Dan Rooke’s Blog

It’s been a while since my last post, please forgive me!

We moved house successfully (just about) and have now been here for over a month. We’ve been busy working on modernising the house with help from friends and family. After sorting the essentials (tap in kitchen, shower etc.) we have nearly finished decorating the lounge. There’s quite a learning curve to wall paper stripping and then putting up lining paper Hopefully we’ll be sorted soon, and I shall post some pictures.

It was also my birthday at the beginning of the month, for which I received a wonderful Canon EOS350D Digital SLR camera. My lovely wife Becca organised this with everyone. Thank you very much to all who contributed. I used it well for Chris and Jess‘ wedding which was also at the beginning of May. I shall have to get out and use it some more when I have some time.

I finally got round to taking the exam to become a Zend Certified Engineer for PHP5 yesterday. I passed! I will hopefully be listed on the ZCE yellow pages that Zend maintain within 24 hours. I’m quite chuffed about that, let’s hope employers recognise it! I have some practice tests left if anyone wants to try it. Professionally, I think I shall be focussing on getting more experience under my belt now for a little while.

Just a reminder that we’ll be moving house on Saturday. We’re mostly packed up and ready to go now! Wish us luck!

We had a great weekend visiting my Aunt and Uncle near Redditch in the Midlands. We visited Warwick Castle on Saturday and had a great day out watching a siege re-enactment, an archery display and a (very interactive!) falconry display. It was a little commercialised and would probably not have been as good a value for money if we hadn’t had a buy one get one free voucher!

While we were in the Midlands, we spotted a Bonsai tree shop near to the house, namely Dai-Ichi. We’ve been casually looking at getting one for a few weeks now and thought we’d pop in and take a look. They had a very large selection to choose from at all different levels of maturity and budgets from £10 - over £1000! It was all very impressive. We decided that we would buy one and we went for an Acer of about 18 years old. It has been recently potted up and so looks very smart and tidy and shouldn’t need any attention in this area for a year or so. We also bought the necessary other items such as a care book and a suitable plant food. Hopefully we’ll be able to look after it well and I shall aim to do regular updates so that you can see the progress!

I’ve just finished my second practice exam in preparation for the Zend Certification for PHP5. My breakdown is as follows:

• Security - Excellent
• OOP - Excellent
• Design - Excellent
• Basic Language - Excellent
• String Manipulation and Regular Expressions - Excellent
• Arrays - Excellent
• XML & Web Services - Excellent
• PHP 4/5 Differences - Excellent
• Web Features - Pass
• Streams and Network Programming - Pass
• Database Access - Pass
• Functions - Fail

My overall score for this test was Excellent! This is much improved over my first test which was still a pass. Interesting that I have jumped from an excellent to a fail forthe functions sub area. I guess I got some questions wrong this time around.

I shall continue revising and seriously consider booking the actual exam, I just need to work out when to fit it in!

I have been busy studying for the Zend Certification for PHP 5 over the last few weeks on my lunch breaks. I’ve now got to the end of the study guide and so yesterday I took my first practice exam online. I received the following break down for the major areas covered:

• Functions - Excellent
• OOP - Excellent
• String Manipulation and Regular Expressions - Excellent
• Web Features - Pass
• Security - Pass
• XML & Web Services - Pass
• Basic Language - Pass
• Database Access - Pass
• Arrays - Fail
• Design - Fail
• PHP 4/5 Differences - Fail
• Streams and Network Programming - Fail

My overall mark was a pass! I am quite pleased with this, it shows me areas I need to concentrate on to practice on my other nine practice tests.

Essentially I have been self taught PHP over a good 6/7 years and as it is currently quite central to my work I thought I’d like to gain certification that says I can do what I say I can do! This is particularly true as I do not currently have a personal project which demonstrates my skills - although I am working on this! Gaining certification from PHP’s commercial backers, Zend, will put me in a strong position to demonstrate my skills and place me amoung the exclusive list of UK PHP developers with this qualification.

I’ll keep you posted about future practice tests and, hopefully not in the too distant future, the real test. Wish me luck!