Nevada Sage

I have been reading Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. The book is about Bernhard Riemann, who is father of what is regarded as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics, The Riemann Hypothesis, which states “All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half”. This relates to his proposed formula to count the number of prime numbers less than a given quantity. The book covers Riemann’s life in general, as well as providing in-depth coverage of his hypothesis.

I find this book to be a good read. It is not too technical in terms of the math used to describe the background requisites as well as the Hypothesis itself. Anyone who is comfortable with basic math, algebra, and elementary calculus will find the content tractable – at least to the point I have thus far read. The calculus used is quite basic, and was fun to see again (I have not done any calculus in many years). Note that I have not yet finished the book, and I’m sure the math will soon leave me behind.

In any case I have found the first two thirds of the book enjoyable and thought to comment.

I took a nerdiness test, the link for which I found on Jason Sweat’s site.

I believe it’s safe to say the results are conclusive:

The result is not entirely accurate, however. For one of the answers regarding Friday night activities I chose ‘gaming/chat’ because ‘working out the bugs in your web engine’ or ‘reading forums’ were not on the list.

I would seek immediate medical attention, but I rather enjoy it…

After a nearly three month process, I was successful in my bid for a promotion. I’m certainly glad that part of the process is over.

I will be moving to (greater) Denver for my new job, at a time to be determined later by the powers that be. I’m still with the same company, so this is a major promotion as well as transfer.

Although I have (charitably) ‘rough’ php/OOP ability, I did find it satisfying that my web dev ability was the deciding factor in my being selected for the job.

In fact, the first project on which I’ll be working is building a website. I have a basic engine written which I use for all similar types of sites, but this is on a much larger scale. I look forward to the task ahead. They have modest requirements so far, and we all know that requirements never change. Right? 😉

I will, however, investigate whether or not I can make use of C# (my company is ALL about MS products, and I’m surprised that they support php – which happens to be v4.3.0). If the server configuration supports C# I can use this as an opportunity to learn that language. So it’s php for now, and hopefully C# just ahead.

Sell the house, pack the belongings, and off to the rockies.

Sitepoint now has a Ruby forum.

I’m just starting to look at Ruby, so this is a welcome addition. This is particularly good news in light of the fact that some serious programming talent, such as Marcus Baker, Jason Sweat, et al are already posting there.

Chris Shiflett‘s new book Essential PHP Security is now available for preorder at Amazon.com.

If the security of your php code is important to you, the addition of this volume will be worth the cost.