Monday April 20th A gorgeous sunny spring morning. I was up early and took a little time to take photographs in St Stephens Green.

The big news of today was that Sun bought Oracle for 9.50 a share. As Jan works there this news effects us, we’ll have to wait and see what happens with this over the next few months. At lunch time I went for a walk along the canals and enjoyed the sun. I took pictures of little clusters of tiny daisies growing in the grass.

I was thrilled to find on my walk home the park was filled with happy picknickers lazing in the sun. I watched some old Italian guys attempting to take pictures of pretty girls sun bathing, probably to take home to show their mates. We cooked a yummy chicken stir fry and discussed what to do next for Ginger Robot, Jan worked on a design while I did some Sys Admin for it. A very productive night.

Tuesday April 21st
After work I went for a drink with Laura at the Ely bar on the Canals. We discussed the next OSSBarcamp, and what we’d like to change this time. For one I’m going to add a registration module, rather than using blog comments, maybe some threaded commenting to encourage discussion too. The afternoon was just beautiful and I sipped my Champagne out on the terrace in the sun. Some other girls joined us and we wore sunglasses and enjoyed the view across the water.

We continued on in the restaurant next door, for the Ireland Girl Geek Dinner. I got to meet some new people this time and had some great food and wine. Amanda Scott gave a talk about taking charge of our careers, getting us to plan the next step we want to take and an action item as soon as this week. mine is to learn more about Django to work on my next open source project. Martha showed off her Roombas, talking about the educational value of owning one as well. Luis and I caught the last train home. As I walked home I noted the beautiful scenery ‘Large beautiful cherry blossoms on a clear navy spring night but add to the images of the future in my thoughts.’.

Wednesday April 22nd
Again a gorgeous day, I stopped while in the green just to take in the view, enjoying the colours of spring and the silence from the traffic outside. I am worried that so many people have commented that this is our summer. After work I wandered up Grafton street, I was curious why there were hundreds of people lined up, I assumed a football match had special tickets for sale. I found out later that they all were there to hand in their resumes for jobs at Londis, a common convenience store here in Ireland.

That night I booked all our accommodation for our trip to Scotland in August. I’ve booked mainly hostels, including a haunted castle where Jan and I will have to sleep in separate dorms, SPOOKY. It’s going to ROCK. I’m looking forward to the Isle of Skye and our hostel that’s walking distance from Loch Ness. Let alone being able to pick some more Fringe shows back in Edinburgh with Miki and James.

Thursday April 23rd
I joined my workmates over at the Barge for a farewell for one of our workmates heading to South America. We discussed her trip and I can’t wait to do the same thing myself some day, maybe 2011 for my 30th. Some girls joined our group early in the night and wanted to do a demonstration of the makeup line they were trying to sell. Most of the girls jumped up and moved out of the room leaving the girls to sell to a group of mostly guys, they even suggested breaking the eye pencil in half to split costs and that the guys might want some bronzer! We ran out of beer before we ran out of daylight, so I had a safe enough walk home. A saxophonist was playing jazz as I walked up Grafton Street. I walked through some low lying mist towards home but could spot the dark navy sky above me.

Friday April 24th
A miserable day with plenty of rain and fog. I upgraded my laptop to Jaunty Ubuntu 9.04. I edited pictures of New York and got an order in ready for my next scrapbook. I signed Jan and I both up for a 5 mile run in July held in Pheonix Park. We have a lot of work to do to be fit enough for that.

Saturday April 25th - ANZAC Day 2009
Jan and I jumped up early and went for a run. This is very unusual for us, but we had fun though Jan finds my pace a little slow. We went to the Woolshed who’d promised an ANZAC day tribute, but unfortunately they delayed it until more people would fill the bar. Instead we had our own minute of silence remembering those lost to the pointlessness of war. We did enjoy some Australian treats as well, a lamington and a Coopers Beer, I bought some Cheezels for later.

