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!

The first release candidate of PHP 5.2.10 was just released and is available for download at: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.10RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 4ef611fdcf7269b2d372dbdebc504cdb) For windows users, the all manner of binary packages can be found at: http://windows.php.net/qa/ This is a stabilization release with a whole bunch of bug fixes and no new features, so I hope it'll get released quickly. You can help make it happen by testing your code against this RC and reporting any new bugs and/or regressions you come across.

After reading about rev="canonical" and all the hoopla about domain shorteners, I've decided to see how short of a domain I could get for my blog to avoid having people needing to use things like tinyurl etc... to reduce the lengths of URLs. The goal was to get a 2 letter domain with a 2 letter extension, an easy solution seemed to be the .me extension (Montenegro), but alas I could not find a single registrar that would allow a 2 letter domain registration (ia or ai, my initials). It seems most registrars or resellers use generic libraries that no matter what disallow registration of domains