The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are …

I just sent out the invitations for the PHP Vikinger event. My method for choosing who to invite was pretty simple - I chose people listed in the the PHP and PEAR credits who I had written personal email to in the last few years.

Nepotistic? “Nay”, say I, “Nepotastic!” I know that the people I invited are cool, which will mean a good event for people who register. Also, as we have registrations, it won’t be too elitist or exclusive.

If you are curious, read on for the entire invitation (minus the list of attendees.)

NOTE: If you didn’t get an invitation email, then hold tight - you will still be able to register in a week or so.

Aloha $person,

This is an invitation to the PHP Vikinger - read on for details.

WHAT IS IT?
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The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be …

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe …

The organizers of the PHP Québec Conference were gracious enough to give me an unedited copy of my Copyright, Contracts and Licensing for PHP Developers session.

I cleaned the audio up last night, stripping out some of the more odious filler words (I seem to say “Umm” rather often), shortening pauses as I switched slides, removing redundant asides (like asking if there are any questions, when no questions then follow) and excising the introduction and applause.

After a good deal of consideration, I did chose to leave the errors and other flaws in the content presented. These flaws were presented to the audience and they should stay in the recording.

Of course, I don’t want people to be mislead by any of the flaws; to prevent this, I am transcribing the entire talk, …

Frappr is an interesting way of showing the geographic locations of people that share a common interest. It's based on Google Maps and of course there is MySQL Users Group, too!

Last night I returned home from our internal MySQL Developer Meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The trip again was uneventful (something I certainly don't mind) and I used it to catch up with email and other work that I could not take care of while being at the conference.

The event was very well organized (kudos to Carol and the rest of the team!) and I enjoyed meeting old and new colleagues. It was nice being able to discuss stuff from face to face and hearing about what's cooking at the various other parts of the company in more detail. Too bad that we sometimes had so many tracks in parallel - it was difficult at times to decide which session to attend without fearing to miss something else. I gave a presentation about SUSE Linux (why it's the best Linux distro to use) and how our developers can help to foster our user community.

On Monday evening, we arranged a small meeting with local community users, some of them …

I am excited to announce that the phpMyAdmin project confirmed to be present at the DotOrg Pavilion of our MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara next month. Thanks a lot to Marc Delisle for the quick reply and arrangement of a representative. One more good addition to the excellent program we've already lined up!

By the way, we still have some open slots to give away for interested projects! So if you're a developer or member of an Open Source project that utilizes MySQL, here's your chance to show off your work to a very special audience. The exhibition will be open on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we'll provide each project with one free conference pass that will entitle you to …

I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.

Next week, the MySQL Development Team (around 100 people) will meet for our internal annual development conference in Sorrento, Italy (between Naples and Salerno).

On Tuesday evening (19:30), we would like to meetup with local MySQL users and affiliated OSS developers to chat about MySQL and OSS and go out for dinner together. So if you are located close to Sorrento, please get in touch with us at community at mysql.com for further details! Looking forward to meet you there - I will be attending the conference until Wednesday.