Jan and I went shoe shopping, hoping to find us both some new sneakers for our jogging sessions. Jan found some cool Nike airs and a pair of summer sandles for GUADEC on the Canary Islands. I found nothing. All the womens shoes seemed to be for show rather than practice. I just want the same as Jan found, but black and in my size. One shop only had shoes that went up to size 5 womens! I’m a size 6, who knew that was so large.
Me eating Cheezels THE RIGHT WAY! :D

We met up with the group celebrating the release of Ubuntu Jaunty at Jimmy Chungs restaurant where we ate some yummy things including mango pudding. Later we crossed the road to Messr McGuire’s for the official launch party. Quite a few people showed up and we had a really chilled afternoon. We looked at the sunny day outside, over the Liffey. We had a few pints, and many laughs with everyone. I won third prize in a quiz about Ubuntu, but unfortunately the cool brown shirt was far too big for me to ever wear it so I gave it away.



I love this image of Maciej marking our papers with the great features of the pub behind him.
There’s some more great pictures in Lauras Jaunty Release Party Collection

It was only 8pm, still daylight, and unfortunately our night was nearly ruined when a severely drunk guy decided to urinate all over the floor of the train carriage then walked up and down the aisle waving his penis around. Luckily he decided to do this moments before our stop and we (and everyone else on the carriage) jumped off, and security were making their way up the platform.

We spent our night relaxing, watching TV, we’ve found The Big Bang Theory which is fantastic, it’s about a group of academics who hang out in a share apartment in California, many nerdy jokes, and situations we’ve found ourselves in at times.

Sunday April 25th
Today we got so much done. Although we started slow with popcorn and TV and relaxing. Our weeks groceries were delivered and we cooked for the whole week. I made some ANZAC biscuits, Jan made salmon tartlets, a lemon chicken and new potato bake, and some white wine and shallot chicken to have on salads later in the week. OOOH yum it’s all delicious and so healthy, our fridge is also now filled with colourful salad veges ready to finish making all these meals. YUM.

Later in the afternoon Jan and I went jogging again, this time doing an extra interval on a slightly longer path. I was envious of Jan having new shoes though, can’t wait to find mine. On the final stretch we noticed the Kilbarrack shops has a new gym that has opened, it turns out they’ve got a great deal where we can just pay for 7 days at a time, and not pay if we’re not going to be there! That is amazing. We both want to sign up soon, I can’t wait to use the exercise bikes.

I’m so proud of us going for these jogs, we started slow so should be able to keep it up and make it to the race in July fit and ready! I think the gym is a sign.

* Install OpenID plugin
* Active OpenID plugin
* In the open ID settings change the user to be Subscriber, have all other options off we don’t care about people needing a password to comment here.

* Set up wordpress install to accept new accounts.Settings->membership->anyone can register

* Install Role Scoper http://agapetry.net/
* Activate Role Scoper

* Install Adminimise
* Activate Adminimise
* In the Adminimise options deactivate everything in the write options for the Page.

Create a page that you want people to edit.
Before you publish scroll down to the Editors section from Role Scoper and set it on for Subscriber.

Go to the template and add some code to add the open ID for that page.

<?php
if ((get_the_title() == "Schedule" && !$user_ID)) { //
$editLink="wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=".get_the_ID();
print "<form name=\"loginform\" id=\"loginform\" action=\"/wp-login.php\" method=\"post\">";
print "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"redirect_to\" value=\"".$editLink."\">";
openid_wp_login_form();
print "<input id=\"wp-submit\" type=\"submit\" tabindex=\"100\" value=\"Log In\" name=\"wp-submit\"/>";
print "</form>";
}
?>

It was unfortunate that at PHP Conference UK the speaker from Adobe, Mihai Corlan, decided to add inappropriate material into his talk, namely a mostly naked woman strutting across his screen. Mihai played with the application making delighted noises, and when he was done, he brought her out again. I personally don’t find it offensive but I cringed because I know many people do. It’s a bit like looking back at the 50s and seeing all the behavior that was considered normal back then that wouldn’t be tolerated today.

Lets keep such things out of our technical communities and events. A similar mistake was made in Australia at Linux events and people of different religions, cultures etc. and people who just don’t appreciate that kind of behavior in public complained. Mary wrote up some great tips for organisers about such things. It turned out many people in the audience were made uncomfortable and some offended at the time in this Adobe presentation but didn’t feel comfortable speaking up about it until later.

