Well there is much to blog. After all I did not blog in ages. Then again there is too much and too little time. So just briefly, I had a great time in Tanzania. Anyone who is considering traveling there feel free to mail me for advice. I also been to the phpconit in Rome last week and gave two talks. Really enjoyed it down there. Very good food of course and various people that I had not met in person yet. Especially meeting Matteo was great and it seems like he will now even become an official contributor to PDO! I also chatted with Stefan a bit about DJing (expect a big announcement - well big for me - in this department soon) and Symfony 2.0 (Liip is currently giving Symfony another look).

This is a question you should be asking the developers of the framework you are using. Same of course goes for any PHP application you care about. Maintainers of said projects should just click here (check the user guide for details) and subscribe an email alias to their QA list (do not subscribe personal email addresses .. people move on .. go on vacation or get hit by a bus). We announce all PHP releases on this list (actually until now we have only announced RC's, but we are expanding this to also cover alpha and beta releases).

Just today I got yet another email asking me why we do not rewrite PHP to get rid of all the cruft and past mistakes. These kinds of emails obviously have become more frequent since the namespace backslash decision. First up I wonder why people send such emails to me? After all I have only very rudimentary knowledge of C, let alone all the PHP specific infrastructure (macros etc.). So I am probably the person with the least ability to make something like that happen or even judge its feasibility among all of "PHP core" folks. But still since the question is often enough posed to me, I guess its more efficient if I reply to it in an easily linkable location. So the gist of my answer is: I would welcome a serious effort to rewrite PHP from scratch, but I do not think it should be done by PHP.net

Well I have learned my fair share while working with Johannes to RM the PHP 5.3 release. The main one that my time predictions suck. Now my last time prediction was that we would release in Q1 2009. Chances of that happening are getting slimmer and slimmer. In an effort to ensure that we at least stay close to that timeframe Johannes and I have asked Christian Seiler to remove the special OO handling in Closures so that the discussions do not bog down the 5.3 release process any further. I thank Christian for being so understanding of the "big picture".

Ok, here is something I wish I could travel back in time and shoot who ever decided it would be smart to make RDBMS locale dependent. As in crap like different decimal separators or worse yet date formats. If at all leave this work to the client, but better yet leave it to the frontend. Today I went through a bit of work until I finally figured out that in order to have SQL Server understand an ISO date (running against a DB configured as German), I needed to set the dateformat in the connection session with a query like "SET DATEFORMAT ymd". You might be wondering about the fact that "ymd" doesn't look very ISO date, but all it actually tells SQL Server is that the numbers between the separators are to denote year first, month second and day third. What really ticks me off though is that I once again forgot to look at the number one source for making RDBMS portable with PHP: the MDB2 source code. Its all right there .. *sigh*