• register_globals will be gone.
• magic_quotes will also disappear.
• $HTTP_*_VARS has been removed, in favour for $_GET, $_POST, etc.
• E_STRICT error messages are included in E_ALL errors.
• Better Unicode Support.
• safe_mode is being removed.

Thank you PHP people.

• How FriendFeed uses MySQL (hint: as a hashtable with indexes)
• The database behind Plurk (twitter clone), also a hashtable

Con:

• Databases as a service, they no likie hashtables

InformationWeek reports that half a day into the Mobile World Coference in Barcelona many phones have been announced, however, none running Google’s Android. 2009 was supposed to be the year of Android, is it actually going to happen?

We’re only halfway through the first day at Mobile World Congress and already things are looking bleak for Android. Many of the major manufacturers already have announced their new products at the show, and not one Android handset has been seen.

Wow.

The Chromium team got a first page rendering on the Mac version of Google Chrome. Finally.

Over the last couple of months, the group working on Mac Chrome (myself included) has shifted gears from layout tests and WebKit compatibility to getting the application user interface up and limping. That also means getting the separate WebCore renderer processes to communicate over IPC to the browser.

Last week, while I was in Cali, the entire team made a tremendous amount of progress getting the cross-platform model and controller classes scaffolded, topped off with a Cocoa UI (with similar strides on Linux using Gtk). We were at the point where you could create new windows and tabs (and close them too) using the shared code, which would spawn/quit associated renderer processes. It was pretty exciting to watch them come and go in Activity Monitor, knowing how close we were to getting bits on the screen.

This week, everything came together and we can now load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs.

You know, we’ve all been there. We want to make it work with CSS. But sometimes it’s just not worth the effort. The hacks and conditional comments ruin our clean markup. And we spend hours trying to make a simple layout work. Occasionally, we have to remind ourselves that we’ve done enough and it’s time to move on.

For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events onto your phone. Sync uses push technology, which means that any changes you make to your calendar or contacts from the browser or phone will be reflected on your device within minutes. For phones that support SyncML, the tool will allow you to get your Gmail contacts onto your phone. For all of these devices, synchronization happens automatically over the air, without having to manually sync your phone. The connection is always on, which means your information is always up-to-date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

What have you found out about yourself you didn’t know?

Just a month ago, Antonio Cangiano ran some benchmarks against a Ruby 1.9.1 preview versus several other Ruby interpreters. Ruby 1.9.1 clocked in at at least twice as fast as Ruby 1.8.7. This is great progress and will tone down some of the “but Ruby is slow” type arguments that have gone around, even though in the grand scheme of things it barely makes a dent.

I don’t care much, but doesn’t it bother people that it was so simple to make Ruby twice as fast? It must have been terribly inefficient before. All the wasted CPU cycles with all those sites running Ruby on Rails applications. Energy wasters.