With a Body Composition Screening, you'll be able to determine your BMI & body fat percentage. FREE to all students, faculty, & staff. For more info or to make an appt. contact 410-455-1558 or galli1@umbc.edu.

In response to my previous article How to Project Manage Part-time People, a commenter named Tristan Bailey asked me, “How do you break up the project or decide on milestones to keep everyone with a similar goal but small time?” That’s a great question and something that goes hand-in-hand with project managing a small part-time team. At Uncover, we’re five people, but only one out of the five of us is full-time, so picking good milestones and project managing is really important for us if we’re going to successfully push product updates.

One of the many hats I wear is the equivalent of Head of Product. That means different things to different companies, but generally it’s the job of the Head of Product to figure out what you need to build to be successful, while developing the roadmap and milestones. You make use of the feedback from your team and from your customers, together with your intuition, to determine what the best course of action is.

Communicating with customers, conducting usability tests, doing research, and so on are potentially a full-time job, but as this bundle of activities amounts to only one of my many roles, I need to prioritize what are must do’s ahead of everything else.
Determining a must do is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. Does your product absolutely positively need this feature, design, copy, etc., for you to not only ship it but for it to be successful? If it’s not going to add to the success of what you ship then it’s not a must do. When we’re talking about success, we’re generally talking about increasing our customer base and – more importantly – revenue.

Revenue is very important to us because, as a small company with few resources, the more money we make the more resources we can apply to grow our business. More resources generally means more hours and more hours means more money if we’re smart about how we put those hours to use. Nice to have’s don’t increase revenue and therefore should be tabled.

After I’ve gathered together the must do’s for the next update to Uncover, I get together with my team to discuss them. We don’t worry about the future beyond the next update, as we don’t have the time do so, so every question I ask them is simple: Is this something that we need to have or do to be successful in our next update? Everything that we agree on as a yes gets added to the project management spreadsheet and everything that gets a no is stored away in a Github Issue as tbd.

After we have our must do’s in our project management spreadsheet, our next milestone is set. Things will get added and removed during the production phase, but that’s unavoidable. Planning is now mostly complete, and then begins the development, design and project management phase. Proper planning and avoiding milestone bloat will really help you ship faster updates that have bigger impact.

The post How to Break Up a Project into Milestones appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Former UMBC Retriever basketball standout Ryan Cook has signed a professional contract with OKK Sloboda Tuzla in the Bosnian Liga I in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Cook finished the 2012-13 season with 478 points, the ninth-most in school history. He was selected to the America East Conference Second Team and to the 2013 America East All-Tournament team after averaging 22.0 points per game in two postseason contests.

Cook excelled at the June 2013 First Team All iBall Pro Combine, which was scouted by a group of former and current NBA and overseas players. He averaged 16.0 points per game during the combine, which ranked second amongst the 43 players that were invited.

OKK Sloboda Tuzla was the runner-up in both the regular season and the championships of Liga I in 2012-13.

SOURCE: DB Networks

October 23, 2013 08:17 ET

DB Networks Introduces Industry's First Behavioral Analysis-Based Core IDS to Detect Advanced and Zero-Day SQL Injection Attacks

IDS-6300 Leverages New Technology Approaches of Behavioral Analysis and Continuous Threat Monitoring to Identify Highly Obfuscated Attacks and Protect Organizations' Databases

Contact:
Dan Spalding
408-960-9297
Email Contact

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The Date/Time PHP extension is a set of classes that allow you to work with almost all of the date and time related tasks. It’s been available since the release of PHP 5.2 and the extension introduced several new classes, all of which are mapped to real life scenarios:

• A date or a time is represented by a DateTime object.
• A timezone of the world is represented by a DateTimeZone object.
• DateInterval objects represent an interval. For example, when we say two days from now on, the “two days” is the interval. The DateInterval object doesn’t rely on a specific date or time.
• DatePeriod objects represent a period between two dates.

Now don’t let the last two tip you off, we’ll be looking at real world usage of these two in a moment.

From date() to DateTime

Whenever we want to show a date we used date(), it’s simple and it works. You just need to pass the date format you need. But it’s a real pain to manipulate, a good example is formatting dates and times according to a custom timezone.

DateTime does more than just return a formatted date, but before we go any further, you need to initiate a new DateTime object which represents your date and or time. Then we can do all sorts of cool stuff with it. A new instance is created just like any other PHP class.

$date = new DateTime();
    

The constructor of DateTime accepts a string parameter which defaults to “now”, the current time and date. To create an object for a specific date, you should pass the specific date and time to it. Formatting for the parameter is self explanatory in most cases. Below you can find a few different examples of constructing your DateTime object:

new DateTime('2013, March 24') //DateTime representing 2013, March 24
    new DateTime('2013-03-24') //DateTime representing 2013, March 24
    new DateTime('+2 days') //DateTime representing 2 days from now on.
    new DateTime('tomorrow')
    

When PHP is having a hard time understanding the format, it will throw an exception. A full list of the available formatting can be found in in the documentation

If there is no formatting that matches your needs, you can specify your own format by using DateTime::createFromFormat

DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', '24-Mar-2013');
    

Now that we have a DateTime object in hand we can do whole bunch of stuff, rather easily.

