Since some others already blogged to be within the first 1000 Zend certified engineers, I feel to raise my 2ct, too. I took the exam during the PHP Quebec conference in Montreal last March. I was actually suprised to pass the exam without any kind of preperation, after Marcus, John and some others convinced my to have a try (it was free there, so I took the chance). At least that shows that you should be able to pass the exam with real-world PHP experience.

Congratulations to Zend for making their certification that public!

I'm sure it's a good marketing thing for them and at least the certification allows employers to devide between real developers and script-kiddies in some ways. For those certifieds I'm actually not sure, the 1000 mark means only good. Maybe the certification exam is to easy? One has to concider that, the more certifieds exist, the more it reduces the "level of professionality" attested for them and the more likely the certification looses it's use for them as their own self-marketing instrument.

Anyway, having a certification in place at all is a good thing. I hope that Zend comes up with a more advanced version of the certification (maybe some "Zend certified PHP wizard"?). This would be a great addition and allow people to show their advanced PHP capabilities. Let me know, if there is going on something in that direction.

So long, happy PHP coding! :)

The call for papers of the eZ publish Conference 2006 (taking place in Skien - Norway this June 21-23) is not closed, yet.

Since Norway in summer is absolutly beautiful, I can only recommend to propose a talk! :) Beside that, I hope for many interessting and innovative stuff to be presented there. This years topic is Enterprise Open Source So take your heels and send your proposals to us!

The call for papers of the eZ publish Conference 2006 (taking place in Skien - Norway this June 21-23) is not closed, yet.

Since Norway in summer is absolutly beautiful, I can only recommend to propose a talk! :) Beside that, I hope for many interessting and innovative stuff to be presented there. This years topic is Enterprise Open Source So take your heels and send your proposals to us!

The call for papers of the eZ publish Conference 2006 (taking place in Skien - Norway this June 21-23) is not closed, yet.

Since Norway in summer is absolutly beautiful, I can only recommend to propose a talk! :) Beside that, I hope for many interessting and innovative stuff to be presented there. This years topic is Enterprise Open Source So take your heels and send your proposals to us!

Bug report #35958 must have the most obscure one ever:

"strftime usually returns a string from the number of seconds since 1 jan 1970. Now, it lags and returns a string representing 23 seconds too late."

If you know what's going on though, it isn't really that weird. Every once in a while the IERS announces a new leap second to "keep the broadcast standards for time of day close to mean solar time". At the moment the difference is 23 seconds which is reflected in comparing the leap second adjusted time zone information file with the non-adjusted one. You can see the leap second with this little shell script:

#!/bin/bash
export TZ=Europe/Amsterdam
date --date "@1136073621"
date --date "@1136073622"
date --date "@1136073623"
export TZ=right/Europe/Amsterdam
date --date "@1136073621"
date --date "@1136073622"
date --date "@1136073623"

The output is:

Sun Jan  1 01:00:21 CET 2006
Sun Jan  1 01:00:22 CET 2006
Sun Jan  1 01:00:23 CET 2006
Sun Jan  1 00:59:59 CET 2006
Sun Jan  1 00:59:60 CET 2006
Sun Jan  1 01:00:00 CET 2006

The output with the "right/Europe/Amsterdam" timezone is actually the correct time, but this will obviously confused too many computer programs. Most often you will not see this one in use.

The new date/time code in PHP 5.1 does not support the leap second either. I was playing with it while developing, but thought it to be to confusing. Seems I was right there :)

The 4.annual eZ publish Conference will be arranged from June 20 to June 23, 2006 in Skien, Norway.

The theme of the eZ Conference 2006 is: Enterprise Open Source.

Topics for talks should include: eZ publish, Enterprise CMS, and Enterprise PHP. The deadline is fast approaching - January 16th - so get those submissions in today! You can check out this page for the complete details...

A very new group of PHP users has been formed in Angers. They seek to not only discuss PHP related topics, but also other new technologies around the web. A mailing list will be quickly set up to communicate between the members meeting places and various other events.

You can check out thier site for complete information...