Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today with a huge list of podcasts for your listening pleasure - the complete list of ZendCon 2010 sessions as recorded at last year's event.

I've decided to [...] just upload them all so that you can download them all in preparation for this year's ZendCon. As you listen to these paragons of PHP goodness think of how wonderful it would be for you to be there in person and talk to these founts of wisdom. You will find several of the speakers from last year at ZendCon as well as a bunch of new ones. While you may have missed the early registration there is still time for you to get your tickets to ZendCon 2011.

There's about 75 of them for you to enjoy and not much time for you to catch up - this year's ZendCon happens in October (17th-21st) in Santa Clara, CA. They have a great list of sessions for this year's event too (which I'm sure will all be recorded for release next year as well)!

Sean Coates and Paul Reinheimer, the hosts of the Pique Web podcast, have released the latest episode - Episode 7 - Christmas Stories.

In this episode a few friends sit around a table, share some great beer, and share user-submitted stories of coding in the first person.

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

• Chris Shiflett's article on Google Web Accelerator
• Russian roulette for bash
• Firefox extensions to automate SQL injection testing

You can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your convenience.

Stoyan Stefanov has an interesting way to "automatically" create podcasts based on your blog posts using PHP, ffmpeg and the "say" command in OS X to create the mp3 result.

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it's for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I'll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file.

The post shows how to use PHP's DOM functions to grab the title and contents of your post (a simple example, at least) and push that information out to a text file. From there, the "say" command is run on it with the "output" file parameter and the result is sent to ffmpeg for compression into an mp3.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswani looking at the reading and writing of metadata for mp3s and images with two handy PECL extensions.

It's just that every time I sit down to have a go at [finding something in my photo or mp3 library], the sheer volume of data overwhelms me and I take the command decision to deal with something easier instead. Sounds familiar? If it does, help is at hand, in the form of PHP's ID3 and EXIF extensions. These extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it's easier to navigate and search. Keep reading, and I'll show you how.

He installs the ID3 package first (via the pecl command line tool) and gives a few sample scripts to pull the metadata information out of a mp3 file as well as update/remove the information that's already there. He even sets up a simple SQLite database to store the information he's retrieved.

The second part of the tutorial looks at grabbing the image metadata via the EXIF extension. This can yield all sorts of information including date/time the photo was taken, the resolution, the model of the camera and various camera settings at the time. He includes a sample script that automatically makes thumbnails for the images via the exif_thumbnail function.

Cassandra Clark (from the Sun Developer's Network) has passed along a note that a podcast from one of the members of the PHP Women group has been posted - an interview with Lorna Mitchell.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of meeting Lorna Mitchell, at ZendCon in Santa Clara, California. We first met at the Sun booth (yes, Sun has products to support PHP). We struck up a brief conversation as I tried to get her to join the Sun Developer Network. I learned she belonged to PHPWomen.org which is a very influential group in the PHP community. [...] In this podcast, you'll learn more about Lorna herself and the PHPWomen.org. Please enjoy and stay tuned as I will try to have more members of this group in to talk with me.

You can grab the mp3 directly from the SDN Channel website.

As a part of this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (2008), the PHP Women group hosted an unconference session. They talk about the session in this new post to their site.

At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled "Women in IT". In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP. We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded.

You can download the audio from the phpwomen.org website and check out the forum entry to continue the discussion. Their post also includes several talking points concerning women in the IT industry and how PHP Women can help.

With the demise of the muxtape service, a new option has popped up - the ability to run your own version with a PHP application called OpenTape. Lifehacker has posted a guide to getting this software set up and working.

Beloved music playlist hosting service Muxtape's gone offline to "sort out a problem with the RIAA," but if you've got some web server space, you can host, stream, and share your own digital music mixes Muxtape-style with newly-launched PHP web application Opentape.

It's not a direct copy, but it's pretty close (and pretty easy to get up and running). It'd PHP5 only, so if you're still living in the past and only have PHP4, you're out of luck. Their guide shows a sample installation on a Windows machine, but its not much of a stretch to follow along on a unix-based machine. You'll also need the curl extension to get some parts of it working - it's not required, though. They have a work-around for that too.

Paul Morgan dropped me a line to let me know about the latest of the talks from this year's PHP London conference being posted:

• Scott MacVicar and Mike Sullivan - Lessons learned from the front line. They provide useful checkpoints across a wide range of topics to help keep projects in check.
• Marcus Bointon - Mail() and Life after Mail(); (Marcus has recorded an additional segment to cover the slides he was unable to cover at the conference. This is well worth a listen for the tips he passes on in handling bounces and getting emails through to the intended recipient).
• Frameworks debate (Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony) plus an extended audience debate and an interesting and humourous last thought from a member of the audience.
• Derick Rethans (closing keynote) - Personal homepage tools have grown up. Derick looks back over the development of php and offers some tips and insights into using php to it's fullest potential.

Each of the above talks also has audio (mp3) you can download and listen to to follow along with the slides. Check out the main conference site for more great PDF and audio of the presentations from this year's event.

The latest episode of the Zend Developer Zone podcast, PHP Abstract, has been posted today - an interview with Zak Greant:

Today I'm going to talk to Zak Greant. Zak's web page tells us: Zak Greant's love of Free Software and Open Source is turning him into a penguin. When not practicing how to waddle or wear a tuxedo, he passes the time running the Foo Associates strategic consultancy and by working with various Free Software and Open Source projects and companies.

There's three ways to grab this episode - the mp3, the in-page player and, of course, the feed you can drop in your aggregator of choice to keep up to date.

The PHP London Conference group has posted three more mp3s of presentations given at this year's conference - one from Scott MacVicar, another from Zoe Slattery and the last from Anthony Phillips:

• Scott MacVicar talking about Sqlite3, explaining what it is and how it's best applied with PHP. [mp3] [pdf]
• Zoe Slattery talking about testing PHP itself and how you can write tests to help improve PHP in the future. [mp3] [pdf]
• Anthony Phillips talking about IBM's Project Zero, how it can give your existing code a new lease of life in a REST context amongst other subjects. [mp3] [pdf]

Check out the conference's site for other great speakers and their sessions (with mp3s and pdfs).