I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at the annual PHP Quebec Conference on March 31st and April 1st. I will be giving a talk on Web services and a workshop on the same topic. The conference includes talks by many great speakers on variety of topics and should be of interest to all PHP users.

I've been fortunate to be invited to speak at two conference so far this year. The first of those two conferences, PHP West will be happening in about a week in Vancouver on January, 14th 2005. I will, be giving a talk on XML support in PHP 5. While the conference lasts only a single day it costs merely $40 to attend and given an impressive list of speakers Rasmus, John, Terry, etc... it is certainly worth attending. The second conference, PHP|Tropics, is still a few month away will be happening at the all-inclusive (alcoholic drinks are included, WOOHOO!) Moon Palace Resort near Cancun, Mexico between May 11th and 15th, 2005. Which should give you plenty of time to convince your boss and/or spouse to let you attend. I will be giving a talk on making PHP run a whole lot faster as well as an introductory tutorial on PHP 5. Marco has been working hard at giving reason for people to stay away from the beach by inviting many other great speakers such as Wez, Derick, Marcus and many others. So aside...

In response to the on going flame war pertaining to the stability and usability of Apache 2 in comparison to Apache 1 I've decided to conduct a series of benchmarks to try to determine exactly how the two Apaches compare. The purpose of the test was to determine which server is faster at serving static HTML pages, who's real-time compression implementation is better and of course which is more suited for running PHP applications. The full details of the test are available below, but here is a quick summary of the results. 1) Apache 2 is about 4% faster then Apache 1 at serving static pages. 2) Apache 2's mod_deflate is over 60 percent faster then Apache 1's mod_gzip at real time compression of static HTML pages. 3) Serving PHP via Apache 2 is 27 percent slower then via Apache 1 DSO and 31 percent slower then Apache 1 static. How the test was conducted? For the purpose of the test I've used clean installations of PHP 4.3.10 compiled with the following common flags "--disable-cgi --disable-cli --wit...

As most of you hopefully know, a few days ago PHP 4.3.10 and 5.0.3 were released in response to several vulnerabilities that were discovered. Two of those involved bugs in unserialize function that is used to re-create PHP variables based on an encoded string normally generated by serialize() function. This functionality allows storage & retrieval of PHP variables from outside PHP. While these two problems are quite serious, they can normally only be exploited locally, meaning that you'd need an account with access to PHP on the server. However, several applications such as phpBB store serialized data inside cookies meaning that anyone accessing those applications will be able to supply their own serialized string. By tinkering with this string it is possible to make an exploit capable of doing things like theft of passwords. In response to this development phpBB developers decided to put the following statement out "This is not a phpBB exploit or problem, it's a PHP issue and thus can affect any PHP...

After what seems like months of development a new stable release of FUDforum, 2.6.9 is finally out. This release fixes a fair number of bugs as well as introducing a number of functionality changes. These include series of speed imporvenments for many parts of the forum as well as some optimizations aimed at MySQL 4.1 users specifically. As of 2.6.9 all installation are now capable of generating PDFs based on forum messages thanks to the customized FPFD library bundled with FUDforum. The layout of the PDFs was also improved. All FUDforum users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. The upgrade and installation scripts can be found here.