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Conferences

php (and web) | works 2005

I'm looking forward to php|works this year. I have the privilege of presenting two sessions; the "usual" PDO talk and my "lucky dip" streams talk (a mixture of streams related things), which seemed to go down quite well with the attendees of php|tropics.

See you there?

Back from OSCON-let there be slides

[Updated: added alternate formats]

A bit lax in getting these online; I bought a new HD for my laptop while in portland, so it's been mildly difficult to get at the slides themselves.

Here are the slides from my PDO talk (powerpoint).

Here are the slides from my PDO talk (PDF).

Here are the slides from my PDO talk (Flash).

OSCON was a blast; good to see the usual gang again, good to put faces to people that I hadn't previously met, and good to meet new people. Looking forward to going again next year :-)

php|tropics coming up

tropics_logo I'm making some final preparations this weekend for my first journey to Mexico and the PHP|Tropics conference.

I'll be speaking on two topics: PDO (of course) and something of an odd-ball talk on PHP's Streams--basically a collection of various handy code snippets and best/worst practices for using streams.

I'm looking forward to the trip; I'll have my electrovaya fully charged for some plane hacking, and be accompanied by my friend, colleague and boss George Schlossnagle--it should be a lot of fun meeting up with the PHP gang again, as well as meeting with the attendees: it's always good meet people that are seriously using PHP.

The location is also going to be nice ;-)

Hope to see you there :)

php|tropics 2005

php|tropics

php|cruise was good, and this years offering from php|arch (php|tropics 2005) looks set to exceed it. I particularly enjoy a good conference; they're not just about learning new things, but also about getting together and sharing ideas, attendee:attendee, speaker:attendee and speaker:speaker.

I'm fortunate enough to be making two presentations, on the following topics:

PHP and Databases Grown-up: PDO

PHP 5.1 features a new data access layer, PHP Data Objects (PDO), that provides a clear, simple (but powerful) unified API for working with all our favourite databases. Features include prepared statements with bound parameters (for all databases, even those that don't natively support them), transactions, cursors, LOBs and flexible error handling. Join me in this talk to learn more about the future of database access in PHP.

Speaking of grown up, following my talk is Dan Scott from IBM on using DB2 with PHP (hopefully your audience will be bigger this time Dan :-)

PHP Streams: Lucky Dip

A roundup of a bunch of handy things you can do with streams in PHP 5. We'll look at time saving functions like get and put contents, as well as multiplexing clients/servers, user space wrappers and other streamy tricks. In short, a whole bunch of Streams tid-bits for your toolbox; let's get out of the fread($fp, filesize($filename)) age.

I very warmly encourage you to attend the conference; the pricing is pretty good (and keep in mind that it's an all inclusive resort--that includes alcoholic beverages and food). If your boss isn't interested, but you really are, why not make php|tropics your vacation destination for the year?

It's like 5 bucks, right?

Well, I'm finally back from php|works, feeling pretty good about how well the conference went for everyone, and pretty jet-lagged and travel tired.

If there is one thing I'll always remember from the conference, it will be the slur on Canadian currency value from the title of this post; it got a lot of mileage (all in good spirits though!).

The conference seemed to go very well; I didn't see (m)?any attendees playing truant, and that suggests the there was enough going on to satisfy them all. After hours there was plenty to do in and around Toronto (even if it meant going to Best Buy first) and that made a welcome change compared to the venues for some of the other conferences I have been to--they have a tendency to be somewhat isolated, and that can lead to a kind of cabin fever.

I was one of the unfortunate speakers to be harasmussed, but I didn't mind; it was kinda funny to see people walk in, hang around for a bit, and then sneak out carrying the vacant chairs from the room.

Thumbs up to Marco and php|a for another great conference! :-)

PDO Slides from php|works

You can find them here.

Update: I realized this morning that I didn't mention meta-data (as in column types and sizes) as one of the things on the horizon in the slides (nor in the talk; doh!).