LornaJane

I'm giving a talk next week in a Beauty Salon. Yes, really :) There is an event entitled "Beauty and the Geek" at Heaven Spa in Didsbury - details on their blog - and the event is on 26th November. It sounds like a fun mix of beauty techniques (mouse-finger massage, anyone?) plus a talk by yours truly ... although I need to a) figure out how to give a talk with no projector and b) live up to my reputation as "influential blogger" - if you're going, then let me know and I'll see you there!

Its been creeping up on us for a while but now PHPNW is almost upon us! PHP people will be arriving from all sorts of places and coming together to attend this event. The schedule is full of excellent talks by a selection of speakers - and we'll round the day off with a lively panel discussion about the PHP community itself.

We've got socials happening right over the weekend - with a pre-conference social on Friday night for people to meet up, catch up, and generally hang out (and drink), the weekend will get off to a good start. Saturday is the main conference event, ticket price includes full access to the event, a year's subscription to php|architect magazine (in print as well as digital format), lunch, and access to the evening party with yet more food (hotpot, since we're in the north!), and of course a selection of drinks.

For those coming from further afield, there is plenty to do in Manchester over the weekend. The conference itself is very central, so you have easy access to the entertainments of the city centre. The shopping is excellent in the city centre and for those who prefer a geekier pastime, entry to the Museum of Science and Industry is free and it is open 7 days a week.

I know there are plenty of people going and I'm really looking forward to it - to catching up with old friends (and colleagues, I don't see them very often!), to making new ones, to hearing the talks that will be going on, and of course to a few drinks and a good time. Hope to see you there :)

I'm currently struggling a bit with my Christmas crochet, so I'm posting here to hopefully pressurise myself into actually finishing it in time. The plan is to make a blanket for my granny for Christmas (its a surprise, I'm banking on her not learning to work the 'net before then) and I've been working on this for 6 months already. It will have 36 squares and I'm currently at 24 squares and losing my way! Here it is so far:



The spaces are the squares I haven't made yet ... I need to get a move on!

Announcing the second girlgeek dinner in Leeds! The event will be Wednesday 3rd December, at The Loft Leeds and tickets are available now, priced at £15. Monica Tailor from Kilo75 will be speaking at the event, and it will have quite a Christmassy feel.

The rules of the girl geek dinners is that any geeky girls can go - and not just tapping-into-a-black-screen-in-a-darkened-room geek girls, there is no minimum requirement! Guys are also welcome but they must be there as the invited guest of one of the geeks. I'm open to persuasion if anyone would like to attend as my guest - and for the girls, I'll see you there :)

I was recently interviewed by Cassandra Clark from Sun about PHPWomen - they've put the interview live now and you can find it at http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/introduction_to_phpwomen_org

I am working on a site at the moment whose front end is in Dutch - and for an English-only speaker, its an education! Most things default to English and I had no idea how to use PHP to work with other languages.

In particular I needed dates like "Donderdag 23 Oktober", and I was sure PHP should know how to do this without me creating arrays for days of the week and months of the year. With some help from my friend (thanks Derick) I discovered that there is a date function in PHP that takes into account the locale of the script, called strftime. The machine needs to have the locale already installed, then you can just do:

Setlocale() will return false if the language isn't available on the host system, so its possible to check and maybe try a few likely ones or let the user know. This was useful to me and will work for other languages too - you just need the locale installed and then set with setlocale.