Last week, a friend of mine asked me if I was posting under Cambrian House under an alias on Tech Crunch. I said no, and didn’t pay it much thought. It wasn’t until I saw this video that I did some digging on TC and found an article that put all the pieces together for me.

It’s no secret that I used to work at Cambrian House. About a year ago now a bunch of us were gathered into a room and laid off - I don’t have any compunctions about saying this because it’s pretty common knowledge; they even admit it in the video. But when I joined CH in the early days, the idea I was introduced to sold me. Like Gord, I wanted to change the world. I watched the vision shift and mutate and evolve so quickly that I was left with my head spinning.

Near the end of my reign at Cambrian House, I didn’t see anything to really get behind. Nothing to sink my teeth into - nothing to champion. However, Let me make one thing perfectly crystal clear. Despite having naught to champion, my opinion of Cambrian House and the people therein has been a positive one. I’m not one of the guys dragging the name or the idea through the mud. Period.

[/end obligatory statement]

Enter VenCorps.

Now, this is something that I can believe in. Granted I don’t know much about it but what I do know is something like this has been so lacking in the startup space I’ve oft considered building something like it myself. This is something that I, as a startup founder myself, can sink my teeth into. Something I can emotionally and personally invest in.

Good on ya CH. Good on ya.

Here’s what I did in the past month:

- Built 5 websites for various clients, of varying complexities
- Networked & started some relationships
- Initiated a longer term consulting contract
- Made some serious progress on my startups application
- Renamed “Karmba” to “Dragonfly”

While some of it was a struggle, I’m very happy with how things panned out, proving that maybe, just maybe, I have something here.

Well, I’m a little behind the game as I’m just hearing this now. But yes kids, we’ve got confirmation the iPhone is coming to Canada.

Finally.

Probably not till June though, when the 3G iPhone is anticipated, but at least now, yes, for sure it is coming. No more pranks or speculation.

Now… All I have to say is this:

It’s about damned time.

There were a lot of topics discussed, including the future of Zend Framework, current challenges, and addressed concerns. They did let us know (I don’t subscribe to the Zend newsletter so I didn’t know this) that ZF has crossed the five million download mark, a jaw dropping number, as well as whispered some confirmation about integration with a third party javascript library. While I can postulate that the library will be either Dojo or jQuery (Dojo is used by a couple in the ZF team, and jQuery has critical mass), they pointed out (and re-iterated) that they don’t want to lock the community into one solution. If I want to use mooTools, YUI, etc, I’ll be able to. Cool.

Here’s what I got out of the webinar:

Be “just a wee bit more” Involved
There needs to be more visibility from the entire ZF team. Guys, let’s be honest, the person getting the most visibility right now is Matthew, and while I think he’s a splendid lad, there are more of you - I’m not saying that I don’t hear from Wil or Ralph or Darby, but I’d like to see more articles from you folks on DevZone and your particular blogs.

Go For More Community Involvement
There were a bunch of ideas tossed around, from building demo apps, open sourcing the code of the framework site (which isn’t going to happen any time soon, but they haven’t ruled it out) to having guest bloggers. Yes Wil, I will volunteer if needed =P. The problem that I addressed when I piped up is that projects like zfforums.com, despite having good intentions, don’t have the critical mass of users to make me prefer them to the mailing lists. And I hate email.

CLI Tools, With More On The Horizon
The challenge of developing CLI tools was addressed, and I translated this as “We’re working on it”. I wouldn’t mind a few code generation tools guys, that’s all I ask for. Creating all those blasted folders and files when I get a new project is sooo tedious.

The Future Is Bright and Shiny!
With talk about 2.0 (or 3.0 and 4.0, depending on who’s wise-cracks you listen to), Zend Framework Certification and lots of new code stuff - like Zend Framework Extras and scaffolding - the future looks bright indeed for the Zend Framework. There’s even talk about generating revenue!

Suffice it to say that I’ll be sticking with ZF, and blogging about it, for the foreseeable future.

There’s also more feedback via Joshteam’s Weblog.

Dude I just wanted to let you know I am extremely impressed with your attention to detail with the cut you did for me…

I was particularly fond of this line:

You do world-class work.

As middleman contractors, we enjoy a life of anonymity and our work is very commonly taken for granted. Every once and a while, it’s nice to learn that our work is appreciated.

If you’re at all familiar with pcntl this is for you. Pcntl allows you to control processes from within PHP (essentially allowing you to run threaded PHP code; fake “real” threading, at least). Zend_Console_Process is a Zend style interface to create threaded PHP applications in a usable manner.

If you take a gander at Ben’s first example, you’ll see the advantages:

start(); 
 
$thread2 = new ThreadingTest(); 
$thread2->start(); 
 
while ($thread1->isRunning() && $thread2->isRunning()) { 
    sleep(1); 
} 
 
echo 'All threads completed';

Now, there’s been some interesting discussion on the mailing list already. For instance:

… Calling this “Threading” is a major misnomer. Threading would imply it has access to the same address space and descriptor table. That is not the case if this uses fork…

-Michael

Good point; so don’t take anything you read on the ZF site (actually, anywhere on the internet for that matter) as divine writ.

Like I said in my last post, it’s all about choosing the right technology. If you need to resize a couple dozen images, this will do you fine. If you need to build a video trans-coding server that can handle hundreds of videos at a time, well… perhaps it is time to choose a different language to do your heavy lifting. The fact that it doesn’t work on windows is a large hit to the adoption of Zend_Console_Process, but in my humble opinion, it is the most interesting proposal to come into review status since Zend_Service_Amazon_S3.

