LinuxWorld Recap

30 Apr 2006

LinuxWorld was an interesting conference, but the corporate atmosphere was rather alienating. There were only two PHP talks (both given by me), and I wasn't at the conference long enough to meet many other people, because I had a flight to Orlando (for php|tek) later the same day. Also, despite attendance being lower than at most other conferences I've been to, the large size of the convention center in Toronto gave the conference a quiet and isolating atmosphere.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the conference as a whole, I enjoyed my talks, and I had good audiences for both. My first talk discussed What's New in PHP 5 and focused primarily on the new object-oriented features. I also gave a quick overview of SimpleXML and SQLite, including some brief examples. You can download a PDF of my slides:

My other talk was a tutorial about PHP security, and the slides for it were just a selection of slides from past talks.

Probably the most interesting thing about the conference was the location. It was right by the CN Tower and Rogers Centre (where their baseball team plays). In fact, the window in my hotel room looked out over the field, which was pretty neat. If I actually liked baseball and there was a game that night, it would have been awesome. :-)