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

A few days ago, Microsoft had done a low-key launch of IE8, which means you need to make your applications compatible with 3 differently broken version of IE ;-P. The biggest challenge IE8 poses is that it runs in "strict" mode by default, which coincidentally breaks all of the previous IE6/7 hacks that had to put in place to make CSS and Javascript render in IE the same way they do in other browsers. Fortunately, unless you wish to refractor your entire code to support IE8 strictness, MS did add a "compatibility" switch, via the X-UA-Compatible meta-tag or header, if you change its value to "IE=EmulateIE7" it makes it emulate the "strict" mode ala IE7, which at least in all of our code makes it render things properly. However, there is a "slight" problem, which I discovered while trying to implement this function. According to the docs, you can trigger this behavior via the following meta tag: [code][/code], unfortunately it didn't work and ac...

At the PHP Quebec conference I've succumbed to peer pressure and decided to sign-up for twitter. So, for those of you interested in following me (damn stalkers :P) my twitter id is @iliaa

The slides from my PHP Quebec talk on "Common Optimization Mistakes" are now up and can be downloaded from here: http://ilia.ws/files/phpquebec_2009.pdf I am pretty happy with the talk, which was a bit strange for me, since I get to talk about some of the downside of optimizations, rather then talking about the various specific optimizations. It looked like the audience liked the talk (I hope), so the results seems positive ;-)