I am search for the ultimate consultant office on the go setup. Basically I need a mobile dual monitoring solution that is luggable, as I keep moving from one client location to another. My current research did not produce any convincing luggable monitors. I stumbled over ScreenRecycler thanks to my co-worker Hugo, who loves geek toys just as muchas I do. Now this got me thinking of the following setup:

I dream of having one phone provider across the world. With reasonable prices for incoming and outgoing calls. With an affordable data plan across the world. Well the data stuff seems quite out of reach today (actually there was a provider in Italy that offered a 1GB UMTS data plan across Europe for 30 Euros a month). However it seems that more and more prepaid providers are popping up that provide much more affordable roaming. Since I moved to Switzerland and starting on a travel intensive job I find myself moving between Switzerland, Germany, Romania and the USA a fair bit. Additionally since I play a fair amount of international Frisbee tournaments I also end up going to most other EU countries and hopefully to Brazil for the beach ultimate world championships next December.

For those of you following my blog, you should remember that I promised an "update" regarding best practices with opcode caches in PHP. I went ahead and poked some people at Zend and phparch if they would not like to organize a webcast on this topic. Then I leaned back and waited until they finalized a date for a webcast. As you probably guessed by now .. there is a date set, which is March 16th. Only 4 more days so register quickly if you want to attend.

Just a short heads up. I think the PEAR constitution elections are a good thing (tm). I know its sounds corny, but PEAR is mainly suffering from its own success. Its simply a huge project, with so many active developers, packages and downloads. I am confident that both of the proposals will help in improving collaboration in PEAR, mainly because they basically provide the same organization we used to have for all of PEAR (which worked great in the beginning), now for categories of related packages. I think this is exciting and with casting your vote (anyone who has a PEAR developer account, which is quite a lot of all of the people with php.net email accounts) you give the entire effort more credibility.

I was talking with Konsta from Doctrine on IRC about all the different authors of the various database abstraction related php libraries when I had a sudden inspiration: Wouldn't it be cool if we could get all of these authors on a single mailing list, where we could all discuss best practices, new discoveries, challenges etc.?