Thank you for your letter. I laughed and nodded along as I read it, and I shared it with all the rest of my parent friends.

Thank you for babysitting! I understand those 3 hours seem like an eternity of suffering; the 3 hours of quiet you gave my wife and I were an eternity of bliss!

Thank you for understanding when we have to leave your party early to get our children home to bed.

Thank you for letting us decide what to do on the nights we have a babysitter!

Thank you for letting us take 3x as long to do everything.

Thank you for always coming to our house for dinner because it's child-proof.

Thank you for going out of your way to meet at a time and place that works around nap-time.

Thank you for talking to and playing with our kids when they are with us.

Thank you for holding our kid while we clean up the embarrassing mess they left at the restaurant.

Thank you for bringing them a new book for story-time.

Thank you for re-scheduling the work meeting because my kid is sick.

Thank you for taking over so many tasks for our social group.

Thank you for being the one to call me instead of waiting for me to call you.

And I'm sorry.

Sorry I don't answer your text messages.

Sorry I rarely ever go out anymore.

Sorry I forgot your birthday/graduation/other-special-occasion.

Sorry for being so up-tight about germs.

Sorry for having to stop our conversation abruptly to chase down my kid.

Sorry for being so chaotic.

Sorry for being jealous and envious of your frequent dinner dates, your vacations, your boredom, or that awesome open source project you built in your free time. (What's that?!)

But while I was writing this letter - which took a whole week, one or both of my daughters have:

said "Dada, I need a hug,"

asked to be held countless times,

giggled uncontrollably as I tickled her,

run up and down our hallway continuously for 10 minutes to tackle me,

been "Beast", "Belle," "Emily," "Nemo," "Bruce," or a dozen other characters,

hugged me with "legs and everything" when I asked,

squealed with delight as she rolled a bowling ball straight into a gutter,

learned to swim back to the edge of the pool by herself,

fallen asleep in my arms while I sing to her,

called out for me when thunder woke her up at night.

Thank you for sticking with me. I'm sorry our friendship has stretched so much, but I hope we'll have great times watching these two new little friends grow up with us.

Disclaimer: this post is totally my own opinion and does not reflect anything from SourceForge at all. that's why it's here on this blog.

I'm angry and want to shoot my mouth off - perfect opportunity for a long-lost blog.

We - i.e., SourceForge are getting some crap for blocking sanctioned countries from our site. That's fine - I'm actually ticked off about it too. And many people out there are making sound and solid comments about the action - not just the ones defending SourceForge; there are some good solid critical comments too.

But then you have people who say something like this:

Sourceforge, you suck! You suck so badly, I’ll hereby guarantee you that I’ll not only recommend *anybody* stay the heck away from you scumbags, I’ll actively let everybody know that you’re the scum of the earth. Shame on you! Shame!

With love from pyalot. Well pyalot, since we're all good to judge and criticize each other, let's get started ...

So you are Florian Bösch. Okay Florian, let's see here ... you've worked at Systor(?), Accenture, and DWS. Systor doesn't seem too keen on open-source?, nor does DWS. Ah, looks like Accenture has some good open source work; but what's this?! It's right alongside Microsoft and Oracle solutions?! OMFG! You are the scum of the earth for working with them! GRARRR!

Or, if I take an extra minute, I find you're actually a stand-up guy and developer and a good contributor to open-source!

Couple lessons here:

1. we're not anonymous on the internet anymore; I found all of this info on Florian starting from his sf.net user page
2. when we only look at a single facet of any news story or party, we get a very distorted view

I actually sympathize with Florian's sentiments - blocking access from countries goes against the FLOSS ideal. But at the end of the day, SourceForge is a US company under US law. And if we're not law experts we should probably speak our opinion quietly or not at all.

I want to share quotes I overhear at OSCON 2009. Most of these are from fellow SourceForgers ...

• I'm a fan of the minimalist beauty of the electronic device.
• Your API is not a beautiful fucking snowflake.
• I am as asymptotically close to clean as possible.
• You're going to be happy about not being happy.
• I'm German, we know how to deal with crowds.
• It doesn't matter, you eat it with rice and bread.
• I fucked the grower to get this shit.
• It's amazing what you can fit up your ass with a little practice.
• I don't like my balls soaked in sugar syrup.
• People shouldn't call each other tar pit.
• There's nothing you can think of with an olive that I haven't already video'd and sold on the internet.
• Is this the placenta thing?
• All eating human flesh stories start with, "I was going to med school."

Anderson tagged me, so I'll give this a try, though I'm going to have a tough time finding 7 other people who haven't been tagged already.

• I have a black belt in the hodge-podge kick-boxing-jujutsu-taekwondo-karate style of fighting they teach at Apollo's Karate.
• I have an identical twin brother, and 2 older brothers, one of whom is also a PHP developer.
• I am emerging Catholic.
• I brew my own beer.
• I love soccer. I try to play every weekend. Also, GO REDS!
• I can speak conversational Russian. I also speak a little French, a tiny bit of German and Portuguese, and I'm starting to learn Spanish. I'm only fluent in English though.
• I landed my job at SourceForge after I made an OSS project there. So go make one yourself!

