The slides from my PHP Quebec talk on "Common Optimization Mistakes" are now up and can be downloaded from here: http://ilia.ws/files/phpquebec_2009.pdf I am pretty happy with the talk, which was a bit strange for me, since I get to talk about some of the downside of optimizations, rather then talking about the various specific optimizations. It looked like the audience liked the talk (I hope), so the results seems positive ;-)

After a fairly timely (by PHP standards) release cycle the 5.2.9 release is finally out. As usual there are a few security fixes and a fair number (about 50 or so) general bug fixes. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release, especially so if you are using libxml 2.7 and XML extension, in which case you definitely want to upgrade since this release fixes a CDATA breakage. Big thanks to all the people who contributed patches and fixes as well as those who took the time to file detailed bug reports that helped issue resolution. We'll see how long it will take 5.2.10 to be released ;-) The official release announcement can be found here and the full changelog is available here.

The first release candidate of 5.2.9 was just released for testing and can be downloaded here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.9RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 0252cc45cce713c10e2fae34aa9e406c) I was not planning on 5.2.9 before 5.3 was going to come out, but we've accumulated a fairly high number of bug fixes and a couple of issues with new version of libxml and PHP indicate we need another 5.2 release, so here we are. The release cycle should be pretty quick (I hope) and if all goes well the final will be released before the month is out.

In a moment of boredom, yesterday I happen to browse to WikiHow. At the bottom of their site I noticed a rather curios button, advertising that their site is "Carbon Neutral", since this was the first time I've ever seen something like that I was naturally curious, so I clicked the link to learn more. This took me a short article giving a pseudo-scientific calculation of how much carbon is consumed by their site, down to their share of train travel. If you are curious you can find the breakdown here wikiHow:Carbon Neutral. One curios thing I noted was "Jack riding bike to work: 0 lbs of carbon!", last time I checked strenuous physical activity, increases heart rate, which in turn causes the person breathe-in more oxygen and subsequently expel more carbon dioxide. This means that if Jack drove a car, rode a bus or train, he'd actually contribute less carbon to the environment and leave more oxygen for the rest of us ;-). Anyhow, on that page they also had a reference on how/where you can buy "Carbon Credi...

I've finally got of my ass and committed my mail logging patch I've written almost 2 years ago. This functionality is predominantly aimed at shared hosters that often have a problem identifying people who abuse the mail() function to send an in-ordinate amount of spam or hacked scripts used for the some purpose. The logging functionality is disabled by default but can be enabled on a per-directory or globally via 2 INI settings. The mail.log directive allows you to specify the file where each call to mail() will be logged. The log file will contain the path and line # of the calling script in addition to all of the headers indicated by the user. The mail.add_x_header directive will introduce a X-PHP-Originating-Script header that will contain the file name (no path) of the calling script and the uid of the script. This combination should be sufficient for the admin to locate the sending script. The patch should be backwards compatible for PHP 5.2 so those of you who cannot...