Yet another PHP TestFest call, this time for the Munich area (or Southern Germany), Thursday and Friday 16th/17th April (yes, I’m late with this blog post ).

This year we organize not only a testfest but also a little PHP Evening with talks (Sebastian Bergmann, David Soria Parra and Sebastian Schürmann) followed by a dinner.

The day after (Friday 17th April), the testfest itself will take place. No PHP internal knowledge is required (like C knowledges), all you need is willing to help to improve PHP as well as a good mood

So if you’re interested in meeting core developers and participating in the TestFest and possibly win an elephpant please take a look at the TestFest page to get more information and drop a mail to me (pierre at php dot net or use the contact form here).

See the wiki for details (location, time, etc.) as well as the PHP QA page for information about the testfest in general.

Vincent Pontier, also known as El Roubio, is the author of the widely known PHP Pet, the Elephpant.

Vincent has now realized a movie about its creation, watch it here !

Thanks to Nexen for the info!

From the Mozilla planet, a word cloud generator. I like the results, it reflects nicely what I do, OSS on Windows!

PHP 5.2.7RC5 has been released. Please test it

The sources can be fetch here (zip sources are available on the windows site as well) and the binaries in the windows site.

Note to self: sigh

• Announce
• Windows QA Builds
• Sources releases

Ilia has released PHP 5.2.7RC4 yesterday and we made it synced again, binaries and sources releases are available! Please test it

The sources can be fetch here (zip sources are available on the windows site as well) and the binaries in the windows site.

Note to self: do not say it is the last RC (is it? )

• Announce
• Windows QA Builds
• Sources releases

PHP 5.2.7RC3 has been released. It is likely to be the last RC and the final release is planed for Thursday next week. Please test it and report any issue you may found. The sources can be fetch here and the binaries in the windows site.

I’m also happy to have finally reached one of our main gaol for the windows releases, to be ready at the same time than the source packages. We were even better, the binary packages were ready and uploaded before the source packages!

• Announce
• Windows QA Builds
• Sources releases

The last time I attended a PHP conference was a couple of years ago and then make a break, too much conferences and not enough time. This pause is now over and I’m impatient to attend IPC next week

This conference looks promising, a lot of known PHP colleagues are there and the Ajax in Action conference is being held at the same time and location.

It is also the first time I will meet my new colleagues

Garrett and I will present a talk about developing PHP internals and PHP extensions on windows. A kind of step by step tutorials with practical examples on how to hunt bugs (leaks, backtrace, etc.) on windows.

If you plan to attend this talk and actively participate (like trying live what we are talking about), you will need to prepare your (windows ) laptop before the talk. The little list below should cover almost all you need to hunt bugs in PHP on windows (other tools will be shown but those are the essentials ones).

Continue reading "talking@IPC 2008"

... it is so win32

Via lawblog.de, it seems that Chrome is as nice as evil.

I did not try or verify (and will actually not install it, no seriously I don’t need yet another browser ) but it seems that it calls home every time you log in your google account and assign your chrome id to your account(s). I wonder if it will make as much noises as it did for other evil activities from competitors, I doubt (fashion victims++)

See the full (German) story www.datenschutzbeauftragter-online.de

Update

And now it’s getting funny:

Google Chrome EULA Claims Ownership of Everything You Create on Chrome, From Blog Posts to Emails

Via gizmodo.com

If I would still need a reason to do not even try it, then this is the best one.

From time to time, for some random reasons or none at all, you end in the radar of what is commonly called “poisonous people”. It is this time of the year again. As I can still sleep well, it is getting to a point where I may loose my coolness. I’m trying hard to do not get there.

Possible solutions or good advices are listed in these two chapters/sections, time to read them again:

• You are what you write

• The ‘Noisy Minority’ Effect

Getting some fresh air, continue the good work as well as enjoying the fantastic teams we settled in the last few months will help me to quickly forget (and ignore) the noises.

While working on the windows ports and updates of the libraries required by php (more on that later), I met a couple of extensions without maintainers, without commits or simply inactive.

As an attempt to either moved them out of core or to give them the love they need, I made a post on internals.

There is one extension that we are going to remove without affecting any code, mhash. Thanks to ext/hash and Scott (he ported the missing algorithms and is adding the mhash API to keep the compatibility). That will drop one PHP dependency (libmhash).

Other “affected” extensions are not so lucky:

• ncurses
• fpdf
• snmp
• interbase (aka firebird)
• frontbase
• sybase
• sybase_ct

In this list one is definitively dead, sybase. There is a little hope for some of them. ncurses and fpdf will be maintained and released in PECL (Thanks Hartmut).

interbase / firebird may remain as we found someone able to test the extensions whenever needed and to valid any windows builds (Thanks Lester). That will help to keep firebird/interbase support in php but not to continue its development (unicode support, firebird 2.1 new features, etc.). See below if you are interested to work on it or if your company is interested.

Just lilke firebird, we found a Sybase_ct lover able to provide not only help by testing but also a server to run the test suites using a decent sybase server (Thanks Timm at 1und1). The details on how it will work are still being discussed but there is a good chance that sybase_ct will be kept in core.

SNMP will remain in 5.3 but its days are counted as there is no developers. I can help someone else to maintain but I can definitively not take the hand on it. It is not a widely used extension but it works well and actually helpful and handy. I’m sure someone out there must be interested enough to stand up and help us to keep this extension in core (see below)

Frontbase has less chance, I’ve mailed Frontbase to inform them about the situation. I have no idea about their interest in PHP (more about webobjects .

Interested in any of these extensions and willing to help? Know someone in the companies behind sybase or frontbase and could help to get them interested in PHP? Drop me a mail (see the contact form) or introduce yourself on the internals mailing lists