Worse still these paying participants felt they did not get anything out of this presentation because they were unable to concentrate after this happened. I hope the Adobe presenter Mihai Corlan was made aware that this is not appropriate for a technical presentation. Finally I hope conference organisers will take more care to make their presenters aware of some guidelines so not to offend or make attendees uncomfortable in the future.

I was tagged by Ken Guest to share seven random/weird things about myself.

1. Apparently I first met my husband at Linux Conf Au, 2001 (Jan 2001) but I only remember meeting him for the first time at the Sydney Linux User Group meetings. We got to know each other over many events over the next six plus months, however we didn’t go on our first date until July 2001, Jan hired a car and we drove 300km away from Sydney, to a cocktail party in Canberra, ACT
2. I first used PHP to write the software for my Thesis, I wrote a web based application for children to collaborate ideas and come up with an invention in small groups to then present to the whole class. I picked PHP at random, ignoring languages I already knew and had used during my degree. I’ve pretty much worked with it ever since
3. I sometimes wear a communicator while we’re watching Star Trek - my favourite series is Voyager
4. I’m a natural blonde, something a lot of people I’ve met in the last year don’t know or realise, because I dye my hair dark now
5. My hobbies include Travel, Reading (mostly Fantasy), Photography and Scrapbooking, I’m active in the Irish paper crafting scene
6. I love the outdoors Camping, Swimming, Fishing but I don’t do them since moving to Europe at all, I would rather live in the countryside, except I love the events and activities that happen in cities.
7. I once, as part of a small team, had to count the lightbulbs in the whole of our university, UNSW, this included monitors and fax machines, it was to figure out how many were left on when no one was inside, most were on.

Tagging Others
I’m going to wuss out with just three people, because I’m not really into this sort of thing, it was a compliment to get tagged by Ken though, and has been pretty interesting getting to know a bit more about the developers whose blogs I read.

• Laura Czajkowski - She’s organising OSSBarCamp here which should be a great event - I’m trying to help her and she always deserves a shout out!.
• Stella Power - First other PHP chick I heard about here in Ireland, and I’m curious to learn more about her
• Gita Malinovska - I find her blog posts interesting because she’s new to running her own business, and bettering herself daily, by learning ways to improve herself and the business. I have a goal to go back to working for myself some day.

Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

I wrote on the OSSBarcamp blog about heading to FOSDEM Feb 6-8th, Last year was fantastic, ( I also blogged about it). It will be great to catch up with our friends that can also make it along, we seem to only see them at confs these days.

The schedule is now up and I kinda hope a couple of PHP talks get on the schedule as well, but you’ll probably find me in the Gnome room, MySQL talks, lightning talks, out on the corridors madly trying to catch up with people I only see once every six months. i.e. trying to be everywhere all at once :).

Other than tech events I’d like to see the comic book museum this visit. I’m very worried about our aerlingus flight being cancelled or late, I have such bad experiences with Aerlingus.

Last night Jan and I went to the Dublin Science gallery for a lecture “The personal side of personal robots” by Dr Cynthia Breazeal. Dr Breazeal is from MIT and is the director of the Personal Robots Group. She studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and now specialises in Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction. I thought I’d write down what I remember of the talk and link it up so I can do some more reading through the research later.

The topics covered gave us an insight into what is going on to bring robots into our homes. Starting with looking at the history of robots through seeing that robots are already in some of our homes, for example the roomba. Next up is where is the current research is going on and where it’s heading to. Surely we all want robots at home and soon. Asimo as part of a family

The desire for robots to be in the home brings up a range of questions outside of the current tasks of existing robots. Scientists now have to look at the way robots will interact with humans to achieve tasks and make that interaction interesting for the longer term.

Dr Breazeal’s research has been covering social intelligence including having a parent for a robot and making the robot an infant. Then she is able to test the robots ability to mimic and learn by mapping to that parent. We saw the robot Leonardo at this stage. Not only did the examples with Leo show him learning the difference between safe and dangerous and divergent belief systems with positive reinforcement, Leo is fluffy, cute and just gorgeous. Dr Breazeal was very excited when the demonstration video was played that showed Leo using information he had just learned from a teacher to solve a problem. She emphasised that this was ground breaking behaviour.

