The codeFest is now over. It went really well. We had about 20 developers yesterday. It was really productive for most people. Some learned a lot. The event was beneficial to the community.

With Yann Larrivée and Louis-Philippe Huberdeau, I was able to make much progress on the PHP Quebec website (jobs section). The new version should be available in a couple of weeks.

The next codeFest should be somewhere in September. For those who don't know, the codeFest is a weekend for contributing to Open Source or community projects. People gather with their laptops and spend the weekend coding. It beats working alone at home!

For more information, visit the codeFest website.

After moving my databases and websites to a new Mac with Leopard, none of the websites were working. It was as if mod_rewrite was not working. First, I noticed that the .htaccess files were all ignored. I checked the Apache configuration file in MAMP, and everything seemed fine. After over an hour of going through blogs and forums, I finally get it: Leopard (it's my first day with it) has its own configuration file in a private folder. That file is not allowing htaccess files.

Solution
1. Open /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
2. Line 175 and 210: change AllowOverride none to AllowOverride All
3. Restart your server
4. Yay!

The 2008 edition of the conference is almost over (we have yet to go to the sugar shack). The event was a total success. For the first time, all tickets we sold out. We had wonderful sponsors that allowed us to do more than before (elePHPants, job fair, cocktail...) We had very good speakers and quality presentations. I talked to many visitors and they were all very happy with the event. It is always a pleasure for me to organize this event and I will surely start planning next year's edition soon. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped us to keep the conference smooth.

In MXML, you may use expressions as a source of data binding.

Example:

<mx:Label text="Beer" visible="{age >= 18}" />

The Label will only be displayed if the person is 18 or older.

Did you try a more complex expression?

<mx:Label text="Beer" visible="{age >= 18 && gender == 'male'}" />

Ah ha! You get a compiler error. Why? Because you're inside MXML and the & character is special.

Solution: replace the & with &

<mx:Label text="Beer" visible="{age >= 18 &amp&amp; gender == 'male'}" />