so check there for a list of who has done it, and who is slacking.

Today’s blog post brought to you by PHPAdvent    I was asked to contribute, and so did, polishing off a post I had planned for my own blog and submitting it to PHPAdvent instead.

It’s all about commenting & documenting your code, and you should go read it at the PHPAdvent website.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, a few months ago I went through the process of finding a new job.  That of course included a number of interviews.  Which got ‘interviewing’ on my mind and encouraged me to write this article.  Now, months later, I finally got around to it.

I’ve interviewed my fair share of programmers over the years, and I find personally that how you interview a ‘junior’ versus ‘intermediate’ versus a ’senior’ programmer needs to change.  Specifically in regards to one topic.

What’s that topic?   It’s giving a coding test (as well as just whether you ask coding questions in the interview)

I personally find that asking a coding test of junior programmers is a GREAT tool for helping to evaluate them.  Typically just a very simple test, a basic CRUD application.   Looking at what they create not only gives you insight into how they think and code (did they do MVC?  a simple single .php file?  handle web security? etc).  It also gives you a great starting point to begin discussions with them in person, asking them about why they did (or didn’t) do certain things.

It’s also worthwhile to go into great depth with junior folks just to make sure that they understand some basics of programming.  Recursion?  Object Oriented? etc.

That starts changing somewhat when you start interviewing folks who are more at an intermediate level.  At the that level, asking for the coding test is fine, but I like to offer for them to instead just provide some code they’ve written before if they wish.  From looking at their code, you may come up with a few directions that you want to guide the discussion with them in an interview to understand certain parts of their knowledge.

This completely switches over in my mind when it comes to interviewing a senior person.  Someone who is ’senior enough’ (use your own definition) should have their experience speak for them enough that there is no reason to ask for a code sample, let alone giving them a coding test.  Typically looking at their experience and asking them a number of probing questions about their experience should rapidly inform you if they know what they are talking about.

Now that’s not to say, that if after doing an initial interview, if something seems fishy, or if you are concerned about their experience, then go ahead and ask for a sample/test after the fact to dig deeper.

But my point is this, when interviewing for senior candidates, you should be spending time researching their experience, their history, what they’ve publicly done, presentations/articles/etc they’ve done and more.   You should take the effort to learn enough about the candidate that it should make most questions about their ‘coding skills’ a moot point, and leave you instead asking more about bigger picture questions, and to see how well they fit within your team.

Also I highly suggest that any coding test you give be a ‘take home’ test.   Let them take their time to do the problem in their own environment.   Asking someone to do a live coding test in front of you is asking for failure.  Are you going to be standing over them watching their every keystroke when they are working for you?  no?  Then why would you test them in that environment?  It doesn’t give a good indication at all as to how well they code (and the style in which they code) when given the freedom to do so.

UPDATE: I have left the original blog post intact below, but I wanted to make a clarification on my position here, as many conversations that I have had with people about this blog post (my most controversial) have led me to believe that many people who read this misunderstand my point.  I’ll take the blame on not being clear enough.

To summarize as quickly as possible, let me say that certifications are certainly useful personal gauges to see if you can pass the test or not (especially when offered free, I hold a number of BrainBench certifications because of that – note that they are not listed on my resume), I also understand that many companies do require or desire them, especially in the government sector.  That’s fine.

My primary point was that I personally do not feel that a certification is a good indicator of “How skilled of a programmer is this person”, but that experience & having a conversation with the person dictates that.  So yes, if I have a pile of 200 resumes in front of me, and I need to quickly narrow it down to 10 to call first, those that prominently display their certifications instead of letting their experience stand out, tend to get sorted into the ’second rung’ category.  And that simply applies for the companies I’ve worked for, the job descriptions that we had, and the types of positions & work we were doing.  Everyone should always try to tailor their resumes to the specific job that they are applying for.

The original article follows in it’s entirety:

Specifically, that when I have a pile of resumes in front of me, and I’m giving them an initial pass to sort them apart, I take any that mention their programming certifications, and sort them to the bottom.

Why?  Simply put, I find that programming certifications are essentially useless.  More to the point, I find that typically the people who list certifications on their resume as part of their qualification for the job, are obviously not qualified.  Afterall, had they been qualified in the first place, why would they need a certification to prove it to me?  Their experience should speak for itself, and the interview should weed out anyone with fake experience.

Some have argued that I shouldn’t hold certifications against people, and I have to point out, that I don’t.  I only hold it against the person, if it’s listed on their resume, specifically if listed as part of their qualifications.  IMO, that all comes down to tailoring your resume for the job you are applying to.  If you are applying to a ‘big corporate entity’/'government’/etc, then sure, perhaps you need to include it because you know they are looking for it.   But that’s not the types of places I have worked for.  If you are applying to a ‘cool place that understands technology & programming’, then you should leave those certs off of your resume entirely.

So what is it that’s so wrong with the certifications in the first place?   Simply put, they prove nothing to me.  They only prove that you could cram and pass a multiple choice test.  I understand and am all for certification programs in other fields than programming.  Especially fields where what is being done must follow certain guidelines (civil engineering), or in general is much more of an exact science than an art (electrical wiring).

But the problem is, that programming at it’s core, is an art.  It’s figuring out ways to work around issues.  It’s finding bugs when the website is down.  It’s understanding the ‘right or wrong’ ways to write a section of code, while also understanding that there are a dozen right ways, and 3 dozen wrong.  None of that, does a certification test.

There is also the fact that a certification doesn’t take place in a programmer’s environment.  When a programmer is at work they have their dev machine which is configured just how they like it.  They have reference materials handy.  They have a compiler/interpreter to tell them when they messed up.

Knowing in the blink of an eye what the order of parameters to explode() are, doesn’t measure your ability as a programmer, at all.

And worse, is the fact that quite often the fact you ‘passed’ a certification doesn’t even mean you did all that well on a test.  Passing can involve much failing.  See the graphic that I have posted with this story, it’s a screenshot from a practice test for the Zend Certification exam for PHP.  Note that the person who took the test failed Security, Database, Design, Arrays, and Basic Language skills.

Yet, they passed the overall test, and would be a ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer).  This goes to the point, just because someone passed just enough questions on a certification exam to pass it … doesn’t mean that they are a good programmer or even that they know some of the most basic skills needed to become a good programmer.

It just means they were able to pass a test (which they may have taken many times before they did)

Well I realized today that I haven’t blogged since I accepted my new job at TravelPod.  (Even though I have 7 blog posts hanging back in draft form).  So I decided to break the silence.

So far, the job is excellent, challenging, and keeping me very busy.  Of course, I’ve had my share of other things to keep me busy as well, namely travel.

I just returned from ZendCon 08, which, as always, upholds a high level of quality.  It’s one of the best PHP conferences every year.   This year I gave two presentations, my standard “High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques“, and a brand new one titled: “The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development“.  Both were well received and the Knight Rider one was standing room only.  That may have been due to all the Knight Rider clips I was showing during the talk

I currently don’t have any future conferences that I’m committed to yet, though there are a number that I’m considering.  I do know that I’ll be making some trips to Ottawa (to visit TravelPod) and Boston (to visit TripAdvisor).

Oh, and I was invited to attend a Microsoft PHP Summit in Redmond in November and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’ll get to chat with MSFT and other PHP notables about things that the PHP community could use (in general, and from MSFT).  As well as hear what things MSFT may have planned.