First off this morning, as highlighted by PHPEverywhere, there's a neat little PDF file over on Snipe.net that talks about the times when it's a good idea to use dynamic images, and how to use them in those instances. One thing that <A href="the PDF file points out is how server intensive making these dynamic images is. They're not something to be taken lightly, and should be used only when you really need something dynamic. I've used them in the past for a "pie chart" of disk space for our hosting customers. (And believe me, an image means more to customers than numbers on a page.) Snipe.net has been around for a while now, and belongs to a friend of mine too...There's all sorts of neat little things on her site, if you just poke around a little bit - so check out the rest of the site too....

Well, there's two new things from Zend this morning: First off, the long awaited (heh) PHP Weekly Summary for this week. This one talks about the release of 4.2.0, some of the problems with it, and a mention of something called "PHP Interfaces" - these would allow PHP to shift information between datatypes without having to convert it to a string inbetween (Ex. XML -> HTML via XSLT extension). Secondly, there's a new Code Gallery Contest in the works - the topic for this one is to find the shortest path through a maze. This one's originally based on a project from the older Berkeley Programming Contest. It think it's a great thing that these contests are stretching the limits of the language and helping people understand how to work with it more than just making pretty, working webpages.

And, lastly, from ApacheToday, we have a new article about Installing and Configuring Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin on Windows 2000. Now, why you'd want to is beyond me, but it is possible to get this setup up and working correctly, and he details all the steps for you in this article - everything from where to get the downloads to how to configure phpMyAdmin to connect to everything correctly.