A few days ago I read an interesting blog entry on Chris Shifflet's blog about Google Web Accelerator (GWA) and how it affects PHP applications. The purpose of the GWA is to accelerate the web page loading speed and thus improve user experience. This is done through a series of techniques which involve different caching mechanisms, periodically downloading copies of frequently accessed pages and prefetching. The prefetching works on a basis of a premise that when you load a web page you will not view just this page, but also click of a few links from that page. So, rather then waiting for you to click those links, while you are reading the current page, the browser is prefetching the content of the linked pages in the background. By the time you decide to click on the next link, its content is already sitting in browsers cache and can be loaded instantly. Pretty neat trick, right? While it is a neat trick, it does present several serious problem that affect both the webmasters and the users themselves....

Finally got around to releasing the next stable release of FUDforum, 2.6.13. For the most part it is the same as RC2, with just a few note worthy changes. The Japanese and Romanian translations were updated, Win32 finally has proper timezone support through a custom subset of timezone values and some more adjustments to the nested category display. The latter seems to have been an ongoing problem throughout the .13 release cycle and I sincerely hope we've finally hammered out all of the possible problems with it. The upgrade and installation scripts are available at the usual location: http://fudforum.org/download.php. On a related note, I am now working on a PDO database driver for the forum. This will allow FUDforum to expand it's database support beyond MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as benefit from an improved API offered by PDO. Many of PDO's convenience functions would significantly simplify the process of retrieving data for certain operations.

One conference is over and another one is already in the works. I've been invited to speak about PHP & Performance at OSCON on August 3rd, 2005. This is my first visit to a non-PHP specific conference as a speaker and I very much look forward to it.

The PHP|Tropics conference was a great deal of fun and an excellent break from the monotony of work, sleep, work... I would like to thank the organizers (Marco & Arbi) for taking the time to organize this event and have it go without a hitch. To those who decided to skip the sandy beaches and the inviting pool to hear the talks, my sympathies :-). The slides from both of my talks are now available online at: Starting PHP Performance Talk: PDF PowerPoint Flash Aside from the PHP related matters a new term was coined during the conference; shifted - To be left drunk and penniless at night in down town Cancun.

Here goes the 1st pre-release of FUDforum 2.6.13. The focus of this release has been stabilization of the code and fine tuning of the previously added features. Changes: If .htaccess is to be obeyed, make sure $_SERVER is created. When merging topics port the read statuses and notifications from source topics. Don't raise notices during charset conversion. Fixed decoding of messages to plain text for NNTP/Mailing list post backs. Many fixes to nested category display on the front page. Improvements to the captcha code generation. Fixed adding users to primary groups during consistency check. Fixed changing of user logins via admin interface. Corrected building of FUDforum zip archives (install/upgrade). Better handling of SQL server version detection (PostgreSQL 8.0). Fixes to pager generation in PATH_INFO theme. Fixed rebuild of primary PATH_INFO theme during upgrading. Fixed bugs that caused HTML entities to appear in bookmark titles in the PDFs. Added missing URL session id...