Sean Coates has a reminder posted to his blog for all of the aspiring PHP speakers out there to get their proposals in for this year's (well, next year's) php|tek 2008.

I just want to drop a quick reminder that the php|tek 2008 Call for Papers is about to close (on Oct. 31), so if you've been dragging your feet, now would be a good time to stop doing that and send in your proposals.

Some of the topics they're interested in this year are rich application development, PHP4->PHP5 migration and looks head at PHP6. Check out the Call for Papers page on the php|tek site for the full list of information you'll need to include along with the summary for your proposal.

In a post from Lukas Smith, he gives responses to some of the questions/comments people have to say about PHP, specifically in how it's related to Java.

Whenever someone asks me why PHP is more "agile" than Java, I tell them that in PHP you can break most of the rules your comp sci course told you about and get away with it. Of course this means that you need PHP developers to constantly clean up their code.

He talks about rules for developing in PHP, one being not to change a method so make it incompatible with its parent. He recommends one way to avoid this - the E_STRICT warning to protect against possible conflicts and issues (the same kind of functionality in PHP6 is in E_FATAL though).

Please, lets get the sense back here. Lets not make things that are not fatal an E_FATAL. Lets use E_STRICT for the pedantic, lets add a E_DEPRECATED for all things deprecated. Lets not kill what makes PHP more agile than those other languages that think they know what I should be spending my time on.

In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.

Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.

He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.

Derick Rethans has posted a quick tip to his blog today:

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The (technically) three-line code uses ISO format for the date to tell you which day is the starting day of that week and which is the end. He only explains this format just a bit, so if you want more information, check out the strtotime function page.

With just a quick handy code snippet posted on his blog today, Derick Rethans shares these two lines to help grab the start and end dates of a week in question.

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The code makes use of the ISO8601 datetime functionality to grab the correct value from a strtotime command. Derick also briefly explains how it all works.

Just a quick note for all of the Zend Framework fans out there waiting impatiently for a new updated package - your wait might be just about over!

According to a note from Andi Gutmans on the framework mailing list: We are working hard to get a new tarball rolled, bug DB up, etc. We should be getting this out the door this coming week. In the meanwhile, feel free to grab the latest version from SVN http://framework.zend.com/download/subversion. Also Mike has updated the manual just recently including some of the language translations contributed by the community (Thanks!).

The message was posted yesterday, so, if all goes well, something should be posted by the end of this week. There's been tons of work going on behind the scenes on the Framework by all sorts of talented people, and if you'd like to check out a bit of it, take a look at the mailing list archives for the project.

Jim Plush has release the latest version of his My-BIC Ajax/PHP framework today - version 0.6.2 - which sees the end of alerts() for debugging.

First, he notes that My-BIC has its own SourceForge project and can be found here. The current site will still be kept up to date as well.

Secondly, the bigger change - the removal of alerts() for the debugging messages in applications. They've been replaced by a list of items with expandable labels. Here's an example of this new feature.

He makes the suggestion for a possible use of this new tool too - remote debugging by having a user/customer see the debug information and give you the results.

As noted in his latest blog entry, Chris Shiflett and the Pro::PHP podcast are again collaborating to bring the listening community more "Ask Chris" shows.

It's been a few months since Episode One, but thanks to Marcus, Ask Chris is back on the air. The format is a bit different - instead of doing separate shows, we'll be doing a short segment at the end of each interview.

This interview is with David Sklar of Ning. He and Marcus discuss Ning, of course, but David also provides some good perspective on the state of technology and how the definition of a programmer is becoming more and more inclusive.

This episode of Ask Chris is about email injection, a topic of growing concern for PHP developers.

You can find out more about this addition to the Pro::PHP lineup and how to subscribe to the podcast over on their site.