Wozniak, Shlain, Geek Squad and IdeaFestival = idea challenge
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Blog: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain lend support to an idea contest promoted by IdeaFestival and Geek Squad.
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Dave Dash has posted his own summary about a recent PHP-related conference that happened in Amersfoort - SymfonyCamp.   He talks about some of the presentations given, the other conference attendees, Fabien Potencier's Symfony 2.0 talk, his own talk on the Zend Search Lucene component and the "clean up" project they spent a day working on.   You can also check out Fabien's overview of the event (with more photos) for a different perspective.
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Wired's geek festival comes up big this year with lifelike robots, homes of the future and immersive games. Peep a preview of this weekend's activities.
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Blog: Tim and I gave back-to-back keynotes at this year's Ubuntu Live.  Tim is not nearly as dogmatic as I am, and here's how we came out....
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Matthew O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.   Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.   He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].
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Gabe: We did a really awesome project (can I say it"s awesome, is that okay?) for Wired magazine. You can either go pick up the most recent issue and read it there or check it out on their site. They asked us to do a piece for them handicapping all three of the next generation systems. We tried to be as fair as we could and hopefully you"ll get a kick out of it.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Blog: A melding of the minds aims to prosper at the IdeaFestival and the "What's Your Big Idea" contest.
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"Come Out and Play Festival" to bring together out-of-the-box designers, techno-philosophers and utopian free spirits. Oh, and gamers too. Photos: Playing PacManhattan
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Cal Evans himself covering ways you can attract quality talent to your organization.   Along the way I've picked up a few truths, mainly stolen from people like Joel Spolsky. Some of these ideas can be found in an article I wrote a while ago titled "Nerd Herding", a link to which can be found in the show notes. Recently, I've had many people ask me variations of the same question, "How do I find talented programmers?" So today, I'm going to share with you some of the things I've learned.   The latest show is available for direct download or, as always, you can subscribe to their feed to get this and lots of other great shows.
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A sampling of ideas from the next generation of consumers--and entrepreneurs.
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As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:   I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.   The post includes Karol's solution - a method that involved using the Zend Framework as a backdrop. You can see the application in action on Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.
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Geekdad challenges you to recreate an item, character or scene from your favorite geek movie.
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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Search Engine Friendly Design and Coding (Especially Flash)  Its been almost a year since I attended a session of this nature. I was not too impressed last time, so I am hoping things have changed within the year. Brett introduces the panel, by saying its the first time WMW is doing ...
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Security researchers at South Korea's first international hacker conference rip holes in Linux and VOIP. But where are the drinking games? Quinn Norton reports from Seoul.