Following some of the suggestions from the php|architect folks about getting your ideas accepted at conferences, Lorna Mitchell has posted some of her thought process behind coming up with a good conference bio.

To get to this point, I started with a list of things I should include. My job, my blog, my community activity, my technical interests. [...] I then turned my points into sentences, and emailed the result to a few people to read. [...] I always take this approach even when I know I'm probably making a hash of it, if I'm asking for someone's input, I take the time to attempt it myself and send them the result.

She also notes that proofreaders are always a big help, catching some of the small things that you might gloss over and could make your bio. You can get a few other ideas and examples here, here or here.

In looking for a better way to handle serialized data (than the usual serialize) Ilia Alshanetsky discovered an extension called Igbinary:

As I was reading docs on Andrei's new memcache extension (memcached) I came across a binary serialization extension called Igbinary written by Sulake Dynamoid Oy. This extension promised much more optimal serialization routines by using binary, rather then a clear text format. Sounded, good so I decided to run a few benchmarks on it.

He uses several different sizes of files to run his tests and found that, while it is just a bit slower than the normal serialization, the compression rate that's about fifty times smaller than the usual. The extension also offers a "compact_strings" parameter that allows for even more compression of just string data.

As you can see the serialization speed is pretty amazing, once your serialized data set is in excess of 100bytes, you can expect nearly 2x improvement with a ~30% data set reduction with igbinary. I think we got a winner!

Following the release of the 1.0 stable version of Microsoft's WinCache accelerator, Ivo Jansch took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see the response times of two applications, WordPress and SilverStripe, on a standard Windows hosting setup.

While it's important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article. The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists. I'm going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I'd like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

They used two servers with the same hardware specs and a the following software: WordPress &SilverStripe, the Web Platform Installer (Microsoft) and Zend Server. Check out the rest of the post for the results of their testing.

New from the Content with Style blog today there's a quick tip from Matthias Willerich for phpMyAdmin users who are having issues viewing the content of blob data types.

n my phpMyAdmin installation, version 3.1.1, none of the old style config settings [...] had any effect, and the solution was terribly elusive. "view blob", "show blob", "display blob", all that Google suggested were people asking the same question, at various ages of the internet.

Finally, after wading through negative comments of forums and not getting much help at all, Matthias dug into the source and found a session variable that can be set to true and the content magically appears.

As is mentioned on the PHP.net website today, the latest release in the PHP 5.3.x series has been posted for download - PHP 5.3.1.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.1. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security updates in this release include a new max_file_uploads directive for the php.ini settings, the addition of some sanity checks on exif processing, correction of a safe_mode and open_basedir bypass and more. Check out the changelog for more information on what was updated and the release announcement for a full update.

You can download the source here and grab the Windows binaries here.