Zak Greant has announced that invitations have been sent for the PHP Vikinger code-fest to be held in Norway June 24-26. 50 invitations have been sent to mostly PHP core developers and those active in the PHP community. There are also 50 open registration spots available, as well as an additional 50 invitations that will be sent based on invitees' recommendations. Marcus Whitney, of php|architect also published a brief interview with Zak, which you can read on the php|architect site. You still have time to register-- for more information, you can visit http://phpvikinger.org or read Zak's blog post.

The author of this title, Rob Richards, announced in his blog that he will be giving away a free copy of his book. Simply send him an email describing why you want a copy and why he should give it to you and not someone else. Deadline for entries is midnight EST April 30, 2006 so be creative. He will choose the winner based on the most interesting email. Read his blog post for all the details.

Zend Developer Zone has posted a brief article with some "Gotchas" for the PHP newbie-- things that don't seem to make sense on the surface, but once you take a closer look, things seem to be clearer. If you're a newb or know someone who is (or even for someone who's been around a while) this article is definitely worth the read. It can be found at: http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/168

Codewalkers has announced their latest free PHP Book giveaway- this time they are giving away 5 free copies of the book Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition. For more information on the giveaway, and to sign up or see a sample chapter of the book, visit Codewalker's site at http://codewalkers.com/raffle.php (no purchase necessary, just enter through the site.)

We now see PHP as an official mentor listed on Google's Summer of Code, so any students out there should take note! Other PHP-related mentors include Drupal, Eclipse, Joomla! and Moodle. Mentors are continually being added however, so keep checking back. Also, mentors are starting to add project ideas so you can see if there is something that catches your eye.

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:

• Validate_FR - Validation class for FR
• FSM 1.2.4 - Finite State Machine
• LiveUser 0.16.11 - User authentication and permission management framework
• LiveUser_Admin 0.3.8 - User authentication and permission management framework
• Net_UserAgent_Detect 2.2.0 - Net_UserAgent_Detect determines the Web browser, version, and platform from an HTTP user agent string
• DB_Table 1.3.0RC5 - Builds on PEAR DB to abstract datatypes and automate table creation, data validation, insert, update, delete, and select; combines these with PEAR HTML_QuickForm to automatically generate input forms that match the table column definitions.
• I18N_UnicodeString 0.2.1 - Provides a way to work with self contained multibyte strings
• PEAR_PackageUpdate 0.4.2 - A simple way to update packages at run time.
• Validate 0.6.3 - Validation class
• Net_CDDB 0.1.0- Package to access and query CDDB audio-CD servers

And for PECL, we had:

• mqseries - mqseries client library

As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net and http://pecl.php.net.

See you next week with more tidbits from the PHP world!