Last Saturday I was at the 4Developers Conference in Poland, as I mentioned before.

There weren't many PHP developers at the conference, and I could really feel the language barrier was a problem (many of the English speaking speakers drew much smaller audiences than the Polish ones), but I met some nice people (such as Neal Ford, Ted Neward and Raymond Lewallen), and in terms of speaker treatment this was by far one of the best conferences I've been to. If you get a chance to speak at one of the conferences that ProIdea organizes, don't hesitate and go!

The amount of speaker dinners/lunches, and long nights in bars with countless Vodka (in the form of so-called 'Polish Mad Dogs') and other alcoholic beverages, and in general the way speakers were supported was amazing! Andrzej, Anna and Magda: thanks for making this a great experience for us, and if you ever do a PHP conference, ping me

Here are the slides from my presentation:

Those who have seen me speak before will notice that this is a more generic version of my "Enterprise PHP" talk, catered to a mixed audience.

This weekend I will be speaking at the 4 Developers Conference in Krakow, Poland.

Since I'll be opening the 'dedicated languages' track, which has a mixed audience of PHP, Ruby and Python developers, I revamped my 2008 Enterprise PHP talk into "Dynamic Languages in the Enterprise" and extended the scope to include Ruby, Python and Perl. Let's see how that works out.

I have never been to Poland before (despite having some Polish roots several generations before me), so I'm excited to be there.

Ibuildings colleague and friend Stefan Koopmanschap will also present, he's doing his 'The Power of Refactoring' talk. Other speakers in the same track are ThoughtWorks's Neal Ford and Ted Neward.

If you are from Poland and know me from the PHP community, come and say hi!

Many conferences and events follow a simple principle. They use a short tag for twitter (e.g. #dpc) and a full tag for less real-time content (e.g. dpc09 on Flickr or blogs). It's not a rule that's set in stone, but it kind of emerged as a best practice based on people's experiences. Other conferences stick to one tag, such as "phpuk2009" last friday.

For those that don't adhere to this best practice, here are the most important reasons for doing so:

• You only have 140 chars on Twitter. The shorter your tag, the more actual content you can add.

• Many attendees use a phone to tweet, and many phones use a T9 editor. Again, the shorter the better. Also, entering a year such as '2009' not only requires 4 key presses, it requires 4 'hold' keypresses on many phones, or it requires the T9-editor to be set to numeric mode first.
• Findability. This morning I was trying to find blogs and pictures from #phpuk2009. Because the same tag was used on all media, the blog posts were hard to find between hundreds of tweets in the Google results. While it's interesting to find those as well sometimes, their real-time nature makes it much less interesting as a search result once the event is over (and it's far more easier to use search.twitter.com to view them in the correct order.

To sum up a few counterarguments:

• When you search it's hard to distinguish between different installments of the event. While I'd say that in blogs and Flickr and other things you would search through Google that is true (I recommend always adding '09' to tags there), for Twitter that is not an issue, because your search is always in order of date anyway.

• "I have phone X, it's really easy to add the year to any tag." Sure, but not everyone has phone X.
• For conference organizers, it's harder to scan the web for relevant content if different tags are used. Actually that's not the case: it's easier to find relevant non-realtime content and relevant realtime content when 2 different tags are used. See 'Findability' above.

There is a group of people that takes this a step further; they argue that a date should never be added to any tag, because appending a separate year tag makes it much more flexible (e.g. #dpc #2009). That's an interesting approach too, but makes it slightly less convenient for my taste (and generally requires even more characters), so I'll stick to #short for real-time content and #full09 for normal content.

What do you think?

Last saturday the sun was shining into my room and it nicely enhanced the gross state my keyboard (a wireless Logitech natural keyboard) was in, after years of typing, which must be zillions of key presses (and having breakfast while reading my daily portion of websites):

At that point I thought that either I would go out and buy a new one, or I'd try something radical. I remembered from childhood that you can put LEGO bricks into a washing machine if you put them inside a pillow cover, and I planned on doing something similar with the keys of the keyboard. While googling if that wouldn't erase the print on the keys, I actually found a guy that used the dishwasher to clean the keyboard.

This could be a bit tricky, but given the state it was in, I thought 'oh well, why not'.

So, after removing the batteries and taking off the wrist pad, I put it in the washer:

I just tossed it in the washer with the rest of the dishes; upside down so the keys would get the most thorough treatment. I added a normal 3-in-1 cleaning tablet, and had it run at the 50 degrees Celsius 2-hour Economy program.

When it was finished, I took out the keyboard, and it was completely soaked:

I poored out the water, took out all the keys so the keyboard would dry more easily, and left it to dry:

After 5 days (it may look dry, but you have to make sure all the inner parts have dried too), I put all the keys back in. This was an interesting puzzle; I had pictures of the layout but I managed to put in everything without looking at them . I inserted the batteries and voila, it worked out of the box!

The end result:

So, YES, you can put a wireless keyboard in the dishwasher!

Disclaimer: This may or may not work for you. If you give it a try, it's at your own risk. Do share your experience in the comments, but don't complain that it's my fault if it fries your keyboard.

P.S. I expected the stickers on the back to come off, but although they have a few small bubbles now, they came out fine.