it’s that time of the year again and that means that we need to do some housekeeping. i’m starting with some virtual housekeeping which means the server gets upgrade to its software.

new versions of mysql and php. i didn’t want to upgrade mysql, but it turns out that the version i was using was compiled with an intel compiler and that interfered with my being able to compile php.

all this compiling nonsense is making my head spin. the next fresh OS install i’m doing is going to be a fedora install with rpms.

a little surprise with PHP 5.3 is that eregi() is deprecated. i never really used it anyway and always thought it was weird that there was eregi() and preg_match(), the functionality seemed duplicated, but now using eregi() throws all these warnings about it being deprecated. this isn’t an issue for me, except that there are some libraries that i use that depend on it.

i think i read somewhere that eregi() is faster than preg_match(), so i guess that’s why people used it. still, i had to rewrite the functions that used eregi() so that my logs won’t be so spammy. i just checked the eregi() man page and it says that preg_match() may be faster. hrmmm, why was eregi() ever around? who said programming was all fun and games?

it also looks like magic_quotes_gpc is being deprecated. i’m not sure how much of a difference that is really going to make with my code, but i’m a little scared. i am sure that i depend on magic quotes, so i better start a code review and see just how bad it really is going to be.