This feed distracts me once a day with nice and interesting astronomy pictures.

one of my favourite pic:

• Astronomy picture of the day

GD-2.0.35 has been released!

After five release candidates, 2.0.35 has been finally released. See the release announcement release notes for all the details. It contains numerous security related fixes, update is recommended.

On the good news side, I’m happy to announce that we now cooperate with Debian to create quality packages for GD library and the PHP extension. Kudo to Sean Finney to have made it possible. Stay tuned, I will post updates as soon as possible!

A* driven development

via Thilo Raufeisen

How to get a back trace on windows without having to compile PHP has been an impossible task for many of us. The difficulty was to first succeed to compile php (given that you have a visual C++ installed). If you are in the middle of a bug hunting session, no need to say that setting up a windows build system is the last thing you like, especially if it is your first time. Thanks to Edin‘s window binary and MS Diagnostic Debug , it is now possible to have a backtrace in a couple of clicks.

What we will need to continue:

• A PHP snapshot or stable release
• PHP Debug pack (snapshot or stable thread safe or non thread safe
• Microsoft Debug Diagnostic Tools
• One evil script to crash PHP, the one in the bug 39346 is evil enough

For the sake of this example, we will simply use PHP in the shell. The same method can be used for IIS or any other process or services.

Once you have installed the Debug diagnostic tools and uncompressed PHP and its debug pack (they can be kept in two separate folders), the first step is to configure the diagnostic tools. Select the tools menu and click on "Options and settings". The first tab contains the path to the symbols files, add the "debug folder" to the existing list using the "browse" button:

Now we are ready to generate our backtrace.

We will use the wizard, click the "Add a rule" button and choose "Crash" as the rule type:

In the next window, select "a specific process":

Add a "sleep(10);" for the first run (from the cmd: "php.exe crashme.php"), it will let you enough time to click "next" and select the php process:

Click again next and let it crash. If everything went well, you should see your new rule as shown in the image below:

It also detected that "php.exe" was used. A rule has been created for all instance of "php.exe". It will save you the sleep and process selection.

Now you can click the "Analyze data" button:

Et voila, the complete report will show up in your internet explorer (compressed html):

As PHP internals developer, what we need is the backtrace itself, you can find it under "Thread X – System ID XXX".

The DDT can be used to hunt leaks and memory handles, but it will quickly reach its limit. A real debugger and compiler will be required to actually fix the issues. But it is a real progress, I hope it will help you to help us to improve PHP on windows!

1.4.0 is by far the most important VirtualBox release. Even if the version increment is small, the changes are nearly all I was waiting for:

• Support host 64bit (32bit guest)
• sessions RDP
• All drivers are now signed MS (your win admin cannot cry anymore
• Copy/Paste between host and guest
• Physical partitions and VMWare images
• Improved GUI and translations 12 langues (I’m partially to blame if there is still typos in the french one )

See the complete changelog here.

The last good thing is the Debian/Ubuntu repository:

Edit your sources.list:

[Bash] sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list 

And add this line

[Bash] deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian feisty non-free 

Save it and add their key:

[Bash] wget -q http://www.virtualbox.org/debian/innotek.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - 

and finally install it (use update if you have an old deb installed):

[Bash] sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install virtualbox 

And finally congratulations to the Innotek team, they did a great job again!