After over 2 years in development, huge amount of commits and changes PHP 5.3.0 is finally out. Kudos to Lukas M. Smith and Johannes Schlüter who have managed this herculean task and overall have done an excellent job. There are some really nifty features in this release such as namespaces, closures, mail() logging, a bunch of new extensions and much more. Hopefully, the process of making 5.3 be production ready will be a quick one, as a large amount of testing has already gone into making this release possible. In fact, I be brave enough to say that for non-mission critical environments PHP 5.3 is ready to go as is.

A few hours ago, 11th release of PHP 5.2, 5.2.10 was released to the world. This, as most past 5.2.X releases has been largely focused on bug fixing with quite a few obscure crashes and memory leaks being addressed, in addition to a single security fix in the exif_read_data() function. All in all there are over 100 individual bug fixes in this release and most 5.2.X and definitely all 4.X users should consider upgrading to this version. The sources and windows binaries for this release can be found at http://www.php.net/downloads.php and the detailed changelog itemizing all of the changes can be seen here.

I was buying 2 monitors for the office today, when a came to paying the bill I discovered a rather nasty surprise. It seems that the Ontario government has decided to apply a $12.03 per monitor recycling tax as part of their EOS program. It looks like our liberal provincial government is always on a look out to grab more of our money, so they can spend it on idiotic initiatives such as eHealth.

Wow, time certainly does fly. I've started with PHP back in 1997, and A LOT has changed since then in terms of the language's capabilities, user base, and the sheer quantity of sites and applications built on it. Hopefully the next 14 years will bring as many improvements and innovations as the 1st 14 did. Happy B-Day PHP!