Following the “Release early, release often” mantra, PHP 5.1.1 was released today. The main causes for this release are four regressions in behavior introduces by PHP 5.1.0, which include: Native date class is withdrawn to prevent namespace conflict with PEAR's date package. Fixed fatal parse error when the last line of the script is a PHP comment. eval() hangs when the code being evaluated ends with a comment. Usage of \{$var} in PHP 5.1.0 resulted in the output of {$var} instead of the $var variable's value enclosed in {}. The fifth reason being a refinement of a cURL open_basedir/safe_mode security fix, to improve the checks surrounding the file: wrapper handling. The new packages and win32 PECL binaries for PHP 5.1.1 can be found here: http://www.php.net/downloads.php Now on to the long overdue rant ;-) The initial and probably the main reason for the PHP 5.1.1 release in such a hurry was a rather interesting problem. One of the features introduced by 5.1.0 was the addition of th...

Yes, it is true, PHP 5.1.0 is finally out! The packages and win32 binaries are available at: http://www.php.net/downloads.php Some of the release highlights are: A complete rewrite of date handling code, with improved timezone support. Significant performance improvements compared to PHP 5.0.X. PDO extension is now enabled by default. Over 30 new functions in various extensions and built-in functionality. Bundled libraries, PCRE and SQLite upgraded to latest versions. Over 400 various bug fixes. PEAR upgraded to version 1.4.5 8 security fixes of varying "criticality" The full changelog is here and the official release announcement can be viewed from http://www.php.net/release_5_1_0.php

While at the Frankfurt conference I had a chance to go on two mini photo trips to the PalmGarden (Botanical Garden) and the Frankfurt Zoo. The former turned in to a bit of an adventure involving doing an almost complete circle while looking for the way in, but eventually we did make it there. Even though the lighting conditions were poor, some shots still came out very well, as you can see here: For the rest, visit the gallery. The Zoo pictures also came out well, but required a lot of post processing to get rid of the "glass effect". The animals seem particularly keen on getting OUT as can be seen by the numerous scratches on the inside class of the big predator enclosures. The highlight is of course a tiger trying to swallow Sebastian and his camera :-) More pictures can be found here.

Thanks to GAIM I have the ability to use multiple IM clients, which now a days is pretty much a necessesity, given that no two people use the same IM system. A few days ago I got a message from the AIM component about the forceable addition of two new buddies to my list, "MoviePhone" and "ShoppingBuddy" that got added to a "AIM Bots" sub-group. It looks like AOL Time Warner thought of a new way to monitize their network. So far these "buddies" don't actually do a thing, and ignore any of the IMs I send them. I suspect in the future (Xmas time) they'll inform me of all sorts of "interesting" things... Fortunately while I had no ability to decline their addition GAIM appears to allow me to put them on ignore or removed them from my buddy list all together. Gotta wonder what's next...

A few days ago I received an e-mail confirming acceptance of my talks for annual PHP Conference in Montreal, yippee! Going to speak in Montreal is always fun, the organizers always find something entertaining for us to do. PHP Québec also holds very fond memories for me, being the first PHP conference I had a chance to speak at back in 2003, and 2006 will be the 4th year in a row speaking there. I guess they haven’t grown tired of me just yet ;-) At the conference I will be giving a single talk on PDO as part of the database track and doing a workshop on PHP security. I hope to make both of those as informative and entertaining possible, so if those topics hold your interest, be sure to attend. You can find additional details about the conference on the PHP Québec website.