If you're headed to a technical conference in the upcoming months but don't know anyone else attending, you might want to check out a few tips that Lorna Mitchell has put together to help break the ice.

These are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.

Her five (well, six) tips are simple ones - things like getting in on the pre-conference hype (on things like twitter or IRC) attend some of the "outside the sessions" events and, if you can, staying around an extra day after the official conference is over.

On the Ibuildings blog cal Evans has made a new post about the future of PHP - the future is now!

PHP is at an inflection point. We are at a once in a lifetime place where several factors are coming together to help boost the profile of PHP up and above the "scripting language" label and into a serious tool for enterprise development. Many developers inside the PHP community have looked at PHP as serious development tool for years. [...] In a growing number of large development shops, PHP has gone from "why" to "why not".

Cal mentions a few reasons why now if the time for PHP developers to help push PHP over the top and even further into becoming the well-known, well-used powerful language that it is. Things like the low cost of Open Source tools and the upcoming release of PHP 5.3 are two among many things that could mean PHP's "coming of age" into Enterprise development.