UPHPU Meeting Thursday 7pm | phpFundamentals topic – Cookies & Sessions in PHP | mainTopic – PHP + Business | specialPresentation – Stackable.com

Our meeting will be on thursday, feb 18, 2010 at 7pm. Location and map below.

mainPresentation – Sales 101: The Basics – Daniel Crookston
An overview of a handful of simple sales techniques you can use to schedule more sales calls, win more contracts, and ultimately earn more money. The skills we’ll be focusing on include turning a cold call (whether incoming or outgoing) into an appointment, helping the people you meet with to feel comfortable giving you their business, and negotiating for a better price once they have agreed to purchase your services.

phpFundamentals presentation – Cookies & Sessions in PHP.
For this month’s beginners PHP presentation, the topic will be Cookies & Sessions in PHP. The purpose of Cookies and Sessions and where to implement them into your website. We’ll cover how to use them, as well as some common mistakes that new developers can make.
Presented by Justin Carmony

specialPresentation – Stackable.com
Xmission will be coming out to present to us on what stackable.com is and how it works for you. They will be answering your questions.

Dan Crookston – About the Main Presenter
Dan has been programming since he was very young, and programmed professionally for 7 years in PHP. He realized pretty quickly that sales was going to be a big part of being successful, so he took some sales classes and did a lot of studying.
Recently he took a full time sales position to get more experience in a sales-only environment and to have an opportunity to learn from people who sell full time. They should feel free to contact me. My email address is dcrookston@gmail.com.

Utah PHP Users Group
Meeting Thursday, Feb 18 at 7pm
12393 Gateway Park Place Suite 600
uphpu.org

After hours party at Applebees 8:45pm at Applebees in Draper

• mindjuju
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A new year, a new start, and a new way to do things

Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are
restructuring the way our meetings will be.

New Meeting Structure

We will be splitting our PHP meetings into 2 parts. First part is basic skills / best practices training. This is for you new guys who want to learn, but don’t know where to start. This section is called PHP fundamentals and will be hosted by Justin Carmony. He and I are working on some printed materials and are ramping this up as we speak. We also have several very senior and tenured members who are VERY friendly to questions. The second portion of our meeting will be a more advanced topic that will be of benefit to intermediate / advanced members, but will still be of great benefit to those who are new.

Still Social!

For those interested in the social aspect of our meeting, we still have the famous UPHPU Afterhours party.

Resources

As far as learning resources, Ray Hunter and I are working on having books available at our meetings. While we will have some fun / zany way of handing out the books, there is an understood condition of receiving the book. You MUST write a review of the book and post it online. If you don’t want to write a review, don’t take the book. I will be breaking arms on this!

Online Resources

I know that our recordings have been sporadic. i’m working on allocating more time to this.

• mindjuju
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40% off PHP titles through Wiley Publishing

Spreading a little Christmas cheer, Wiley Publishing has offered our group 40% on the following PHP titles. Please use promo code PHPH1. Offer valid from December 15th, 2009-January 31st, 2010. read more »

• wade
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Methods for Mockups: A Geek’s Guide to Design

For our November meeting, Velda Harper Christensen will present on fundamental concepts that won’t replace your designer, but will help bridge the gap between logic and aesthetics. Velda is a designer, blogger, mother, geek, and full-time student. As usually, after hours party to follow!

We are also running a tech book drive to assist those who are just starting to learn web programming! You and I both know you’re not using those HTML books anymore! bring them in and let somebody else benefit from something collecting dust on your shelf! Bring in what you can, HTML, JavaScript, etc, I promise it’ll go to good use.

• mindjuju
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Post to group through Google Wave

I have created a Google Group for us so that you may “wave” to everyone in the group via Google Wave. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a pretty URL or email address because they were already used and Google has a lame rule that they can only be used once, even if the previous instance has been deleted (which was by me, which makes it even more lame).

Visit the Google Group home page for more information. Join the group and then add the address “utahphp@googlegroups.com” to your Google Contacts list. You can then add the group address to new waves and everyone will have access to it.

Note that Wave will bark that that user does not have a valid Wave account when you try to add it. Ignore that and simply strike the return key and the address will be added to your contact list.

• wade
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A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security

For our July meeting, Josh Fenio will present on A Web Developer’s Guide to System Security. The presentation will track the day to day aspects of a security-minded systems administrator. Topics that will be covered include intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, and recovery, along with relevant tools to accomplish each mission.

Josh Fenio is a software engineer in Northern Nevada, known as “stderr” or “dataw0lf” on the IRCs.

