I've been asked to post some updates on DPC2008.

The first results of the CFI have been announced. Most requested speaker was Derick Rethans. He'll be at DPC and present an XDebug workshop on the Tutorial Day, and a presentation about the ezComponents framework on the main conference. Most requested topic was a look ahead at PHP5.3 and PHP6. We've found Stefan Priebsch, experienced speaker and expert on PHP migration, to be willing to present this topic. On the main conference day, he will give an overview of the future of PHP.

There are 2 more slots to fill. We're already talking to candidates so expect some more speaker announcements soon.

The total line-up right now is: Zeev Suraski, Marco Tabini, Sebastian Bergmann, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Lorna Jane Mitchell, Derick Rethans, Stefan Priebsch, Fabien Potencier, Stefan Koopmanschap, Gaylord Aulke, Dennis-Jan Broerse and myself.

The Tutorial Day is almost sold out, there are about 20 tickets left, so hurry if you want to join one of the tutorials. For the main conference day, which has a bigger capacity, 40% of the tickets is sold right now. If you haven't purchased your tickets yet, you might not want to wait until the end, we expect to sell out (luckily not as fast as last year, but it will happen :-)).

Main website: http://www.phpconference.nl
Registration: http://www.phpconference.nl/register

Last friday was the third edition of the PHPLondon conference. I had the pleasure and honor of opening the conference with my 'Enterprise PHP' talk. (My slides are on slideshare).

I've attended the first PHPLondon conference 2 years ago, and it was great to see the progress that they made since then. The venue, the presentations, the catering, the organization, everything was improved significantly and contributed to a great conference. I'd like to thank Paul Morgan, Matt Raines and all the crew for organizing this conference. I'm proud that my company was allowed to sponsor this event.

And as with most conferences, the social aspect was even nicer than the actual talks. I've met many old friends, and was introduced to many new ones.

It started with the pre-conference speakers dinner, where I had some interesting discussions on a range of topics including music, PHP, DRM, web 2.0 and how social networks are changing the recruitment business, with Paul Morgan, Ian P. Christian, Toby Beresford, Jonathan Mills and Matt Raines. After dinner, we went to the Theodore Bullfrog pub where members of PHPLondon had just had a presentation on Imagick by Mikko Koppanen.

In the pub I had an interesting talk with vBulletin's Mike Sullivan about running a succesful commercial php project, and met Lorna Jane Mitchell for the second time in two weeks and got to know her better half Kevin.

For someone who lives in a country where hardly anybody goes to a pub before 23.00h, it's still a bit weird to see pubs in London closing at that time, but we went back to the hotel and some of us continued drinks and conversations in the hotel bar. Derick Rethans at one point used the phrase "Why does everything around me look green?" at which point I thought it would be better to look up my bed so I would have a clear mind the next morning. Had a final quick glance through my slides before I went to bed, but I actually fell asleep behind my laptop in the process, so I left that until the morning.

Friday was the conference day, which, as I mentioned above, was great. After the conference there were a few hours of drinks and snacks. Richard Harrison was kind enough to give me one of the famous blue Elephpants (will upload picture soon) and he told me about his new company, Pluggable, which looks very promising.

At the end, a group of roughly 35 went to the Bavarian Beerhouse where we had lots of German beer, German food and 'Dirndl' waitresses.

And that marked the end of a great conference. It's one I'm sure to visit again next year!

I'm proud to announce that we're organizing another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, with the help of the great people at Zend. It will be in Amsterdam on June 13 and 14 this year.

Last year we organized it for the first time, and based on feedback from our visitors we have made several changes to this years event:

• We now have 2 days instead of 1 (1 tutorial day + 1 conference day).

• Last years event was sold out way too early so we increased capacity (still, don't wait too long to get tickets ;-)).
• A new website with more relevant information, which will be updated regularly as we move closer to the conference. The new site is at www.phpconference.nl.
• We only fixed part of the program, and visitors can help finalize it (more on that below).
• The conference will be in English, because we had more visitors from abroad than we had expected last year.

So far, we already have been able to attract great names from the PHP community such as Zeev Suraski, Marco Tabini and Sebastian Bergmann. More will be added as we get closer to the conference.

To finalize the schedule, we want to do something different. Instead of the more common 'Call for Papers' where speakers can submit their talks, we're doing a 'Call for Ideas', where we want to hear from our visitors (or potential visitors) who they would like to see at the conference, or which topics they would like to hear about. We can't guarantee availability of speakers of course, but we'll try to match the requests as close as possible. Enter your ideas at the box in the bottom right of the website.

Oh, and for those who were present last year, this time we have a dedicated internet connection for speakers and a redundant beamer.

I hope to see you all in June!

A few weeks ago Matthew gave me a deck of php playing cards and there's been some kind of weird poll going on over here regarding the Queen of Clubs, aka Joyce Park.

The picture in this card looked kind of weird, so someone started a discussion whether Joyce is either a) wearing a yellowish t-shirt with a black trim, or b) it's not a t-shirt and she's wearing a black necklace. (See picture here).

It seemed that everyone had an opinion and, nerdy as we are, soon there was a poll up on one of our whiteboards. The losers would buy the winners candybars.

Eventually, there were 9 of us (including me) that voted for the shirt, and only 4 that voted for the necklace. It's clearly a shirt in the picture. Right?

Yesterday, finally, using the obscure means of posting a comment to Joyce's blog, coworker Peter found out the truth.

So I've lost a Mars.

But this smelled fishy. There appears to be an original picture in which the distinction is clearly visible. It appears that the card has been heavily photoshopped. No wonder her necklace turned into a shirt.

So bottom line: Cal, you owe me a Mars.