Yesterday I accepted an offer for the position of Senior Analyst Programmer at River Island, woot! I start August 1st.

I also managed to sell my certification study guide for a small fortune.

Go me!

I bit the bullet last week and ordered a Zend Certification Voucher. This afternoon I went to book an exam; during Pearson Vue’s registration process Zend require you to enter a Zend network username (I forgot I had one). While scouring the site for my username I stumbled across this thread on their forums.

With the new PHP 5 certification going live in just 5½ weeks (26th July) I figure I’ll hold off booking my exam until this materialises. Now to Ebay my Zend Certification Study Guide!

Well it seems I was a little slow off the mark with spotting this but I stumbled across Xgl today. What is Xgl? (quote lifted from Wikipedia)

Xgl is an X server architecture, started by David Reveman, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. It takes advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, supporting hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz.

It certainly looks impressive, especially the rotating 3D desktop demo that Novell have showcased. Shame it doesn’t support multiple monitors though.

If I’m honest I did think to myself, after the novelty factor has worn off, how much will this improve productivity? Sure spinning the desktop on a 3D cube looks cool but I never used the multiple desktops that were available in Linux anyway, it was usually a case of “out of sight, out of mind”.

After a few days of using Windows XP’s Luna theme I found it bulky (and always reminds me of fisherprice) and switched back to Windows Classic, I’ve found most of people at work have too.

Check out Novell’s Xgl showcases.

Just as I was quickly checking Intel’s share price before bed I spotted a link on Google finance that Scoble has quit MS! I was most surprised, though I don’t frequent his blog as much as I once did.

Talking of Intel’s share price it’s now below $17!

I bought some stock back when it slid to $19 thinking that was good value for money, and again when it touched $18 but it just keeps on sliding… I pray Conroe is enough to curb the downward trend.

The benchmarks look promising (still waiting for independent results though) and Apple are shipping Intel notebooks, this has gotta be good right? Still undecided if its worth buying more…

When Zend released their certification in 2004 I promptly picked up their study guide in October 2004 (along with MySQL’s study guide). However, even now I’m still not certified, I’ve studied the material but never booked the exam. When I stumbled across this thread it reminded why I never booked the exam.

An interesting quote from Chris Shiflett (PHP security guru and member of the Zend Advisory Board) about the study guide:

However, I feel obligated to voice my concerns about the book. It was very rushed (we each had a couple of weeks to write our chapters), and the production time was nearly cut in half. As a result, the book has more errors than the average technical book. In addition, the practice questions in the back are ones that were thrown out of the real exam. This means that they were considered to be too hard, too tricky, or too useless (like memorizing the order of arguments passed to a function). I think the guide actually hurts the exam for this reason – people see those questions and begin to form an opinion about the exam itself.

This was exactly what put me off certification. I’ve lent this study guide to other (who I would consider experienced) developers at work, and they would only pass 60% of these test questions. Are they poor developers, or not bright enough? I hope not because I failed the same questions!

The problem with these questions is they’re assessing programming problems that rarely apply to "real world" programming. For this reason certification lost it’s appeal. An example:

What will the following script output?

<?php
$a = 1;
$a = $a- + 1;
echo $a;
?>

A. 2
B. 1
C. 3
D. 0
E. Null

This isn’t actually from the back of the book but the exam prep questions from the first chapter! Post your answer in the comments