The next fascinating robot shown to us was ‘Autom’, This robot was designed to be integrated into peoples lives to help them reach long term weight management goals. Results from experients with Automa showed people preferred to interact with the robot than pencil and paper and still more than a computer program with exactly the same information provided. More interesting agian was the the participants named their robots and even dressed them. Some even needed to say goodbye when they were taken away again. This showed emotional relationships with the tools in their homes and something I think those of us desiring a robot buddy want.

The goal of how to have a robot integrated into the owners social network was worked on with ‘Autom’ where the data Autom collected could be shared with the health maintainers support network, including nutritionist or doctors. Having a robot become part of the team or group of contacts as well as being a useful communication tool is something I’m looking forward to.

Dr Breazeal’s current research is into having robots become another communication method for us. The robot used in this case is “The Huggable”. The huggable is designed to enhace the users current social network. One example use case of the huggable was to introduce touch into remote communication, for example a parent away on a business trip who could still read and interact with a book as well as the child.

Examples of robots used as theraputic, communication enhancing tools were ‘Paro‘ who is a baby seal given as a pet to people with alzheimer’s. Paro makes me feel sad even just looking athim but I think he’s wonderful. The famous dancing keepon is working towards helping children with autism.

Finally there was an experiment done with the MDS models. These experiments were to see how humans react with robots depending on facial expressions, shaking hands, female vs male traits etc. Basically how trust worthy the robots become in these situations.

One key point I got from Dr Breazeal’s lecture was that doing experiments with robots and humans is helping us understand human behaviour as well. She mentioned that some of the results they found don’t have matching results with human to human behavior, that work would still need to be done.

Finally it was question time. Jan was very curious to hear about what work was happening to get out of the uncanny valley, Dr Breazeal says that there definitely is work in that area. I asked what robot should the hobbiest be aiming to get started with. Dr Breazeal recommends the mindstorm nxt and their programming language scratch.

There are a lot more thoughts going on in my mind and I’m sure Jan is just as full of robotics ideas and experiements and wishing we could be getting on with that right now. I know we’d love a robot that could interact in the way we see in the movies, even more so I desire for tools that can help with our daily lives. Not only chores but organising myself, managing my tasks, a PA, cooking assistant, information prioritiser, document manager but ofcourse most of all… a trusted robot friend.

youtube video of the keepon:

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Wow there doesn’t seem to be any other PHP developers out there
It may be that most PHP developers are freelancers. Due to the competitive nature of the business they don’t want to get together to discuss for fear they will lose customers. Why socialise with the enemy. Most freelancers get work by word of mouth. Actually wouldn’t this make it better to get together with others to share work when there’s too much? Hopefully the user groups can promote the idea that sharing information and working as a community is good for the industry for EVERYONE. There is a suspicion that more developers are out there and don’t ever hear about the user groups because there isn’t enough marketing.

Another problem is there isn’t normally PHP development shops set up. I know there are a lot of examples but this is a perception when comparing PHP development to JAVA for example.

Finally Developers may come from being hobbiests or from being designers so don’t know the channels to join the PHP world, and therefore don’t end up finding out about the user groups.

Things that discourage developers to come along

• Being too far away
• Being at a bad time of day, too early or too late
• the members being a clique
• Not having a regular time and place can be too confusing
• members being too experienced - The high level talk that occurs is scary for newbies
• Lots of talking - no doing - People want to get out and do things in the community and get frustrated with talking only

