GD imagettftext broken on Leopard/mac ports

Spent the better part of the morning battling PHP/GD. I needed to overlay text on an image, something I can recall doing in the past without issue. Not this morning though. Everytime the code got to 'imagettftext' it would result in a WSOD. After much troubleshooting and Google'ng I found this mention in the PHP bug db which then pointed to the root of the cause: The macports 'freetype' lib. The solution for fixing that is here.

hope this helps others

Augmenting Web Services with SMS and XMPP

This talk was centered around adding channels of communication such as SMS and XMPP to existing HTTP web services.
A project called Extapi, is a small web app that manages this coordination between multiple channels and services.
here are the slides for my presentation given on November 14th 2008 at PHP|Works

AT PHP Works

In Atlanta for the php|works conference.
Listening to the Keynote from Kevin Dangoor (founder of turbo gears). He's discussing successfully fostering open source projects.
Looking forward to meeting new folks with PHP and/or Python backgrounds