While Yahoo and Google show off their search-index sizes, I am waiting for some real innovation in the way that search results are presented. For example my number one gripe with search engines is that I mostly get redundant content and that links are returned that simply give me a link which contains my search term.

Here is a little tid bit about a useful MySQL extension to the SQL standard, since I have given this same hint to several people in a short timeframe. A good friend from good old Berlin who runs a site for selling car parts was the first to ask, so I am giving him credit for bringing this nifty operator back to mind. Essentially the problem is that frequently we want to easily handle matching against some value or NULL with the same code. Obviously the standard expects you to switch from the standard equal operator to "IS" for matching a NULL. After all NULL is not equal to anything. Right, but its tedious to handle this in the code so MySQL invented the "<=>" operator aka the "NULL-safe equal to operator". Also very useful in combination with prepared statements.

As I said in my last post we are not yet sure if we need to make some changes to namespaces before we can move from alpha to beta in the current 5.3.0 release cycle. What I did not ask for explicitly is feedback from people that have already started developing code with namespaces. These people are likely the best source of feedback on the current state of namespaces and if the proposed changes to namespaces would be useful or not. As you can see in the thread on internals around this RFC Stas does not feel its necessary, while Marcus still feels its a good idea.

If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions). Also this time around the Windows infrastructure is in place with its very own website and a large choice of different binaries for whatever flavor of Windows you prefer. Aside from a few additions, it was mainly bug fixing in this release. The biggest changes happened in the fileinfo extension.

How dramatic a topic. Anyways, I just send of an email to the PDO list, where I CC'ed a long list of developers from the community and RDBMS vendors. I hope that this will become the starting point for work on a PDO version 1.1. This will hopefully will just be the first step towards even bigger things to come, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. I really think that today we have more developers and vendors interested than ever. Now we just need to figure out how to work together within the PHP development and legal model. But recent discussions, especially with various vendors, have made me more hopeful than ever that we have a chance to make it happen. Please join the discussion if you are interested.