On thePHP.cc blog they share some thoughts about conferences and, more specifically, the way that PHP conferences are handled with respect to speaker compensation.

Attending an IT conference is fun. You get to meet people, listen to interesting presentations, maybe even participate in a workshop where you can expand your skills. Furthermore, there is free food, evening activities including parties, and networking. At the very least, it is a break from doing time in the office.

Each tech community, including PHP, has some well-known speakers that frequently present at conferences around the world. Admittedly, we are among them. How cool must it be to get all this excitement of a conference, and even get paid to do it?

Wait a moment. Nobody said that conference speakers get paid to do their job. And in fact, they are not.

They talk briefly about the history of conferences in the PHP community and how, despite the industry standard being to the contrary, they'll often pay for speaker travel/accommodations. Despite the time taken to prepare a presentation at a PHP conference, (most) speakers do not anticipate being paid for the speaking time itself. The post ends with a discussion about the amount of time they (thePHP.cc) spend around conferences and when they expect that an event would help out speakers with costs involved with the event.

Think you know a lot about PHP? Well, the folks at PHP Weekly and mogosselin have put together a fun little quiz you can use to see just how much you know your favorite language.

Question topics cover things like:

• Notable people in PHP's past
• "Meta" about the language itself
• The future of the language
• Projects from around the PHP community
• PHP security topics
• Plenty of tricky code questions

...and that's all the hints you're going to get. Go over and test out your knowledge and see how you rank against the other developers taking on the challenge!

SToyan Stefanov has posted some examples of what sort of output can be made with the imagefilter function in PHP.

Here's the list of filters he applies:

• Brightness
• Grayscale
• Contrast
• Colorize
• Edge Detect
• Emboss
• Gaussian Blur
• Selective Blur
• Mean Removal
• Smooth
• Negate

And, as a sort of a bonus, he includes a lazy way to make your image look like it's sepia toned.

SToyan Stefanov has posted some examples of what sort of output can be made with the imagefilter function in PHP.

Here's the list of filters he applies:

• Brightness
• Grayscale
• Contrast
• Colorize
• Edge Detect
• Emboss
• Gaussian Blur
• Selective Blur
• Mean Removal
• Smooth
• Negate

And, as a sort of a bonus, he includes a lazy way to make your image look like it's sepia toned.

On CodeSnipers.com there's a new book review of one of O'Reilly's PHP-related offerings, "PHP Hacks" by "Jack D. Herrington".

I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!

She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.

On CodeSnipers.com there's a new book review of one of O'Reilly's PHP-related offerings, "PHP Hacks" by "Jack D. Herrington".

I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!

She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.

In a pointer from this blog post on Adam Trachtenberg's site today, there's a story of some struggles that Tim Bray has been having when it comes to online calenders and coordinating with those in his life.

Here’s the problem: Dr. Wood and I both have complicated jobs plus we have a family, so just like everyone else in the world, keeping in sync is a problem. Herewith a painful half-finished story of trying to solve it with technology. The conclusion is painfully obvious: whoever first provides a family-scheduling tool that non-geeks can use and Just Works with the tools most people run their calendars on is going to make a lot of money and do Humanity a major service.

He goes through tagged: calendar fun icalendar webcalendar calendar fun icalendar webcalendar

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