I just got my confirmation for my flight to San Francisco to ZendCon happening in early October and noticed something interesting on my invoice for the flight in the "taxes area". Taxes, Fees and Charges Canada Airport Improvement Fee 20.00 U.S.A Transportation Tax 15.54 U.S Agriculture Fee 5.15 Canada Security Charge 7.94 Canada Goods and Services Tax (GST/HST #10009-2287) 26.01 U.S.A Immigration User Fee 7.21 Why would an airline ticket include the U.S Agriculture Fee, is there a tax on the air above the US farmland or something?

After a few years on Gallery 1.X, which with a few tweaks worked quite well for me, I've decided to make the transition to Flickr's pro account. The conversion was largely made possibly by a tweaked gallery2flickr script that allowed me to move albums over without loosing any data in a process, which is always a good thing. It still took some time, but in the end I am quite happy with the results. Flickr has some very neat features in comparison to Gallery such as geo-tagging, very convenient interface for tagging and labeling photos, which at least in Gallery 1.X was rather frustrating. My new gallery can now be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iliaal/

After a somewhat extended release cycle PHP 5.2.4 is finally out! A fairly extensive list of changes this time with over 120 bug fixes and a fair number of small security fixes and improvements. You can find the abbreviated details about the release here and the full boring details in the ChangeLog.

The first RC of 5.2.4 was just released and is now available for download here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.4RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 43e28d2aa55b6c8bcd67da16e24b225a) This release have been long in the making so the changelog is a bit intimidating, so we definitely need a lot of testing for this release. I would like to ask everyone to give this RC a shot and see how it behaves with their code and hopefully not find any regressions. If you do find any, please let us know.

I've been so busy last few weeks I didn't get a chance to blog about the acceptance of my talk for ZendCon. So, here it is now, better late then never. This year has been quite busy in terms of security when it comes to PHP, the language and many changes were done to make the language better when it comes to security. The talk will try to summarize the many happenings in the PHP security world in to a quick one hour talk, so it should be quite an interesting challenge :)