Both Keith Casey and php|architect have posted announcements about this year's CodeWorks traveling conference tour (previously announced here). First, from the official php|architect post:

CodeWorks 2010 (CWX for short) is a series of one-day technical conferences presented by the php|architect team and sponsored by Adobe. It's slated to stop in five cities, starting November 9th. [...] Each stop features talks presented by the php|a gang on various PHP-related topics, including object orientation, scalability, security, development tools and efficiently building your own APIs.

And from Keith Casey, a presenter on the tour:

This time around we've simplified the whole thing. The team is smaller. The format is simpler. And we're limiting the cities a bit more. We have four people doing 6 presentations on one track across five cities in a span of 10 days. If you've ever been to a tech conference, you know how much effort it can be.

For more information on the conference, check out its official site for dates, times and registration.

The php|architect folks have posted the details about this year's CodeWorks conference happening nine days in November and spread across five different cities all over the United States including Seattle, Orlando and Austin.

This year's theme is "Roadies, not Rock Stars". We are not rock stars, ninja's or guru's. We are code monkey's just like you and we do it because we love it. Just like you, we like to share what we have learned so others can benefit. Come join Marco Tabini, Ryan Stewart, Keith Casey and Cal Evans when we come to your town! Spend a day with us as we share with you what we've learned.

At each stop, this crew of four will present a one-day series of talks on things ranging from unit testing to APIs to working with OOP in PHP 5.3. You can find out more about the sessions that will be presented at your closest location on the CodeWorks site. You can also register and get in for the Early Bird price of $75 USD for a single ticket or $70 USD if you're part of a group.

Ibuildings has officially wrapped up their "Elephpant Challenge" contest they were holding to solve a routing problem that involved a globe-trotting PHP ElePHPant. Their latest post (from Ivo Jansch) reveals the results.

Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

The shorted route, found using the Haversine Formula, involved stops in Mexico City, Cupertino, Hawaii and the Tower of Pisa. The winner for the Medium category was Andy Thompson with an average of 10 landmarks with 38 lines of code (in 333 seconds). The winner in the Senior category was Michiel Brandenburg with coming out on top with a runtime of 50 seconds in 46 lines of code.

The post also includes some interesting observations they found about the event including contestants' general adherence to the specs, how the choices the developers made really made a difference in the outcome and how difficult running a contest like this could really be. Congrats to the winners!

Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch have started up a bit of a contest for those owners of elePHPants out there - the elePHPant World Tour (ewt08):

Here's the basic premise. It seems obvious that elePHPants love to travel. Equally obvious is the fact that a lot of PHP developers love to take pictures. So, let's combine the two. If you spot an elePHPant while traveling, like near a landmark, or making it's way through the airport, snap a picture. Upload it to flickr and tag it with ewt08. Thanks in no small part to a bit of Web 2.0 magic and Wordpress, we'll steal the picture from flickr and post it on the blog.

In January of 2009 the PHP Women group will take a look at all of the photos and pick the best ones. There's multiple prizes so far including a copy of Zend Studio Professional and admission to the Dutch PHP Conference '09 (check out the about page for more).

Ivo Jansch has posted some great news to the Ibuildings blog today - things about the upcoming Dutch PHP conference.

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th).

The first bits of great news surround the attendance - the conference day alone is over 95% full and the tutorial day is even more packed with only a few seats left. A pre-conference part has also been set up (see the post for the details of when and where). They've even set up a page of travel information to help you if you're looking for a way to get to the Amsterdam RAI for the two-day event.