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It's been a couple of days since the final PHP 7.0.0 was released. Among the new features/improvements brought by this new version are improved speed and reduced memory usage. So they say. It's about time to find out if this is the case.

It's official. PHP 7.0.0 is here. The most important changes are:

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved Exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
• Secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Return and Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts

The link for the official news item is at http://php.net/archive/2015.php#id2015-12-03-1

To use it in your favorite web development environment, if you're a Linux user (like me), you will have to wait until a package is available for your distribution. If you're on a rolling release (Gentoo forever!), version 7.0.0 is probably a couple of hours away from commit in the portage tree. If you're on Windows (no comment...), grab your binary build from the official Windows releases page, at http://windows.php.net/download/

Exciting days ahead!

It's one of these times that you blog about a new release of a great piece of software. This time, it's Drupal. Drupal 8.0.0 was released yesterday, after almost 5 years of development (Drupal 7.0 was released on Jan. 5th 2011) and it's a great release!

For one thing, Views is integrated into the core. To be honest, I haven't kept up with the latest development timeline regarding this new version, so I'm pretty sure I miss a lot.

It will be great to try out the new release. Drupal is one of the best (if not the best one) platforms to build a website.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead, download and install it!

It's been a couple of days since I bought a ZTE MF667 USB 3G modem for the few days that I will be for vacation and internet access is mostly necessary. The first thing I had to do is to confirm that this modem works with Linux.

Plugging it in for the first time and network manager did nothing. The first thing to do is to search for possible solutions (using my wired connection). After a few posts, I couldn't figure out what was missing. The last post found presented the correct solution.

This is a post about a few thoughts about programming practices. These thoughts arose after my involvement with two projects.

The first project was a web application using PHP as the server-side language and MySQL as the database. A colleague came to me asking for some help in their project and hints about it. After going through some of the code and regarding my relatively little programming experience (I'm not a full time programmer), some random thoughts came to mind.

Click at http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-framework-2015-survey/?ref=cdccd3f2b5a2fe94c0de0aed2bdc495c to vote for your favorite PHP framework for this year.

Today was the unfortunate day that Leonard Nimoy, the actor that performed the Vulkan character Spock in the original Star Trek series has passed away at the age of 83.

As I read somewhere in G+, "Damn it Spock, that was not a logical action".

RIP Leonard. Thank you for all your acting.

This is a blog post about why you should dump MySQL (or any forks...) and choose another database for your projects. It is not exhaustive at all, it just reflects my opinion about this database that I have formed so far after many years using it. Many are going to hate this post, many will probably love it. Feel free to comment below in any case. I have blogged about MySQL in the past (read here and here), but things have changed since then.

My (our) favorite browser, Firefox, yesterday turned 10 years old for its 1.0 release. Since the words "privacy" and "free and independent web" have special meanings these days and become more and more important, let's try to keep web a independent place for all and our data under our control. Use Firefox and these goals will come closer. Do not use closed source browsers, like Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera or any derivatives. They might be better (or even worse), but use the only free (as in freedom) and decent alternative free browser, use Firefox!

After reading this article regarding copyright from the Pirate Party of Greece (the article is in Greek), I watched the following video on Youtube, that describes the reasoning behind the concept of copyright and how it was created. Please watch it, it's very informative. The video is in English (Greek subtitles are available).