he PHP Programming Innovation Award Winner of 2012 was announced. An interview with the winner, Karl Holz from Canada, was one of the main topics of the episode 33 of the Lately in PHP podcast conducted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert. They also discussed the usual batch of PHP topics of interest like Zend Optimizer+ source code that was released, the PHP 5.5 feature freeze and roadmap, as well an article that compares PHP to an Hobbit, as well other languages to Lord Of The Rings story characters.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recording. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.

[Manuel Lemos, Ernani Joppert and Rochak Chauhan] also discuss the latest developments of the TIOBE programming languages ranking. The latest numbers seem to suggest that languages like Python and C# are gaining popularity supposedly at the expense of an apparent loss of interest on PHP.

The ranking their referring to can be found here. You can listen to this new episode either through their in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. There's also the complete transcript if you'd like a text-only version.

Once in a while, a class appears to be not only innovating, but also does something unusual and extraordinary.

This month the winners of the award August edition were announced. The most extraordinary class seems to be "Image Nudity Filter" by Bakr Alsharif, despite it reached only the 2nd place in the month award ranking.

The class analyzes an image and rates it according to the probability that it may contain nudity. This is especially useful for sites that might need to keep things more "family friendly" but still allow users to upload their images.