Today has seen the release of 4 major releases for some great software that I regularly use. There must be something special about June 30 that I didn’t know about. It makes me wish I held out on the release of PyRadio 0.2 for a few more weeks, and then it’d have been 5 great releases is one day!

PHP 5.3.0

The long awaited release of the latest version of the PHP programming language was finally released today. I can’t wait to start using some of the new language features in my PHP code, especially closures and late static binding. Namespaces are a feature I was looking forward to, but due to the awkward syntax I’m not sure I’ll be compelled to use them over PEAR style class naming conventions, which do a pretty good job of emulating namespaces.

Firefox 3.5

I’ve been using the beta version for a while, but today Firefox 3.5 was officially released. Along with lots of performance improvements 3.5 also includes lots of new features. My favorite is an improvement to the “restore previous session” dialog, where you can now select specific tabs that you do or do not want to restore.

Virtualbox 3.0

The open source visualization software was also released today. A great tool for testing sites in multiple browsers, or trying out new operating systems.

Wireshark 1.2

As is 3 major releases today weren’t enough, version 1.2 of the popular network protocol analyzer was also released today! An absolute must for anyone developing any network code. The new version includes lots of bug fixes and GeoIP integration.

PyRadio 0.2, the curses based Internet radio player which I develop, is now available!

Changes since the last release include:

• External radio stations file
• Page up/down to move up and down 5 stations at a time
• The selected station remains highlighted when you move about
• Volume up/down keys
• Additional radio stations

The latest code available via GitHub, and you can download the 0.2 release from the project page.

Thanks to everyone who left feedback and suggestions about the 0.1 release!

If you find any bugs or would like to request any features then please leave a comment.

I spend quite a bit of time over at reddit, reading subreddits such as programming (aka proggit), php, python, and compsci. It’s a great place to find new and interesting programming related content on the web.

There was a post on proggit today called the big programming related subreddits round up which listed over 30 different programming related subreddits! Far too many to keep up with, you might think. A comment was left describing an amazing reddit feature I (and apparently many others) didn’t know about: You can create a multi-reddit by combining several subreddits together. The following multi-reddit includes both the PHP and Python subreddits:

http://www.reddit.com/r/php+python

What a great feature! Here are some multi-reddits that I’m now following:

LAMP (includes PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Javascript, CSS, Linux)
Scripting (includes Python, Ruby)
Functional (includes Functional, Lisp, Scheme, Clojure)
Dev (includes Programming, CompSci, CodeProjects, Agile and OpenSource)