Ideas for User Groups

• Do more hands on stuff like the bug hunting days - Take a look at the bug lists of frameworks out there, get some more advanced or involved developers to come along and explain how to go about triaging and making patches.
• Discover and explore open source applications together, show newbies how to get involved in the project, help them dig into it and make changes.
• Encourate regular users to present, give everyone a turn, sure some may not be so good at speaking but who knows.
• Run events/workshops specifically aimed at newbies, people starting out
• Explain the path of the PHP developer from newbie to guru
• Invite speakers - Adobe, Zend, IBuildings, people from open source projects
• Set up as a non for profit organisation based around the user group - this helps companies make donations and in some countries be able to claim the donation against taxes.
• Have a mother site for the country or area then this will point people to specific area user group websites. Umbrella groups and Sub groups or chapters.
• Use the tools of the web - twitter, facebook, mailing lists, IRC, forums
• have your user group site come up on google for [country]+PHP or [city]+PHP
• Organise Events / Conferences
• Have social events based around pizza, coffee or beer
• Make sure to get feedback from the community, what do they want? What do they like and dislike about what you’re currently doing

Why PHP Users groups are good for you

• Speaking at a user group is great for your career, showing that you know something.
• Help you become a better developer
• they give you access to tools
• Give you access to contacts for payment or to work together on projects
• The presentations can be very informative and introduce you to new concepts
• It helps grow PHP as a viable technology for the whole community
• As a freelancer belonging to a usergroup can help with sharing contracting work between the group.

PHP User Groups and the Sponsors

• Sponsors can help the user groups by centralising the conference/event organising efforts - e.g. Mark de Visser mentioned as part of the ZendCon conference process they were sent in many excess talk proposals, it would be great if the local user groups could access the good speakers that lived locally
• Sponsors can help advertise user group events - if they are sending out a newsletter to PHP developers they could send them information about PHP community events in their area
• In return the community can refer people to the companies e.g. about certification, services, products, information, training
• User Groups need to let sponsors know exactly what they will get for their buck, how many people attend events, how many on mailing list, topics that come up, how they will be presented at the event. Concrete Facts
• Recruiters may want lists and job boards, access to people changing jobs
• Charities may be interested in sharing resources because of the open source aspect of PHP, and the fact they may have access to open source specialists for their own needs. Example premises for holding events.
• The user groups need to remember to request stuff, not just sit around waiting for items and sponsorship to flood in
• Remember to thanks sponsors (on mailing lists, at the event) and come good on the promises/agreements

Sponsorship Ideas and Tips

• Books from publishers e.g. O’Reilly
• Recruitment companies
• Companies that use PHP - PIZZA!! or BEER!! or COFFEE!!
• Zend - Training, Studio, Products, Vouchers, Certifications
• PHP|Architect - Magazines, Training, Books
• Sugar CRM
• Ibuildings
• Universities - Space - Attendees from student community
• Sponsors may want one of their staff to do a talk, for example a new author may want to do the circuit or a consulting company may want to promote their knowledge
• Borland
• Local PHP hosting companies

Promoting the PHP User Groups

• Get onto master user group sites for your local area
• get your events onto php.net
• Share presentations among the user groups in your area
• PHPClasses shows maps and lists
• PHPusergroups - though may be unmaintained and events not vetted
• Future Idea - having php.net tell people about events in their area by map

Other Notes

• People that come to PHP User Groups are usually there individually, they aren’t being sent by their employers
• The PHP User Groups that were represented have around 30 people attending meetings/lectures regularly.
• Dalas had a nice thing going where they would have a follow up event after a talk at a coffee shop/book store to discuss the ideas further.
• People come for what they can immediately gain e.g. a talk on a specific topic. and stay for the networking

Again, these are notes I have made while listening to the podcast made at Zendcon unconference session about PHP user groups I hope they are useful to you.

Do you have any other tips for PHP User Groups?

At work I’ve been learning more about PHP, SEO, Design Patterns and computer science in general, It has been a thrill to be learning and pushed forwards again. Working for myself saw me doing things the same way too often because the problems I was presented with weren’t as challenging, original or new.

I’m very interested in how to integrate the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) best practices into the software development process so that it all just becomes a natural way of doing things. I think the most interesting thing for me has been how much material there is to read and how little it really says. I’m trying to just pull out the key points and this is more difficult than it should be. Hopefully it will be rewarding though, and that all the work I’m doing will make some change in how we all do our work. Ofcourse SEO is generally rewarding because as the “right way” of doing things are implemented the site will do better in the search engines because they look better to robots AND as a side effect they’ll be easier for humans to use them too.

