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 ;-)

After a fairly timely (by PHP standards) release cycle the 5.2.9 release is finally out. As usual there are a few security fixes and a fair number (about 50 or so) general bug fixes. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release, especially so if you are using libxml 2.7 and XML extension, in which case you definitely want to upgrade since this release fixes a CDATA breakage. Big thanks to all the people who contributed patches and fixes as well as those who took the time to file detailed bug reports that helped issue resolution. We'll see how long it will take 5.2.10 to be released ;-) The official release announcement can be found here and the full changelog is available here.

The first release candidate of 5.2.9 was just released for testing and can be downloaded here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.9RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 0252cc45cce713c10e2fae34aa9e406c) I was not planning on 5.2.9 before 5.3 was going to come out, but we've accumulated a fairly high number of bug fixes and a couple of issues with new version of libxml and PHP indicate we need another 5.2 release, so here we are. The release cycle should be pretty quick (I hope) and if all goes well the final will be released before the month is out.