As is mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, the Adobe Developer Week will be starting up on Monday, May 10th and will offer free sessions for developers interested in learning about Adobe products.

During Developer Week, learn about the Adobe Flash Platform, including Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash Player, and how it integrates with Adobe Creative Suite 5 technologies. This weeklong event features free, live webinars presented by Adobe technology experts. See live demos and have your questions answered by the experts during interactive Q&A sessions.

You can find out more information about the sessions offered and how to register for them on this page of the Adobe website.

In doing some work with data and date ranges, Leonid Mamchenkov came across something strange about the "weeks" that the date and time functions in PHP work on. Sometimes, there's not always 52 weeks in a year.

With code as simple and straight-forward as [our example], you'd probably look for the problem elsewhere. Maybe it's your statistical data which is wrong, or the graph is not generated properly. But the problem is here.

How many weeks do you think there are in a year? A common knowledge says 52. However, if you think for a moment about how the weeks are related to the year, you'll realize that the first and last weeks don't necessary start and end at the edge of the year.

So, when using the date function, you might not get quite what you were expecting. It works more correctly and can include the extra "week" if there's enough of an overlap. The "W" parameter (for "week") works off of the ISO-8601 week number for the year, not the general calendar weeks.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).

php|architect has started their latest promotion - the "7-Day Promo Fest":

We're happy to announce that our 7-day Promo Fest promotion kicks off on January 3rd with a 50% off sale on our own Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide.

Check out the full details for these next few days with discounts on things ranging from half off a Vulcan practice test and half price on all of their online training courses.

On the "Yet Another Web Development Blog", there's a new post about a PHP developer (the author of the post) taking some time and spending a week with the Python programing language in a real project to see what it's like.

Today I was the first time I've used my new found Python skills in a professional capacity. [...] Since I had already worked with the HTMLParser library, I figured this would be a perfect opportunity for Python.

He includes some sample code showing a basic use of Python and a brief comparison of using each of the languages in a web development environment.

Derick Rethans has posted a quick tip to his blog today:

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The (technically) three-line code uses ISO format for the date to tell you which day is the starting day of that week and which is the end. He only explains this format just a bit, so if you want more information, check out the strtotime function page.

In case you didn't get a chance to make it to this year's Zend Conference, Cal Evans has put together this cool little video montage of the week.

With a weekend to kill and only a laptop to amuse myself, I sat down to put my feelings, my emotions, my raw soul into something that would express the impact the conference left on me. Unfortunately, what came out was something a bit less moving than I anticipated but none the less, it was fun to make and it's slightly amusing to watch.

So, check out the video, makes a few comments and relive a great week for all who attended. (And yes, I'm in there somewhere...)

Cal Evans of Zend's Developer Zone (one of the attendees and facilitators of the conference) has posted his own wrapup of life in San Jose for that week, including candid shots and tons of great info for the week.

As I write this, it's Sunday. I'm sitting here in the lobby of the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. [...] Now that I've had a chance to relax and gather my thoughts, let's glance back over the shoulder before packing up for the next conference.

For each day, he gives the highlights, both of the people he met and of the talks/tutorials attended. There's even a few special announcements included that happened during the week - like about the new ZendBox the company will be offering. After-hours activities were mentioned as well, including the "Pirate Party" IBM threw the last night of the conference.

With just a quick handy code snippet posted on his blog today, Derick Rethans shares these two lines to help grab the start and end dates of a week in question.

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The code makes use of the ISO8601 datetime functionality to grab the correct value from a strtotime command. Derick also briefly explains how it all works.

The Zend Freamwork is practically busting at the seams with community participation, and now the ZF development group is asking for even more. Starting June 12th, they're asking for propsals (specifically) from as many developers as would like to submit.

The intent here is to develop a boiled-down listing of modules to create and include in the coming versions of the framework as well as fill in some gaps in its functionality.

There are also a few changes they mention wanting to make revolving around database functionality (ActiveRecord and quoting iisues). Prior proposals will be looked at and considered again as part of this process.