In the wake of this year's php|tek conference, Marco Tabini has unveiled his secrets to the "master conference evil plan" that he and the php|architect crew have been putting in to action for their conferences:

For the past four years, I have put a lot of work into executing a strategic plan that is tangentially connected with our conferences. [...] Instead [of trying to force interaction], I decided to try and slowly steer things in a direction that would have made our conferences closer to a family reunion than a dry business meetup.

He mentions the steps in his "evil plan" (for conference domination?) - community participation, setting the right atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, the oh-so-secret choosing of the speakers and their leadership by example through participation with the speakers and other conference goers.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from the latest poll on their site. This time, it asked visitors to vote on which of the five options they thought was the best advantage that the phpbb SEO Master had to offer.

The option, 'All' has won hands-down with a majority of 20.6%. A contradicting result is seen as next to 'All' is the option 'None' with 12.7% votes. The third position goes to 'easy install and works with your existing board' as it has garnered 4.8% votes. The last on the list is 'topic URLS are dynamically converted to SEO friendly addresses' which has got a dismal 0.0%.

Be sure to check out this week's poll too - it asks for votes on which of the options is the most important feature of PHP 5. Options include "Better error handling", "Newer useful functions", and "Best OOP support period".

If you've been programming for any length of time, you know the "joy" of working with someone else's code. When taking over a project, the first inclination I've seen with most programmers is to go in and format everything to what they'd like (or duplicate functionality). This is where the problem comes in, the trend that Michael Kimsal talks about in his new blog post - something he wonders about being an "antipattern".

I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name. I'm currently maintaining some code, and it's quite a jumble. One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic in other areas of the code. However, what never happened was the clean up of the old code, so now there's two places where the same set of data is retrieved in different ways.

He proposes the name "Multi Master Data" for the situation - two different sources, living in the same code, doing the same thing. Of course, he also mentions a situation where this type of problem can cause real issues, especially when trying to track down a bug (a bang your head on the desk moment).