One of the biggest problems I have with most web applications is file uploads. As a developer, I rarely need to upload anything larger than, say, 100MB - this covers a lot of code files, libraries and so forth. Generally, in an OOP world, if a file is larger than a couple megabytes you’re probably doing something wrong anyways.

But, I’m a developer. I work with people on a daily basis that aren’t developers. Hi-res photos, PSDs, even digital media files such as AVIs & MOVs, are something that should be considered when building an application. A complicated PSD, for instance, can easily grow upwards of two gigabytes.

And therein lies the problem.

Let’s face it, PHP, for all its glory, is quite simply, not the best language for uploading files. This is a three pronged problem. The first is PHP, which I’ll elaborate on. The second is HTTP. HTTP is just not suitable for receiving large files; don’t get me wrong, it’s possible, but I question the wisdom. The third is actually client based - it takes time to upload a file, and most people I know (especially non-web savvy folk) get irritated when it doesn’t work immediately.

Let’s take, for instance, what most people do to get around the upload problem by overriding the PHP default limit. Formerly, you could set these variables using ini_set() and ini_restore(), but some of the overrides are no longer available through these methods. You can use a php.ini file, set the options directly but chances are you do something like this, via an .htaccess file.

php_value upload_max_filesize 30M
php_value post_max_size 30M
php_value max_execution_time 300
php_value max_input_time 300

Make no mistake, this is bad, and a potential security hole. Why? Because someone could easily setup a denial of service attack and bring your servers to its knees.

Addressing the Problem

Okay, so now that I’ve said that uploading files as big as we’re talking is a bad idea, what’s the solution?

First, address the HTTP problem. We’ve got several options, but something I found a few years ago is very promising. Take the challenge outside PHP.

Meet Tramline (http://infrae.com/products/tramline), an upload and download accelerator that plugs into Apache. Using mod_python, it provides a direct means to bypass PHP altogether and hook into Apache. A bit more security tweaking and it is an acceptable solution. There’s more alternatives too. Curl, WebDAV, Java, Streams, Python and Perl to name a few.

At this point, it is fair to say that one should choose the right tools for the right job. This is also true with the client upload problem. It is completely unacceptable to use a file control, have the user hit submit and expect them to wait there for five minutes or more. That said, there are alternatives. SWFUpload, YUI Uploader and various other Javascript methods as well, and with a bit of tweaking I’m sure they could be modified to utilize a service.

6GB-7GB? Easy. Just don’t stick to your PHP guns.

I’m interested to hear how other folks have handled large file uploads.

Take, for instance, Rick’s post about The No Email Thread. One line in particular stood out.

your time is just as valuable (or more) than mine

Doesn’t sound like a there is lot of ego there. Despite Rick’s history - not to mention the fact that he and his team of mad scientists control the flow of millions of dollars - he still recognizes that time is valuable and tries to conduct his business affairs in such a manner.

I think that most people in this industry could learn a thing or two by checking their ego when they open an email or go to a meeting. Programmers especially are guilty of this. We build applications, engineer specifications and somehow it gets in our brain that we’re god’s gift to [insert your demographic here].

Your time is valuable, but so is the time of the people you’re working with. If you’re not interested in an RFP, a potential client, or a partnership, take a lesson from Rick and tie it off in a respectable manner so they can move on.

Kudos Rick. Keep it up.

Back in the dot com, I tried to start up a web design company like so many others. Twice. It failed miserably, crashed and burned. It was then that I realized two things. The first is that I needed to face the hard truth that I just wasn’t a designer. The other is that I quite simply wasn’t ready for such a venture. After closing shop (and that shop was of course my $800/mo apartment) and nursing my battered pride, I got some advice. Stay in the industry, work for other people. Lay low and bide your time. So that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t lose my entrepreneurial spirit however. I co-founded a content management company, and stayed in the startup industry. A year ago, I left Cambrian House with the firm intention of starting a company anew… only to sign on with another company a couple months later at the nigh fanatical request of a friend of mind. What was intended to be short term wasn’t exactly that.

Fast forward to the here and now.

A piece of advice that has always stuck in my mind when talking to other entrepreneurs is to “quit your day job“. It is a ludicrous thought to those that don’t possess an entrepreneurial drive, and doctrine to those that are unhappy doing anything else than forging ahead on the path less taken. It motivates to the point of insomnia, drives one to work that much harder on their venture of choice.

However, my venture of choice, codenamed Karmba, is a product. Products take time to build, and I certainly don’t have the resources to devote to one hundred percent development whilst paying the bills. As such, when I left the safety and security of working for someone else, I had a plan. Start consulting, leveraging my technical aptitude to agencies and development companies. This in turn helps fund the product during downtime, allowing the hiring of other developers and designers alike.

And so, it has been two weeks since I deliberately left security and stability (not to mention a fantastic company) to pursue personal goals and dreams. I continue to feel what thousands have felt before, including myself. Uncertainty, lack of confidence and restless nights, coupled with dreams of a brighter future.

As I press into week three, I am reminded of feeling an unparalleled ambition and sense of accomplishment that only taking the path less traveled provokes. Despite the fear of failure and lack of sleep, I know I made the right call. Besides, like Wil Schroter said:

There are no weekends, only 2 days per week with different work hours.

But that doesn’t stop people from trying. Tungle has gone into public beta, as of today.

http://www.tungle.com/ - Best of luck, lads!