With design patterns the funniest thing was finding I have used quite a few of them but didn’t know there was a name for designing code in that way. I’m happy to learn more about them now, learn them off by heart and probably even remember the titles for them. I enjoyed this article about the Strategy and Factory patterns.

I’ve been reading Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise PHP Development” and I attended an IBuildings lecture a few weeks ago(IBuildings is a pretty cool company huh?). Anyway I’m very interested in the part about training employees to be more efficient in the same way you’d optiimse and fine tune a server that wasn’t running at it’s best. On this note I’m doing research into training, certification, conferences and tools for making myself more efficient at work. I’ll be studying for my MySQL Developer Certification soon and I can’t wait to learn anything new I can about that either.

As part of learning more about Enterprise PHP I’ve done some investigation into frameworks. I’ve always liked the idea of creating my own set of tools to share among all my code. I plan to read more about Zend and PEAR over the coming months and hopefully use them too. The main tool I’ve been working to improve is my editor, and to hopefully use an IDE - I’m interested in this because currently I use Notepad++ on windows. For the last week or so I’ve been struggling to work with Zend Studio with no success, I think mostly because of the large amount of code I’m trying to introduce to it. I’m not sure what advantage I’d have with Zend Studio over Notepad++, I believe my next step will be to try eclipse with PDT.

In conclusion I hope to improve the way I do things and learn as much more as I can over the coming months to be a better developer in the future. I also hope I can document my thoughts as I go to help other people along the way as well.

Facebook has announced that it will open it’s international headquarters in Dublin. I wonder what this means for me as a web developer.

I’m hoping it means they hire a bunch of PHP developers and the Irish PHP User Group Flourishes. Hopefully with more large companies around that use PHP we’ll have a great community to help build our own skills and contacts. I can’t wait to go along to some technical event held by Facebook!

I have been finding Facebook less important to me than I initially thought it would be. However I read that Facebooks traffic is up 50% over the last year on Search Engine Watch. I was an early adopter of Facebook and I was excited. Now I feel the need for something much better to come along something more relavent to me and my life.

Will Facebook the website become more relavent to me now that it has a headquarters in Europe? In thinking about their announcement I assessed how I use Facebook lately. I open the website in the morning and at night, and after pressing ignore on all the applications and strange things people invite me to I then flick to my Friends section where I read what people have been up to. Once a week or so I check out the feeds to see other peoples comments and photos and such. I wish I didn’t have to go to Facebook for this, I wish it was more integrated into my life, part of my igoogle desktop or something like that (ofcourse facebook can provide these services).

On that note I think I’ve been becoming happy about the Tech community here in Dublin. With the Irish PHP User Group, Irish Linux User Group, Open Coffee, Geek Girl Dinners, Ruby User Group and work events, Ireland has felt more like the Technical Capital of Europe I imagned before I arrived.

Finally I will do some more investigation on how Facebook works, how PHP is involved and the chances of PHP developer community growing in Ireland.

What does Facebook opening their International headquarters in Dublin mean to you?

I’ve been working for Web Reservations International a few months now. Recently I got involved in investigating conferences as part of a plan to encourage the continued professional development of the technical team. Note that the last part, the description is what I found interesting about the conference, they have more stuff going on there than I listed. Also remember I’m located in Dublin so the locations are a bit biased too. Please give me feedback:
* If you have been to any of the confs let me know and tell me what you thought.
* If you have any opinions on any of the conferences mentions.
* If you notice any obvious ommisions.
* About the conference/professional development in your work place/profession.

