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PHPNW09 - Manchester, October 10th 2009

Lorna Mitchell wrote to let us know about PHPNW09, which will take place at the Manchester Conference Centre in Manchester on the 10th October, 2009. This is the second PHPNW, which as far as I'm concerned makes it an annual event.

PHPNW09 is a showcase of all the PHP talent in the North of England, from sea to shining sea. Last year's conference was a huge success. This year, beside the main event on the Saturday, there will be a Pre-conference Social on the Friday evening (9th) and an informal wind-down on the Sunday (11th). Overall, a magnificent weekend of laughs and coding:

Call for Papers
Calling everyone who knows something and is prepared to share! PHPNW09 is coming to Manchester on 10th October 2009 and we need speakers. This year the aim is to build on the great line-up of PHP talks from last year designed to raise everyone’s game, and this year we’re looking for sessions that will help us collaborate and perform in a team setting. Its a one-day event and we will have sessions of both 30 and 60 minutes in length. PHPNW has a definite local feel so we’re looking for new talent as well as established and experienced speakers – so if you’ve got something to say, submit a paper!

YAPC::Europe - Lisbon, 3rd-5th August 2009

The YAPC::Europe conference will take place in Lisbon from the 3rd to the 5th August 2009. A fine array of speakers are scheduled for 4 tracks over the three days, with a sizeable handful of O'Reilly authors on the bill: Dave Cross, brian d foy, Damian Conway and, of course, Larry Wall.

If three days isn't enough for you, there are training courses before and after you can attend.

On the Thursday and Friday after the conference, Damian Conway, brian d foy and Mark Keating are hosting courses on New Features of Perl/Perl Best Practices, Mastering Perl and EPO Workshop, respectively.

And Dave Cross is running a two-day Introduction to Perl course for the two days prior to the conference. Newbies can start the weekend with no understanding of Perl and exit on Sunday evening with enough knowledge to enjoy the rest of the conference.

Indeed, Dave's course isn't the only conference feature to caters for Perl Rookies. Says Dave:

Send a Newbie.
"Another interesting experiment this year is Edmund von der Burg's 'Send-a-Newbie' programme. Edmund was concerned that there are usually very few young people at YAPC, so he decided to do something about it. People can donate money and Edmund (with a committee of trusted advisors) will allocate that money as grants which can be used by young people to pay to get to the conference. See http://www.send-a-newbie.com/ for more details."

What is this?
We want to cover the costs for young Perl programmers to attend the 2009 European conference in Portugal, funded by donations from individuals in the Perl community. Attending YAPC::EU is a great way to get to know others in the Perl community and we don't want anyone to be excluded.

On top of that, O'Reilly's very own Josette Garcia will be attending the conference, which is enough to make any event complete.

OpenSQLCamp, European Edition

The Mighty Kris Buytaert writes:

OpenSQL Camp is a fresh, free, unconference conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first edition of OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, in November 2008, it was a huge success.

Lenz posted the invitation to OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition which will take part in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany. St. Augustin is located close to Bonn and Cologne.

Attendees of this conference are mostly open source developers and end users/open source enthusiasts. The FrOSCon organizers agreed to provide us with a "Developer Room" for both days, which allows us to organize our own subconference about Open Source Databases. The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases.

Popular Open Source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL will probably be well presented, but the other lesser known platforms will also be around and there are still slots available for talks!

Interview with Francesco Cesarini, co-author of Erlang Programming

The great Francesco Cesarini, co-author with Simon Thompson of Erlang Programming talked to me at QCon about what makes his book different:

And here's Francesco advocating for Erlang Factory, which will take place in London from the 25th June 2009, with Erlang University starting on the 22nd June 2009:

Erlang Programming - Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson

Erlang Programming is an in-depth introduction to Erlang, a programming language ideal for any situation where concurrency, fault tolerance, and fast response is essential. Erlang is gaining widespread adoption with the advent of multi-core processors and their new scalable approach to concurrency. With this guide you'll learn how to write complex concurrent programs in Erlang, regardless of your programming background or experience.

Written by leaders of the international Erlang community -- and based on their training material -- Erlang Programming focuses on the language's syntax and semantics, and explains pattern matching, proper lists, recursion, debugging, networking, and concurrency.

This book helps you:

* Understand the strengths of Erlang and why its designers included specific features
* Learn the concepts behind concurrency and Erlang's way of handling it
* Write efficient Erlang programs while keeping code neat and readable
* Discover how Erlang fills the requirements for distributed systems
* Add simple graphical user interfaces with little effort
* Learn Erlang's tracing mechanisms for debugging concurrent and distributed systems
* Use the built-in Mnesia database and other table storage features

Erlang Programming provides exercises at the end of each chapter and simple examples throughout the book.

Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson will be signing their new book Erlang Programming at the Erlang Factory. Buy on the day and get 35% discount off the cover price.

What does the future hold for MySQL?

An Interview with Michael 'Monty' Widenius

Josette Garcia writes:

I met Michael “Monty” Widenius, founder of MySQL and co-author of MySQL Reference Manual (O’Reilly), during eLiberatica conference last month. As MySQL, Sun and Oracle are very much in the news at the moment, I thought you might want me to share with you some of the talks I had with Monty.

 

Q.  When and why did you start MySQL or how did MySQL come about?

A. Netbas, the origin of the MySQL projected was started in 1981 after a discussion with Allan Larsson that there where not any good general database programs around. I said I had some ideas of how this should work and sent Allan a working prototype a week later. (Note that this was on a computer with 28K of ram!)