Unix Timestamp

$date->getTimestamp(); //returns a unix timestamp
    

Modifying Date/Times

$date->setDate(2013, 12, 30); //yyyy, mm, dd will set the the specified date
    $date->setTime(12, 3, 20); //hh, mm, ss (optional) will modify the time
    $date->modify('tomorrow'); //string based manipulation
    $date->setTimestamp(1364798550); //modify using a unix timestamp
    

Note that when out-of-range values are set, PHP will modify the date accordingly. For example, $date->setDate(2013, 12, 35); will generate 2014-01-04, the same goes for time.

Working With Multiple Dates

Now that you’re obsessed with DateTime, the next thing you know, your apps will be filled with DateTime objects. You’ll start to love dates and times like never before. From now on, you’ll be dealing with DateTime objects, not “strings” that you have to pass to the strtotime function when you need to do a little math.

Say for example that you need to compare two birthdays:

$sheldon = new DateTime('May 20th, 1980');
    $neo     = new DateTime('March 11th, 1962');
    
    if ($sheldon > $neo)
        echo 'Sheldon is younger than neo';
    

Another scenario might be comparing two dates. We can compare dates against one another like so:

$diff = $neo->diff($sheldon);
    

The diff call returns a DateInterval object. If we dump out the return value:

DateInterval Object
    (
        [y] => 18
        [m] => 2
        [d] => 9
        [h] => 0
        [i] => 0
        [s] => 0
        [invert] => 0
        [days] => 6645
    )
    

These are public properties. You can generate some friendly output from a DateInterval object:

$diff->format('Neo is older by %Y years and %m months older'); //Neo is older by 18 years and 2 months
    

What’s best about the DateInterval object is that you can apply the interval to another DateTime object:

$neo->add($diff); //neo's birthday changed to sheldon's
    

Note: Modifications to DateTime, such as adding doesn’t return new DateTime objects, it affects the original object. Always keep this in mind when passing around DateTime objects throughout your app. PHP 5.5 introduced a new class that returns new objects upon modification.

diff isn’t the only place where you can generate a DateInterval object. Since it’s a class, new objects can be initiated as usual:

$new_diff = new DateInterval('P2Y');
    

The amount of years/months/days etc., are passed in as a string to the constructor. More information can be found in the constructor’s documentation.

Working With Timezones

When creating new DateTime objects, the second argument of the constructor defines a timezone. If we skip this, a default timezone will be grabbed from the php.ini‘s date.timezone. You can modify this at runtime by calling date_default_timezone_set:

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
    new DateTime('today'); //datetime object is on New York time
    

You can also change timezones on the fly. As you may have guessed, first we need a Timezone object.

$timezone = new DateTimeZone('America/New_York');
    $sheldon->setTimezone($timezone); //sheldon's birthday now on to New York
    

You can define the timezone while creating your new DateTime object:

$sheldon = new DateTime('May 20th, 1980', $timezone);
    

However, an important thing to note is that setTimezone modifies the original DateTime object. What we’re basically asking is, “format this date, to this timezone” whenever we call the setTimezone method. Now on the other hand, in the last example where we pass the timezone into the DateTime constructor, we’re saying, “the date I’m creating is in this timezone”.

A list of valid timezones are available in the online documentation.

DatePeriods

I think the official manual provides the best explanation:

A date period allows iteration over a set of dates and times, recurring at regular intervals, over a given period.

DatePeriod allows us to generate a set of DateTimes using two days that we define between an interval. We pass a starting date, an interval and an ending date. On each interval a new DateTime object is created.

Let’s say that we want to get all of Sheldon’s birth dates, since his birth:

//since birthdays occur every year, the interval is one year
    $interval = new DateInterval('P1Y');
    
    //third argument is the end date, new DateTime() == right now
    $period   = new DatePeriod($sheldon, $interval, new DateTime());
    
    foreach($period as $dt) {
        //DateTime objects
        echo $dt->format('Y-m-d - D'), "\n";    
    }
    

The result would be:

1981-05-20 - Wed
    1982-05-20 - Thu
    1983-05-20 - Fri
    1984-05-20 - Sun
    1985-05-20 - Mon
    1986-05-20 - Tue
    ...
    

Now by default, the DatePeriod includes the starting date that we pass in. However, the fourth argument to the constructor allows us to skip the start date:

$period   = new DatePeriod($sheldon, $interval, new DateTime(), DatePeriod::EXCLUDE_START_DATE);
    

Let’s see how many birthday parties Neo has had before Sheldon was born:

$bdays   = new DatePeriod($neo, $interval, $sheldon, DatePeriod::EXCLUDE_START_DATE);
    echo iterator_count($bdays);
    

Extending

All of the classes that we’ve covered today can be extended to use with your own methods. One popular usage is extending the DateTime with a __toString method so that you can properly print out a DateTime object without calling format.

A Couple Usage Scenarios

• One of my personal approaches to using DateTime objects, is when dealing with date/time columns in databases. All of the dates are stored as UTC timezone dates. The app code only works with DateTime objects, but before the end query is generated, all of the dates are formatted to UTC. This approach has allowed me to work with multiple timezone inputs easily.

  I can pass in a New York time object and completely forget about formatting it, before going to the database. I can easily switch between Unix timestamps and regular date-time formatting in my database at anytime, my app code doesn’t care as long as it gets a DateTime object.

• I’ve also used DateInterval to simplify subscription payment logic. Using DateInterval objects to define the time between the subscription has made things really easy. I just need to apply the interval to last payment date.

Do you have any good date/time usage examples? Share them in the comments.

Wrap Up

The date time extension has so much to offer, if you’re on the bleeding edge, there are new classes and interfaces introduced since PHP 5.5. Be sure to checkout the manual. Thanks for reading.