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I’m Zend Certified! October 29, 2004

Posted by Ben in : General , comments closed

Just thought I’d toot my horn here, though most folks that read this blog probably won’t know what “Zend Certified” means. In short, it means that I’ve passed standards set by Zend for know-how to program PHP.

From the Zend PHP Certification Study Guide:

The Zend PHP Certification formally confirms the recognition of specific abilities and skills acquired and developed by the examinee. In other words, how predictably is the person likely to perform when applying PHP technology to a business problem? Have the examinees reached a predefined minimum standard in both academic and practical experience needed to produce quality work?

And since most don’t know what PHP is exactly (also quoted from the study guide):

PHP is the most popular Web-development language in the world. According to estimates compiled in April 2004, there are over fifteen million unique domains—and almost two million unique IPs—on the World Wide Web that reside on servers where PHP is supported and used.

The term ‘PHP’ is actually a ‘recursive acronym’ that stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. [. . .]

So, in short, it’s basically a programming language used mainly on, but not restricted to, the Web. As of August, the number of sites using PHP was right at 17 million.

I’ll blog about my experience with and thoughts on the test a little later on my techno-orientied blog, if you’re interested in reading that sort of stuff.

Enterprise Saves Itself October 19, 2004

Posted by Ben in : Sci-Fi , comments closed

Well, they’ve finally done it. After three seasons of alluding to a temporal cold war that had fans reeling and refusing to watch the show, the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise, have finally brought an end to the underlying storyline that threatened to destroy the Star Trek universe timeline.

I have a DVR, so I didn’t watch the “Storm Front” conclusion until last night, and I can say that, even as an avid viewer of the show, I’m glad the storyline is gone. Now, Star Trek fans shouldn’t have a reason to complain about the timeline, and it appears that they’ve got some good writers this season that will abandon the full-season story arc and return to the small 3 and 4 episode mini-arcs that were popular with ST:TNG.

I think it’s a great move, and I can’t wait for the Brent Spiner episodes airing in a few weeks, where he plays an ancestor of Dr. Soong, who you will recall is the “father” of Data.