• mindjuju
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Security + PHP

I’m pleased to announce the May Meeting for this Thursday, Security + PHP.

It’ll cover some of the basics of web application security, such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF), SQL injection and some tips for their prevention and becoming more security conscious. There will be some demonstrations of all the topics with some suggested solutions. We’ll also see a demonstration of the simplistic Browser exploitation Framework (BeEF) project from bindshell.net , which presents an interesting take on potentials of XSS and XSRF within the browser.

A little about Eric:

I’ve been a programmer since I was age 12, back in the days of TI-83 graphing calculators and the lot. From there, I learned to develop through a combination of languages including Visual Basic, Delphi, and C/C++ with mostly security and personal firewall penetration testing applications that performed on the Windows platform. I learned substantially about the Windows API framework and developed most of my system level programming skillsets from this focus. I’m coming up on my senior year of my Bachelor’s degree program at Weber State University and work almost exclusively with web development technologies, such as PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, etc.

For the past year, I’ve worked at Code Greene, a web development company based in downtown Salt Lake City; I’ve worked on backend medium to large scale integration projects as well as custom PHP and CakePHP web frontends and sites, though my preferences are towards integration and API projects. While I know CakePHP best, I have looked at other PHP frameworks, such as Code Igniter and Zend Framework. In terms of my computer preferences, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming so a Linux distro, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu, with some quality hardware usually suits me well. I don’t like Windows much anymore, as in the past year I have migrated all but one of my home systems to Ubuntu and only have to use Windows minimally at the university. Honestly, either way works if I can get the job done without too many runarounds, and you know…button clicks.

Eric can be followed on twitter at xtrementl (Extreme-NTL).

• mindjuju
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SSL + Apache

This Thursday’s meeting is going to be presented on SSL + Apache. It will cover SSL basics, how SSL works, how to get an SSL certificate, how to create your own certificates. The difference between self signed and certificate authorities. Building your own certificate authority. How to configure Apache with an SSL certificate. And other general SSL tips and tricks.

Lonnie Olson aka. fungus is a long time Linux/BSD administrator with a love of programming, networking, and security. Infrequent postings can be found at http://lonnieolson.com/ or on twitter @fungus.

• mindjuju
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Open Source Bridge

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies. It will take place June 17-19 in Portland, OR, with five tracks connecting people across projects, languages and experience to explore how we do our work and why we participate in open source. The conference structure is designed to provide developers with an opportunity to learn from people they might not connect with at other events.

Open Source Bridge is run entirely by volunteers who believe in the need for an open source conference that focuses on the culture of being an open source citizen, regardless of where in the stack you choose to code. All proceeds from conference registration and sponsorship go directly to the costs of the conference.

Sessions and events will share in-depth knowledge about using, creating and contributing to open source as citizens of a greater community. You’ll find relevant information whether you write web apps for the cloud, tinker with operating system internals, create hardware, run a startup, or blog about technology. They are still seeking proposals—and just extended the deadline to April 10th—so submit yours before time runs out. Some examples of our proposals so far: Brian Aker on Drizzle, a reboot of MySQL designed “for the cloudâ€?; Linux Kernel hacker Greg K-H about how Linux manages development; Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, about what’s next in collaboration; Amber Case, an anthropologist living in both the physical and virtual worlds, about Cyborg Citizenship.

In addition to regular conference sessions, they are holding an unconference day for free-form sessions, and host a 24-hour dedicated “hacker lounge� at the top of the Portland Hilton. In addition to hosting the hacker lounge, the Hilton has offered Open Source Bridge attendees steeply discounted room rates, starting at $139/night.

Visit opensourcebridge.org to learn more about the conference, see our session proposals, and register to attend.

UPHPU members can get $100 off registration with a registration code obtained by contacting Victor or Wade. They have also given us one free conference pass to raffle off at our meeting on 16 April.

• wade
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@UPHPU on twitter

I just set up an @uphpu on twitter. I @thinbegin have really been loving the twitter lately and think it may be a good augmentation to the mailing list, IRC Channel and WordPress tools that are already set up and being used.

If I have stepped on anyone’s toes in doing this [setting up the UPHPU twitter user], it was unintentional. I just wanted to grab it up before some other organization out there decided that the acronym fit their needs. :) Please, if there is any stubbed toes by my actions, please email me privately and we’ll mend the wound. :)

Of course, any interested twitter users among us should feel free “follow” @uphpu. I really think it would be another great “feed” of communication.

Oh, and feel free to follow me [@thinbegin] too as I post about PHP, amongst other things, regularly. Micro-blogging FTW!!! :)

• thinbegin
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