Its been 3 years since the first release of PHP 5, and it was surprising to see that as of last month the penetration for PHP 5 was still floating around 15% (source http://www.nexen.ne). That’s a hell of a lot of PHP 4 development still going on! Myself included (did i say that out loud?). Many hosting providers and popular applications like WordPress are still widely supporting 4, but be weary, with the discontinuation of 4 there’s going to be a lot of rewriting and migration going on (FYI Migration Guide). Gees i hate updates!
Recently my colleagues and I discovered some sneaky SEO strats being used to direct seemingly large amounts of competitor traffic to the RSVP personals site. Read more about it here
Keep your eyes out on soon-to-be media coverage on the story 
Seems to be a lot of exciting things going on in the world of PHP lately. In addition to Zend Framework there is now a plans to release Delphi for PHP. In a recent Delphi Seminar held in India, CodeGear (a subsidary of Borland) announced in addition to their release of Delphi 2007 they will release a brand new product line aimed at Rapid Application Development in PHP.
Thursday night saw the arrival of the Nintendo Wii at Melbourne department stores. It was reported that up to 300 people queued at Chadstone and Southland for a chance to purchase the console. There were no guarantees since many stores had already taken on pre-orders. “Everyone is after the Call of Duty package with the second controller” said Russell Willson, console enthusiast and colleague. 
Russell came to work on Friday with his Wii and even though I personally have not been caught up in the hype I have to say it’s an impressive piece of gadjetry - Russell tells me he’s actually physically stuffed after playing and hour of Call of Duty. “The controls actually interact with the game through movement. For Call of Duty you use 2 controls, the standard (looks like a TV remote) and the “nun chuk” (looks like an electric shaver). The normal control is used to control weapons and the nun chuk is used to control the character - when he picks things up, rows boats or moves tanks!”
I won’t be surprised if we see Palates come out on the Wii in the next few months! 
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I am going to attend the next Melbourne PHP User Group meeting in January 11th 2007.
Check out the details here: http://melbourne.ug.php.net/content/view/133/59/
Have a read on the BuilderAU on the Java SE6 core enhancements overview.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed on a unified system for submitting web pages to search engines. Called “Sitemaps” funnily enough, the Sitemaps protocol will be based on Google Sitemaps which will be upgraded to Sitmaps 0.9 to reflect the now unified system.
Windows Live users will be able to submit their webpages to Sitemaps through the Live Search Submit page, and Yahoo users can use Yahoo Site Explorer. Existing Google sitemap users will not have to change anything
For more info checkout the Sitemaps.org website
Today Microsoft announced that Windows Vista will be available as of January 2007.
Vista will be available in 4 different flavours; Vista Basic, Vista Premium, Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. Microsoft will also release 2 other versions at a later date to be announced: Vista Starter - for first time PC users - and Vista Enterprise which probably the server version (?)
faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life - moz
I managed to grab a copy of Firefox 2 earlier in the week so I’ve had a good chance to play around with it and I’m very impressed. From the outset it doesn’t look dramatically different. There’s a slightly different skin, but everything is still in its place and works very similarly but with a few subtle differences.
In version 1 you couldn’t close tabs without first activating them then clicking the close button in the top right of the tab panel, in version 2 each tab has been given it’s own close button. Also another annoyance in version 1 was how tabs just seemed to disappear when they tab panel exceeded the browser window. Tabs became inaccessible until you closed other tabs, in version 2 a scrollable panel has been introduced so that you can scroll backwards and forwards through your tabs.
Another nifty addition is the ability to resume previously tabbed browser sessions, so you can pick up where you left off. And then there’s the inline Spell Checker! If your a typo king like me you’ll find this little feature simply brilliant - misspell a word in a form and the Spell Checker will underline it in red, where upon you can simply right click and make the correction.
Anyway there are a lot more great additions to Firefox 2. Let us know what you think
Earlier this year we did an overview of the Firefox 2 beta release, after much anticipation the guys over at Mozilla have release Candidate 1. Code named “Bon Echo” this is a preview release for web developers and curious users wishing to take a sneek peek. Here’s the official features list;
It also looks like Firefox 3 is in the pipeline…
For more info on the brains behind release 2 and Firefox in general checkout the Bon Echo Planning Centre and Firefox Brainstorming page
