Damien is continuing his very handy phpinfo() research work, this time focusing on the popularity of the different PHP extensions people utilize with PHP and some interesting configuration directives such as disable_functions. You can find the graphs and summaries here and here. A very interesting read to anyone writing or considering writing distributable applications that need to work in different PHP environments.

After an extremely long (IMO) release cycle the final version of PHP 5.2.0 was finally released yesterday morning. There are many new features, speed improvements and a fair number of security changes. You can read the official release announcement for a quick summary of the major changes and the specifics can be found in a very long and somewhat boring to read changelog ;-) The bottom line is that all users of PHP 5.x should definitely upgrade and for 4.x users need to seriously start thinking about migrating as well, since we've finally got a 5 release that not only is feature complete but is also faster or at the minimum performs at the same speed as PHP 4.4. Big thanks to all the contributors who made patches, reported bugs and ran tests to hopefully make a solid release.

The slides for the Caching Systems talk are now available online, they can be downloaded here.

The slides from my talk on PHP Security are now up and can be found in PDF form at the bottom on my talks page. The talk was unfortunately rather short and I had to rush through a number of things, so my apologies if things felt a bit rushed, but I think the key points were hit and as far as an overall overview it was pretty good. Those interested in hearing more about security can review my slides from previous conferences that go into a bit more detail as far as the various security issues.

The slides from the PHP & Performance tutorial I've given during the Zend's PHP Conference are now up, you can find them at the bottom of my talks page here. To all the people who have gotten up really early in the morning, thanks for attending and hopefully you've found something interesting for yourself during the talk. [b]Update:[/b] Rasmus has kindly pointed out that stripping while drastically reducing the size (basic binary is about 3x smaller), does not actually impact the startup speed in any measurable speed. A quick test with php-cgi from latest CVS appears to confirm this, so unless you want to save disk space at expense of debug symbols, do not strip! Thanks Rasmus.