Anyway here are the conferences I found split up into groups (Design, javascript, PHP, Java, Systems, Other):

Design

• Fronteers - Amsterdam - September - CSS, XML, JAVASCRIPT, OOD, HTML 5, IE8, SEO
• dConstruct - Brighton England - September - Design Social Networks
• @Media - London- May - Design, Content management, business practices
• Future of Web Design - London in April New York in November - Design, Javascript, Community
• Adobe Max (Europe) 2008 - Milan, Italy- Dec 1-4 - Adobe Products (Photoshop, illustrator, fireworks), Design Concepts, Cross media design, brand experience, accessibility
• Web Design World 2008 - Boston, USA- December - Communities, Hype, New technologies, CSS, Javascript, Social Media, SEO
• Interaction 09 -Vancouver - Feb- User-centered design, innovation
• InHowse Designer - San Francisco - October- Work Practices, Corporate culture vs creativity
• How conference - Austin Texas - June - adobe products, corporate creativity
• SHIFT -Lisbon (Portugal) [MOVES] - October - User Experience, Accessability, Mobile, Future, Social Networks, Design, Digital media
• UX -San Francisco, CA , August -
• UX London - London - Summer

Javascript

• @mediaAjax - London - September - AJAX, Javascript, JQuery
• Web 2.0 Expo - Berlin, Germany - October - Mobile, Web Desktop, Web 2.0, AJAX, Social web, analytics, user/business flow,
• The AJAX Experience -Boston, MA, USA - September - AJAX, JQuery, Cross Browser coding

PHP

• Future of Web Apps - London - October - Community, Scalability, the future, mobile web, beyond google maps
• PHP NW - Manchester UK - November - PHP, Development,
  Best Practices
• IWTC - Dublin/Ireland - End of Feb/ Start of March - PHP, AJAX, CSS, Design
• International PHP 2008 Conference - Mainz, Germany (MOVES) -October - PHP, Reusability, Monitoring, Quality Assurance, Database, Security, Testing, Eclipse, Optimisation, Best Practices
• PHP London - London - End Feb- Testing, frameworks
• Irish PHP Conference - Ireland - Not yet decided
• PHP Works - Atlanta, USA - November - Caching, Best Practices, Code Auditing, Multilingual content, PHP 5.3, Development Process.
• PHP | TEK -Chicago (Moves) - May - PHP, Design Patterns, Best Practices, working with the latest Technologies, Testing, Security, Objects
• Zend Con -Santa Clara, California - September -PHP Best Practices, Unit Testing, Scalability, Performance

JAVA

• SpringOne America - Hollywood, Florida - December - Spring, Business applications, Integrating Spring with other technologies
• Core Spring Training -London - Spring, Enterpise Application Developement
• Irish Java Technology - Dublin - November - Java development
• Java Community Conference - Antwerp - December - Java Development
• Spring One – Spring Framework -Antwerp (moves) - April - SPRING, Java, Development
• The Server Side Java Symposium - Prague (Moves) - June - Java

Systems

• MySQL Users Conference & Expo -Santa Clara, California, USA - April - MySQL
  Development
  LAMP
  Security
• OpenSQL Camp 2008 -Charlottesville, Virginia, USA - November - MYSQL, Replication
• MySQL European Customer Conferences 2008 - London, England - October - MySQL, Best Practices, Reliability, Scalability
• GUADEC -Varies - Canary Islands - July - Web enabled desktop, new technologies, open source
• Fosdem - Brussels, Belgium - February - LAMP Linux Free Software Programming
• LUG RADIO LIVE - Wolverhampton - July- Linux, Free Software, Open Source, Application
• Irish Open Source Technologies Conference (IOTC) - Dublin, Ireland -June - Open source, Linux, Networking, applications, Technology Companies in Ireland
• Apache Con – Collective Apache Projects Conference -Amsterdam - April - Apache webserver, Tomcat,
• UKUUG - Manchester - November -Packaging, linux application development, File systems, distributions
• Linux TAG - Germany - May -Quality control, distributions, new technologies
• Linux.conf.au - Hobart(Moves) Australia - January - Linux, Open Source, Programming
• SANS - London - December - SANS institute, Security

Other

• Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow -San Francisco, CA -September - Mobile Platforms, Opportunities
• Face Book Developers - Global -September - app making, marketing, What’s NEW?, tech queries, viral marketing, Legal
• Future of Mobile - London -November - Smart Phones, Platforms, Emerging markets, Android and Gears, Data trends, marketing
• Agile Business Conference - London - September - Agile Business, project management

I hope this helps someone! Also please write a comment about conferences, and professional development in your job!