Apparently, I find it much easier to point at other people’s content than to write my own. As a result, I seem to be spamming my blog with external links.

I’m not sure if it’s better to post these in a separate sidebar, aggregated in one daily post, or the current solution. It seems Jeremy has similar issues.

Please let me know what you prefer.

I will continue to aggregate these links in my del.icio.us account, so I guess you could always subscribe to that RSS feed instead.

Now that’s I’m back from FOO Camp, I’m checking my calendar to see what conference events I have coming up. For those of you keeping track (hi mom!), here they are:

• Microsoft PDC: September 13-16 in LA. I haven’t managed to wrangle a chance to speak yet. :)
• Zend/PHP Conference: October 18-21 in Silicon Valley. Speaking about eBay Web services. Final talk TBD.
• ApacheCon US 2005: December 10-14 in San Diego. Speaking on “Consuming Web Services Using PHP 5”.

I may also go to Web 2.0 and the 4D Summit, but I have yet to finalize those events.

The ApacheCon talk should be quite cool, as I will be showing off nifty real-world web services examples. For example, sucking del.icio.us RSS bookmarks into a WordPress blog, or mashing up eBay Web services search results with the Google mapping API. Here’s the full abstract:

As we move into the world of Web 2.0, PHP developers must increasing include Web services in their toolkit of skills. This session covers how to implement REST and SOAP clients using the latest PHP 5 extensions, such as ext/soap, SimpleXML, and xsl.

This is not an academic talk discussing theory and specifications. Examples show applications of popular Web services, including del.icio.us, eBay, and Google Maps.

Don’t be left behind. Come to this session and learn how to integrate Web services into your code.

I have most of the code already written in various places, so there’s only the problem of creating the slides. Once I know more about my other talks, I will pimp them here, so stay tuned for all the details.

On one hand, most people don’t think time zones and day light savings time would be interesting. On the other hand, when you’re sitting between Ray Ozzie and Larry Wall in a 6 person conversation, everything is interesting. :)

Now I am in a meeting on online map APIs — people are talking about mashups. Don, Paul, and others are discussing their experiences.

Big issue: geocoding data. Google wants to expose it, but it’s a legal thing. They are working on it. Don’s using geocoder.us. He likes it. Rich Gibson from geocoder.us is here.

We are working to hack this into Chris DiBona’s demo app.

That idea seems to have died down. Now Don is showing how he is doing geocoding of photo data.

Everyone is using PHP, except for Paul, who is using Perl.

I’m back from LinuxWorld. Slides from my talk (well, similar slides, I modified them slightly) are available.

I have to say, I haven’t loved going to LinuxWorld for the past 2 or 3 times, but today was the first time I was able to tell why. At first, I thought it was the presence of all the large vendors (IBM, Novell, CA, Intel). Actually, those booths are more funny than annoying. (See the CA dancing penguin from January, 2004.)

It’s actually the hardware/IT nature of the show. I’m a software guy. I’m not interested in your network monitoring applications or your license deployment systems. I guess they’re necessary in large IT setups, but I don’t want to hear people screaming at me about them over their loudspeakers.

Still, it’s good to see my friends working the show. Even unexpectedly ran into Rick from Zend hanging out at the Intel booth. Talked to a couple people at the MySQL showcase, including the SugarCRM folks.

Did a little bit of eBay evangelism with the Zimbra folks. They make an Exchange server replacement, but they also have an AJAX mail client interface that will scan messages and hyperlink phrases (similar to the Google Toolbar). Seems only natural that they’d link to eBay items, don’t you think?

In the end, I ditched the O’Reilly and MySQL parties., as I couldn’t bare to stay at LinuxWorld until 7 pm. Too much work and chaos.