The night before the conference, a social event will be held at the Brook Green Hotel. The following day all talks/receptions will be held at the Olympia Conference Center followed by another trip to the Brook Green Hotel that evening. Speakers for the day include Andrei Zmievski (Open Source Fellow at digg), Chris Shiflett (of OmniTI) and Hank Janssen (of Microsoft).

You can still register for the event at a cost of £120 covering the day of talks and a buffet lunch. Costs associated with the evening activities are not included.

The 'Extract Method' is one of the most common refactorings you will ever do. It is also one you will frequently see implemented on the Refactor tool menu on various IDE's. What this method basically does is to take a group of related code and convert it to a function with a appropriate name that easily explains the purpose of the code.

He gives a code example - converting hotel room price to points based on the currency its requested in - both with and without the Extract method in use.

Now for our grand prize winner, a free ticket to ZendCon '07: Chris McKinney [with his slogan to end the commercial] 'a shiny badge with your name on it!'

The next contest follows in a similar theme, but this time the prize at stake is three free nights at the hotel where the conference is being held, the Hyatt Burlingame. Entering this contest is even easier than the last one - especially if you're already headed to the conference. All you have to do is register before September 12th - it's that easy!

I have been inspired by Cal Evans' mashup experiment, which he did a presentation on at the Dutch PHP Conference last month. Also, I was annoyed with having to consult many different resources when I plan a business trip. So I began building frekfly, my own little mashup.

The post mentions two versions of the mashup - an initial version that pulled the services together and a second version that added in a web service for hotel information. This current version can be found at frekfly.com

Zend and MySQL are getting together to throw a party at OSCON and you are invited! Come join us at the Doubletree Hotel (5 minute walk from the convention center)for drinks and snacks.

Check out the ZDZ post for a map to the location and the times for this free party. They have a list on Upcoming going to get an idea of the attendance, so if you're planning on hanging out with the PHP crowd, let them know you're on your way.

Registration is still open for the 2006 D.C. PHP Conference.

Great speakers: Rasmus Lerdorf (who got the PHP project off the ground in 1995), Chris Shiflett, Adam Trachtenberg, Laura Thomson, David Recordon, Elliot White III, Mike Naberezny, Will Fitch, Ben Ramsey, Tony Bibbs, Brian Ashe, Shen Guo and Bram Vogelaar.

Our L'Enfant Plaza Hotel venue is walking distance from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum and the new American Indian Museum.

To get the full details or to just sign up right away, head over to the main conference site and get all the details. Pricing starts at $695 USD ($400 for students) and includes two days jam packed with PHP goodness.