Andrei Zmievski

I gave a talk on PHP and Unicode at the Zend Conference 2006. It was actually at 8:30 in the morning on the day of my birthday (November 2), which I thought was a nice touch on Zend’s part. Additionally, all the sessions in the conference were numbered with track number and order, so my session’s number was 2-11. Coincidence or not? In any case, the slides are online now.

A quick note to let people know that the slides from my php|works 2006 talks — “I Love Unicode, You Love Unicode” and “PHP-GTK 2” — are available online now.

Just got back from OSCON which was again in Portland this year. The conference was excellent, as always and so were the events and extracurricular activities. The sheer variety of talks at OSCON is exciting and frustrating at the same time: exciting because I attended several talks that I would not get to hear at a more focused conference, and frustrating because of the time conflicts between these talks.
The slides from my own session on PHP 6 and Unicode are online now.
By the way, if you like books just a tiny little bit and happen to be in Portland, do yourself a favor: set aside a full day and visit the Powell’s. It the world’s largest independent used and new bookstore (covering, oh, a couple of city blocks) and has an amazing collection of books (including some very rare ones). You could literally lose your friends and family there and wonder among the stacks for hours whilst salivating giddily over the titles on whatever topic your mind can imagine. And don’t worry, there is always the coffee shop to come back to and get provisions to sustain yourself.

I gave the Unicode talk, which is slowly evolving, at the PHPConf in Moscow in May (more on that trip later) and at the New York PHP Conference last week. The slides for both can be found on the talks page. Next week is the ApacheCon Europe in Dublin and then OSCON in Portland last week of July. Stop by and say hello. Unicode is not scary, I promise.

I was in Orlando this past week at the php|tek conference, put on by php|architect. I gave two presentations there: PHP 6 and Unicode and Regex Clinic. The slides for both of them are available on my Talks page.
The social highlight of the conference was, perhaps, the dinner outing on Thursday night which culminated in an impromptu speed beer drinking contest. Guess who started it. (hint: name starts with Ras and ends with beer glass slamming on the table)

I just got back from Montreal where I gave two talks at the PHP Québec conference: one on PHP 6 and Unicode and another on PHP-GTK 2. Both of my sessions were full and I got very positive comments from the attendees. I think I am getting close to figuring out the right proportions of theory, examples, and demos that should be present in a talk.
For PHP-GTK 2, I showed off a couple of apps that I quickly wrote a few days before and that make use of Yahoo! developer APIs. The first one lets you pick two airports and calculates the distance between them as well as showing the local maps and weather info. The second one uses Flickr API to display a continuous grid of latest images from flickr.com. These were about 100-200 lines of code total each, so, of course, Rasmus had to brand them as Pidgets.
The conference itself was well organized and attended and had a number of interesting talks. Kudos to Sylvan, Yann, and others for their efforts.
The post conference program for each day was full as well. On Thursday night we had a dinner for speakers and organizers at the always excellent À la Decouverte, a small and cozy restaurant with a big taste. I had marinated snails with mushrooms in garlic butter and phylo dough for appetizer, and ostrich medallions in blueberry sauce for main course, and both were delicious.
On Friday night we made a visit to the ever popular Les Deux Pierrots which is hard to describe to someone who’s never been there before. Two bands alternate on the stage and play anything from popular rock tunes (think Take Me Out) to French camping songs to something resembling a hoedown. The level of energy is amazing, and you can’t help being pulled into the manic foot-stomping/hand-clapping atmosphere. Great place to let off steam, basically.
And Saturday morning found us at the Sucrerie de la Montagne, a “sugar shack” outside Montreal that lets you take a peek into the process of obtaining and making maple syrup and also manages to feed hundreds of visitors an hour at the rustic wooden tables in its giant restaurant. The rule of thumb is, you have a big (> 1 liter) bottle of syrup on the table and it has to be gone by the end of the meal. So you put maple syrup on and into everything: bread, pea soup, omelette, sausages, meat pie, mashed potatoes, pancakes, and coffee. We almost managed to finish ours.
Pics should be coming up soon.

I got the notice today that PHP Quebec 2006 committee has accepted two of my talk proposals: one about PHP 6 Unicode support and another about PHP-GTK 2. So, see you in Montreal in March!

Photos from OSCON 2005 are uploaded. I stole some from Marcus, and no doubt will steal some from others as well.

I am back from OSCON 2005, where I presented a talk about the work we’re doing on the Unicode support in PHP. The slides are available here. Mine was not the only talk regarding Unicode at the conference: Dan Kogai gave a presenation on Perl 5.8 and Unicode, and in my opinion, PHP 5.5/6 or whatever it ends up being will have a much better integrated runtime support in this area, not to mention an awesome set of i18n functions thanks to ICU. The goal is to make PHP as good as or better than any other Web development language out there when it comes to Unicode support, and so far that pretty much means Java. I am confident that that goal will be achieved.
This conference was, by any account, an excellent one: great talks, good networking, seeing Portland for the first time, and of course a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

Posting this out-of-order, but it couldn’t be helped.
A week before Cancún, I was at the International PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition, held in Amsterdam. I gave an inaugural talk on the new Unicode support in PHP and also on the current state and development of PHP-GTK 2. This was my first visit to this city and I was determined enjoy it, despite the yawn-inducing 6 am departure time out of San Francisco and the three hours of turbulence after take-off. The good thing was that on the flight to Dulles airport the person seated next to me turned out to be the head of software department for Affymetrix, and we spent the whole time talking about DNA micro array, exons, TOUFs (transcripts of unknown function), and other such topics.
Continue reading “Amsterdam” »