If you've been reading the internals list or the blogs of various PHP developers you probably know that the work on the new minor PHP branch, 5.3 has started now that the key feature list of the release has been established by a public vote on the internals list about a week ago. Some of those features, like namespaces, late static binding, __callStatic and several others have already made into the CVS. As per our tradition of changing Release Masters for every minor release, a new masochist, ;-) Johannes Schlüter will be taking of the role of RM for PHP 5.3 from me. I will continue to RM 5.2.X release, which has 1-2 releases in it still and will be actively maintained up until 5.3.0 is released into the wild, something that should happen early next year. I've been release mastering PHP 5 for almost two years now, all the way back since 5.1.0 and it has been quite challenging and interesting time, and its time for new blood so to speak. I want to congratulate Johannes on his new role that will hopefully...

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/