It’s weird how worlds intersect. Here is some lobbycon dialog:

“I don’t know, but if you plot the points, there aren’t many intersections. I’ve noticed it on my Facebook: The Open Source world has different geeks, and then the Web 2.0 world is mixed up. Priorities are f’d—people like X, who are big in the Web 2.0 world, nobody knows here.”

“Web 2.0 is…not even geeks really.”

“If it were, every party would be like the Ars Technica/Gizmodo WWDC party.”

“Haha.”

…

We’re talking about someone who worked on some open source software used in Web 2.0.

“Yeah, makes sense. He was really talented when he was younger. But then he got into [some hyped Web 2.0 thing redacted]. Bridge too far. He’s one of those people who got sucked into the bubble, never to escape.”

“Haha.”

“There is a black hole of Web 2.0 situated somewhere near South Park. I think it’s under the swingset. Get too close to there, you start to think you’re relevant.”

“You should twitter that…or blog it.”

Done.

Talk tomorrow

If you’re in Portland for OSCON, then come see my talk tomorrow (Wednesday) morning!

It’ll be fun!

Here is a taste.

Yummy.

If you are an ogre.

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While the MySQL 5.1 feature list looks quite tasty to me, the MySQL 5 feature list has not really won me over. Aside from the fact that most new MYSQL 5 features have been quite bug plagued (though this is now mostly resolved side from the performance issues with VIEW's and INFORMATION_SCHEMA). So Arjen is doing some courses on MySQL 5 features, which got me thinking which are the features I regularly use? Uhm .. I think there is only one, which are VIEW's. Actually I always end up using them for the same thing: Computing a status field that changes given the CURRENT_DATE. I tend to try and avoid cron jobs for these tasks whenever I can. Of course it would be more performant to update the status once, but replying on the status update cron job to actually work right at the expected time is tricky. Maybe with the event scheduler in 5.1 I will consider changing this VIEW use case.

Fire up the download clients, Zend Framework 1.6 RC 1 is now available. There’s nothing better than fresh code!

If you’re at OSCON, and you love security, you may or may not enjoy my talk on PHPSecInfo, a security auditing tool for the PHP environment. I’m actually going to try to show some new code, so if you’ve seen it before, you can see it again – for the first time.

The talk is at 1:45pm Thursday, 07/24/2008.

• PHPSecInfo homepage
• PHPSecInfo code repository

I currently find myself with a client who owes a substantial amount of money (over $8000) and I’m at a bit of a loss over how to approach collecting on this debt.  Emails and phone calls have not worked so far.  This was billed over two invoices, and the first invoice is now five weeks past due.

Interestingly, 3 weeks ago when I sent an initial inquiry (2 weeks over due) I was told that the client had never recieved the first invoice.  Sounded convincing enough, but I had a return email from him on May 22 in which he’d acknowledged receiving the first invoice, with instructions to only email it to him in the future, instead of his CC’ing someone else as well.  So there’s some trail of evidence that this wasn’t completely ‘lost’ or ‘never recieved’.  At the same time, there was *a lot* going on on the project at that time, right before Memorial Day weekend, and we were trying to do a project launch.  Someone else at the client’s company had quit right around that time as well, so I was giving the benefit of the doubt.

I followed up with an email, which inquired about the invoices status.  I was told the client was ‘waiting on some checks to come in. Hopefully late this week, but more likely mid next week’.  I wasn’t sure if he meant that he’d send a payment the middle of the following week, or if he expected those checks in the middle of the following week.  Whichever was intended, I still haven’t seen payment yet.

I’m reviewing options here, and none look pretty.

1.  File a small claims court claim.  There’s a limit of $5000 on this, so already I’m losing out.

2.  Hire a NY attorney to file a larger claim.  This will likely be expensive.  (I’m in NC and the client is in NY, making it more complicated still).

3.  Hire a collections agency - this doesn’t seem like the right option, but it’s on the list.

4.  Forget about it.

#4 is the least attractive, which probably goes without saying.

I’ve considered a ‘name and shame’ approach - naming the particular client in question - but I don’t think at this point that will do anything positive except make me feel good.  I have our original contract which called for payment within 21 days (3 weeks) unless the work was noted to be unsatisfactory.  Bad clause in there, and the whole agreement was very one-sided, but I signed up for it, so I’m stuck with it.  In the 2 months of working with this client, I had no written or verbal indication that my work was unsatisfactory, so I don’t think there’s a leg to stand on there.  I’ve not yet sent a ‘final’ letter via certified mail yet, which I believe would be a good next step to take to document my efforts thus far.

The topic of collections is covered in my book, and was based on some previous experience and that of some colleagues of mine over the years, but I’ve never experienced it this personally before.  I will need to take my own advice next time and require some form of down payment for most future projects of any substantial size.

I’ve been on both sides of this situation - not being able to pay someone, and not being paid.  I’ve never had a client not pay this much though.  The one previous non-payment was for a few hundred dollars, and it was something we worked out over a phone call (not really a big deal).

What would be your advice in this situation?  If you’ve been in this situation before, how did you handle it?

For anyone wondering, this was not something that dragged on for months - this all happened within 2 months, but about 95% of the work was carried out over a 6 week project.  Perhaps invoicing weekly would have helped bring this to a head earlier???

I find myself once again in Portland, OR at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. This year, I’m giving a talk on memcached. The talk is on the PHP track, but the concepts can apply in any of the other languages represented at OSCON, so if you’re interested in memcached and how to use it, stop by on Wednesday at 5:20pm.

In previous years at OSCON, I’ve stuck mainly to the PHP track. This is because I have a lot of friends who are speakers, and so I’ve attended their talks to learn from and support them. This year, though, I’ve decided to focus on some of the other languages represented here, particularly Python and Erlang. This morning, for example, I attended Steve Holden’s Python In 3 Hours tutorial. Tomorrow, I’ll be attending the Practical Erlang Programming tutorial, and later this week, I’ll get Just Enough C for Open Source Projects.

So, today, one of the more interesting features I learned that Python supports is the concept of closures. Here’s a simple example from the tutorial:

# Closures example
 
def adder(n):
  def add(m):
    return m+n
  return add
  
add20 = adder(20)
 
print add20(2) # should print 22
 
l = []
for i in range(100):
  l.append(adder(i))
 
print l[13](22) # should print 35

FYI: There’s been some discussion surrounding a recent patch proposal to add closures and lambda functions to PHP.

At any rate, it’s good to be back at OSCON this year, catching up with old friends, making new friends, and expanding my knowledge of open source languages.

By the way, I’ve brought along with me 10 elePHPants who need good homes. If you want one, it’s yours. You just have to fi

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