Welcome

zombat.net is the home of Blake Soley, web developer and PHP programmer by trade.

As I am gainfully employed on a full-time basis, I can no longer accept new clients.

(If you are interested in .NET development, see womps.net.)

Blog

I co-author a blog called PHP vs. .Net, a literary battleground where I advocate the virtues of PHP in contrast with my co-author's dedication to .NET.

My latest posts

• HTTP Signed Requests with PHP
• Installing Gearman and gearmand on Windows with Cygwin
• An Exercise in WordPress Integration, or Why WordPress Sucks
• Facebook Notifications – "An unknown error occurred (out of memory)"
• Fixing "Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error" with Google Chrome

Stack Overflow

I am a regular on stackoverflow.com, a popular programming forum created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I can frequently be found answering PHP questions there.

Recent Stack Overflow activity

• Answer by zombat for Reformatting PHP Array decoded from Facebook Open Graph
• Answer by zombat for PHP - MVC - Better way to prevent calling unwanted method in Controller?
• Answer by zombat for why obtain an access token / appId / apisecret from Facebook and/or should I store them?
• Refreshing Facebook session from an iframe application
• OO JQuery and classes
• Answer by zombat for MySQL slow group by/order by

Development

I am a software engineer at GameHouse Canada, a great company that makes fun social games, as well as a diverse array of casual and mobile games.

I focus primarily on data components of games, such as server-side operations, game logic, database architecture and caching systems.

It's a great place to work!

Interests

• I am an avid scuba-diver, with an Assistant Instructor rating. Victoria is a great place to be a diver.
• I enjoy photography, and can often be found fooling around with my Nikon D70. My latest interest is underwater photography with a Panasonic Lumix LX-5.
• As a beginner surfer, I enjoy faceplants and falling off my board on any decent-sized wave.