The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup

I don’t know if it’s just the economy, but I’ve started clipping
coupons again. In fact, my wife gave me an early birthday present: a
coupon organizer to carry in my laptop bag. So, I guess it’s no
surprise that I’ve actually started paying attention to the discounts
different PHP related vendors are offering, and thought I’d share some
of the latest with the group in case you’re looking to save a few
bucks.

Zend is offering $100 off Zend Studio if you take their survey by May
31st. That brings the price down to $299, which isn’t too bad for a
feature-rich IDE & debugger. Details are on their web site,
http://www.zend.com

Also, if you’re interested in online PHP training, head over to
http://www.zend.com/en/store/php-training and use the code training12
by June 31st for 12% off.

The folks at php|architect magazine are giving away downloads of the
May issue. They gave us copies of this at php|tek, and it’s mainly
focused on running PHP on Windows (Microsoft was a sponsor), but
there’s some nuggets in there for everyone else. Take a look — it’s
free, what do you have to lose? Download your copy at
http://phparch.com/c/magazine/issue/97

Remember our next meeting is June 4th at 7pm, and Mike Creuzer is
going to wow us by de-mystifying Bayesian filtering. See how spam
email & comments get filtered out so effectively these days. Don’t
forget to visit http://php.meetup.com/381/ and RSVP!

It’s my Meetup and I’ll cry if I want to!

June 4th is my birthday, and I’ve asked Mike Creuzer (@creuzerm) for a special gift: a presentation on Bayesian spam filtering!

Every day, more than 1000 messages end up in my spam mailbox, and only one or two actually make it to my inbox every couple days. Things weren’t that good ten years ago — what changed? A few years ago, Bayes’ theorem revolutionized spam filtering by monitoring the probability that each word in a message is a sign that it’s spam. This was a revolution! Spam numbers dropped almost overnight!

Mike’s going to explain the math behind this technique in terms everyone can understand (right, Mike?), and you’ll come away with a new tool to fight all kinds of spam, whether in email, on a contact form, or in blog comments.

Interested in attending? Don’t forget to RSVP at our Meetup page.

Years ago, we were able to get away with just exporting to text files, maybe CSVs if people wanted to see their data in Excel. But those days are past, and customers want the output of their web apps to be just as rich and vibrant as the rest of the software they use every day.

Two members stepped up to the plate with presentations on creating PDFs with PHP, using two popular libraries: TCPDF and FPDF.

Eric Michalsen’s presentation, on TCPDF:

Also, check out Mike Creuzer’s presentation on FPDF:

Thanks for the great presentations!