“Christmas is nigh, and the PHP Advent Calendar rides again! In line with tradition, we’ve swapped the chocolates for doses of wisdom from people in the PHP community who’ve kindly donated their thoughts and tips to see us through the coming year.”

With big names in the already published list like Cal Evans, Matthew O’Phinney, Lorna Mitchell, Elizabeth Naramore, and another 25 issues coming up, you really can’t miss this years edition of the PHP Advent Calendar, brought to us by Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates.

Wether you want to follow the articles on Twitter, or rather subscribe to the feed, you sure will give the upcoming year a headstart with all the wisdom written down in these daily articles. Curious? Read the already posted articles on the PHP Advent Calendar 2008 website.

p. Ok, it’s been a while since I’ve done a ZendCon update so bear with me. This is more than just a “pay the bills” post, I’ve got some real cool announcements. First, we have the name of the final keynote speaker, second, we have a new speaker in the lineup and finally an exciting announcement about Tuesday Evening’s Reception in the Exhibit Hall.

p. Thanks to Laura Thomson for pointing this out to me. Apparently Vanessa, proprietor of http://v-nessa.net is the latest to realize that the PHP community is not just a bunch of smart people, we are dead sexy too.

p. The echoes from the last OSCON parties haven’t even stopped reverberating though the halls as the next convention moves in. The vendors are all long gone and the attendees are all shoved in tiny seats on their express flight back to the real world. Let’s take a quick look over our shoulder at the party that was OSCON ’07 before answering the call of the road and heading off to the next event.

p. Chris Shiflett osted an announcement on his blog today welcoming Luke Welling into the OmniTI family.

p. Back at PHPQuebec, I was standing in the back of the room for the closing ceremonies when Laura Thomson of OmniTI announced that they had officially opened OmniTI Labs. Somehow, I passed over this fact in my PHPQuebec roundups, so let me correct that oversight now.

p. Two entries appeared in the blogosphere yesterday from principals at OmniTI. Click on inside and I’ll give you details.

p. This past year at OSCON I interviewed a lot of people, I mean a lot. I’ve still got more to come after this one. The fun part about the whole OSCON interview series was that almost one half of the interviews I did worked at OmniTI. Here now is my interview with Wez Furlong.

p. This is another in a series of interviews I’ve been conducting as I travel to different conferences. Most of the people I get the chance to interview are directly involved with PHP in some way. This interview is a bit different. Theo Schlossnagle is the founder of OmniTI, one of the premier PHP consulting companies in the world. OmniTI consults with companies all around the globe on issues ranging from architecture to security.

p. Theo Schlossnagle, the founder of OmniTI, recently released his first book titled “Scalable Internet Architectures”. If you buy tech book by weight, this is not a good value because it weighs in at a paltry 2 lbs. If you want more than that then you’ll have to click through.