I'll tag ...

• Matt Crouch - above-mentioned brother.
• Travis West - SourceForge colleague and long-time friend.
• Steven Osborn - developer from Vidoop who helped me run the Tulsa PHP User Group until he ditched us for Portland.
• Noah Everett - Tulsa PHP developer I met thru TPUG; he created and maintains twitpic.
• Brad Vernon - Tulsa PHP + Ruby developer I met thru TPUG.
• Vance Lucas - Another PHP developer here in Oklahoma. Met him at Tulsa Tech Fest 2008.
• Rafael Dohms - PHP developer in Brazil; he saved my ass at PHP Conference Brasil '08 when he found a DVI-VGA adapter for me to present my keynote.

So tagging it back to Brazil, from whence I was tagged.

Kiva.org is a remarkable organization in at least a couple ways - they employ micro-finance principles to aid entrepreneurs in developing countries, and they make excellent use of online technology to do so. We highlighted them in my International Aid and Development class in college.

I really like that they're using the Long Tail on both the lending side and the receiving side of micro-finance. I also like some of their cool web features - the portable badge above, and their use of Facebook Connect to syndicate their activity to Facebook.

One of our good friends gave us a $25 gift certificate to Kiva and I think it's one of the best gifts we've ever received. I've admired Kiva for a while but have never spent the time or effort to get involved with it; this small amount is really inspiring me to do more.

UPDATE: Wow. When I picked my loan recipient, Margaret, she had 0% of her requested loan. In the 1-2 hours it took to get this blog post up, she received 100% of it. Go Kiva! Go Margaret!

Here is, verbatim, text I received from the local homebrew shop about Oklahoma State Question 743. I think it's important for people to be informed when they vote, so I'm passing this along ... obviously it's biased pro-wine-makers...

Fellow Oklahoma winemakers and homebrewers,
Tomorrow's election will have a state question that has a huge impact on the Oklahoma winemaking industry. In 2001, voters in Oklahoma voted over 70% in favor of allowing Oklahoma wineries to sell directly to liquor stores and restaurants without going through a distributor. That change allowed the wine industry to go from a few wineries to over 50 in just a few short years. Small wineries were able to sell to the local liquor stores and restaurants without being at the mercy of a wholesaler that had little interest in distributing for every little winery that opened here in Oklahoma.

Last year this law was challenged by the distributors as unconstitutional and was overturned by the state supreme court. The reasoning was that it created an unfair advantage for Oklahoma wineries over out of state wineries who were still required to go through a distributor. It was a huge blow. Out of state wineries that distribute in Oklahoma would more than likely use a distributor regardless.

In order to make the law "fair", a new question will be on tomorrows ballet. It rewrites the law to include any winery that produces under 10,000 gallons a year. Oklahoma wineries are dying on the vine right now. With out this change many will not succeed. Please pass this on to friends so that we can ensure that this law passes.

The following is the actual question appearing on the ballot:
State Question 743 - In Short: Wineries from Oklahoma and outside the state of Oklahoma will be able to sell their wine directly to retail stores and restaurants if SQ 743 is approved. Currently, they can only do so through a wholesaler or at fairs/festivals.

Actual Ballot Text:

This measure amends Section 3 of Article 28 of the Constitution. It requires a customer to be twenty-one and physically present to purchase wine at a winery, festival or trade show. The measure changes the law to allow certain winemakers to sell directly to retail package stores and restaurants in Oklahoma. The change applies to winemakers who produce up to ten thousand gallons of wine a year. It applies to winemakers in state and out of state. Those winemakers may not also use a licensed wholesale distributor. They must sell their wine to every retail package store and restaurant in Oklahoma that wants to buy the wine. The sales must be on the same price basis. The sales must be without discrimination. Those winemakers must use their own leased or owned vehicles to distribute their wine. They may not use common or private carriers. If any part of this measure is found to be unconstitutional, no winemaker could sell wine directly to retail package stores or restaurants in Oklahoma.

Dang! I wish I had this quote when I was making my REST slides for Tulsa Tech Fest. It's perfect!

I think most people just make the mistake that it should be simple to design simple things. In reality, the effort required to design something is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the result.
-Roy Fielding

The man himself. Priceless. Goes along great with the one I did use:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupry

Alright, so invoking Rasmus in the title is a bit provocative, but I stumbled on an interesting talk of his; showing performance benchmarks for a number of popular php frameworks. The first portion of the talk is exactly what he presented @ OSCON, but the second half looks to be raw performance numbers. It looks like there are a couple specific, but easy, performance tweaks that he granted to certain frameworks, and I like seeing the data so much I thought I could try my hand at distilling it into Google Docs charts.

It's interesting that some tulsaphp guys and were recently talking about Zend had to be the slowest of all the frameworks, but apparently not so! That honor goes to CakePHP?