Pierre-Alain Joye has three different posts to his blog about the releases of new versions (or new software) he (and others) have posted recently - a new release candidate for GD, the new Hidef extension in PECL, and a bug release for the zip extension.

• The first post concerns the Zip extension release and which of the provided libraries you should use with your PHP installation (he recommends the latest PECL version over the included version). There's also a link to the new release - 1.8.6
• The second post is an announcement about the publishing of the Hidef extension into the PECL library (by Gopal Vijayaraghavan). It can be used to do a "one time declare" of constants in your application, working with a configuration file to only load them the first time the browser hits the site/application.
• Finally, in the newest of the posts, Pierre points out a brand new release candidate for GD 2.0.35 to two possible correct race conditions. You can download this new release here: tar.gz file, tar.bz2 file