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

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.

On my way home from the Frankfurt conference right now, according to the in-plane TV we are somewhere just south of Greenland at the moment. That's right, this blog entry is being written from an average altitude of 30,000 feet (9144 kilometers), go go Lufthansa that offers relatively cheap wifi ($30 USD) for entire flight, COOL! That and the fact that they serve free alcohol on economy class, makes this flight even more enjoyable. I would like to thank the folks are Software & Support for inviting me to their conference, it is quite enjoyable, not to mention quite big, much larger then an average PHP con. I've yet again had the privilege to meet with many people with whom I've only conversed online and met good friends whom I have not seen since previous conferences. To those of you who've attended my sessions, or had missed them for some reason, the slides are finally up, wifi on a plane is MUCH better then wifi at the conference :P You can download them here: PHP Security Talk: PDF PPT PHP 5 OOP...

While md5 is a fairly strong hashing algorithm, even with the best algorithm weak passwords based on dictionary words and/or their variants can be easily compromised. There are a few sites on the net that have built searchable databases of "weak" password allowing quick strength checks of md5 hashes. But, each one of those databases has different set of hashes and a different database size, making a "complete" search rather difficult. So, I've come up with a little aggregator script that gathers information from 5 different (tell me if you know of others) sources and offers the resolved data on a single page, thus giving you a fast response from a cumulative database. The script can be downloaded from here, http://ilia.ws/uploads/hash.php.txt It is released under BSD license, so anyone is free to use it.

he fourth and final release candidate of PHP 5.1.0 is now available for testing. You can download the source packages from here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.1.0RC4.tar.bz2 4afd68f8e4fe532cea83f30bd2ff26f5 http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.1.0RC4.tar.gz 679a0d12b8cb00c55d56621ea9609013 The Windows binaries will be available shortly from http://downloads.php.net/ilia/ as well. In the past two weeks a great deal of effort was put by a number of developers towards stabilization of the 5.1 branch with over 20 bug fixes made during this period alone. Based on our own tests (those wacky phpt files) and those made by QA team and related projects, 5.1 is ready for production. Pending discovery of any critical issues such as crashes, security faults and regressions I intend to release 5.1 final no later then November 10th. In the meantime I'd like to ask all PHP users to test their code against PHP 5.1 to ensure that no critical issues have been missed. Our own testing methodology while quite...