We used Netbas over years (changing names a couple of times: the last name was Unireg) to develop applications like book-keeping, warehouse systems etc. Over time we started to use it to store and aggregate data for large data warehousing applications. In 1995 we needed methods to generate web pages with information from the database. I removed the GUI interface from the application and report functions and instead added an SQL interface and MySQL was born.

David Axmark then convinced the other MySQL founders, Allan Larsson and me that we should release MySQL to the masses under a free and dual licenses product.

eLiberatica

Josette Garcia writes:

eLiberatica, organized by Lucian Savluc and Agora, is over.

As usual I met some great people:
. Georg Greve, President - Free Software Foundation, Europe - FSFE works to create general understanding and support for software freedom in politics, law and society-at-large.
. Danese Cooper told a few "True Stories from Open Source". In the taxi to the airport she also told me of the importance of "R"- more on this later, probably toward the end of the year.
. Teo Constantin Teodorescu gave a very funny and deep talk "National Unique Queue Register can fight against Corruption".
. Monty Michael Widenius - "Open Source licensing and software quality" and David Axmark - "Clouds on the Horizon? Get Ready for Drizzle", the two men behind MySQL.

Other exhibitors included:
. Fedora
. Romanian Free Software
. Mozilla
. RadGs Software
. Byblos

What did I learn?
. From a very student-oriented conference, this year the business people made over 50% of the number of delegates, even though the conference was held at the Universitatea Politehnica. Is Open Source at long last finding notoriety/credit among the business community?
. Once Again, ladies were well represented at this conference - approx 20-25%. It seems that education is different here and that girls are not automatically pushed to humanities studies and boys to science. One day we might see this happen in Western Europe.
. Unfortunately, I feel that the credit crunch hit Romania pretty badly and that money is very tight and jobs not secure. It is always a pity that a nation which has been fighting to recover from a very bad political and economical past, has to continue struggling due to events occurring outside its boundaries.

Programming Ruby 1.9 - Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt

9781934356081: Programming Ruby 1.9 by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler & Andy Hunt - Prices: £38.50

Ruby is a fully object-oriented language, much like the classic object-oriented language, Smalltalk. Like Smalltalk, it is dynamically typed (as opposed to Java or C++), but unlike Smalltalk, Ruby features the same conveniences found in modern scripting languages, making Ruby a favorite tool of intelligent, forward-thinking programmers and the basis for the Rails web framework.

This is the reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including all the new and changed methods introduced by Ruby 1.9). It also includes all the new and changed syntax and semantics introduced since Ruby 1.8. Learn about the new parameter passing rules, local variable scoping in blocks, fibers, multinationalization, and the new block declaration syntax, among other exciting new features.

PyconTre, Italia - Round-up

PyconTre, Italia is finished. Goodbye beautiful Florence, goodbye sunshine. During these two and half days I met some great people - around 350 of them. Some of the top talks included:

. A retrospective of how the community helped build Python 3.0 Guido van Rossum
At long last I met Guido van Rossum the creator of Python. Guido kindly helped me sell the last copies of our new Masterminds of Programming by plugging the title during his talk.

. Lo Zen e lArte della Manutenzione delle Astrazioni Alex Martelli
Alex Martelli (author of Python in a Nutshell and co-author of Python Cookbook with his wife Anna) gave a super talk Lo Zen e lArte della Manutenzione delle Astrazioni otherwise known as Zen and the art of abstraction maintenance. A shorter version of this talk will be heard at OSCON 09 in San Jose.

. On Improving the air-speed velocity of a Python Fredrik Lundh
During PyCon US, Google announced the Unladen Swallow projects, which aims to speed up CPython by a factor of 5 on modern multi-core machines, whilst keeping source-code compatibility for both Python applications and extensions. In his talk On Improving the air-speed velocity of Python, Fredrik Lundh discussed where the project is today and whats coming up.

. Distribuire programmi Python con PyInstaller Giovanni Bajo
I am told that Giovanni Bajo's talk was superb but unfortunately, I cannot find a translation of the title or resume so do get your Italian working.

During PyCon Due, last year, there was a non-organized recruiting session. This was so successful that this year a fully organized session was planned. I understand that this was a great success and that a company came out with 15+ CVs. Another highlight was the lightning talks which were full.

PyconTre es morte, viva PyconQuattro.

High-Profile Speakers at "eLiberatica – The Benefits of Open and Free Technologies" Conference

We have the pleasure to announce the third edition of one of the most important Open Source and Free Software conferences in Eastern Europe: eLiberatica 2009 that will take place on 22nd- 23rd of May, in Bucharest, Romania.

Some high profile speakers this year: Danese Cooper, "Monty" Michael Widenius and David Axmark, Georg C. F. Greve and more.
Some of the organizations who are sending representatives to talk at eLiberatica: Free Software Foundation and FSF Europe * O'Reilly Media * OSOR (European Union) * Monty Program * Drizzle * NL Net Foundation * IBM * Fedora * The University of British Columbia * Mozilla Europe * RedHat * French University Agency * Gartner Romania * BIT Software * Open Agile Romania * SUN * Dell * Microsoft * RadGs Software * and more.

More about eLiberatica?
One of the biggest events of its kind in Eastern Europe, eLiberatica brings community leaders from around the world to discuss about the hottest topics in FLOSS movement, demonstrating the advantages of adopting, using and developing Open Source and Free Software solutions.
Beyond this, the event tries to promote these open and free concepts in other fields, covering but not limited to, business, media, digital civil society and education.

We are confirming more than 400 attendees this year.

The registration is still open (and the ticket price this year very low); we would be more than glad to see even more out of the country participants than last year.

For more details, please check eLiberatica 2009 conference website.