I have rewritten Sifar, a gem that validates and generates strong passwords. The last version was based on one of my old PHP libraries, and it felt clumsy when simply ported to Ruby.

Currently the only way for Zend_Tool to pick up your custom providers is to add the provider directory to the php include path. This is especially problematic if you have multiple applications in one server.

CCAvenue is an Indian payment gateway; they claim to be the biggest in South Asia. Last week I was looking for an Active Merchant plugin to integrate CCAvenue in a Rails application, but apparently none has been made public so far. So here it is.

At NDTV, we tend to stick to LTS releases of Ubuntu in our servers. Due to the update restrictions, we usually end up building rubygems from source as the default package is outdated. I don’t like this solution as it messes up package dependencies. Turns out there is a PPA for rubygems that seems to be more frequently updated.

From Manuel Lemos of PHPClasses:

The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1.

Very few would relate the Sun MySQL deal with the recent final release of PHP4. With the ‘M’ of LAMP under the control of a traditional rival and death of the technology that almost single handedly popularized the LAMP stack, what does the future of the PHP and LAMP in general look like?