I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively for a while now (Windows XP x64 for daily work and Windows Vista x64 as my gaming system), but Apple made the braindead decision to let iTunes v7.7's iPhone 64-bit support only run on Windows Vista. Well, unfortunately, all my business data is on Windows XP and there's no way that I'll downgrade to 32-bit and loose support for my 4GB RAM.

Turns out, there's really no technical reason for not having iPhone support on Windows XP 64, unless you have a phobia of editing MSI files with Orca. Here's an excellent write-up.

I wish I could be there :-).

Brian Rosner posted this update in the Django users group. This means that Django just made a big step forward!

This PHP RFC contains a proposal for closures, lambda functions and callables in PHP. Looking at the rest of PHP, the syntax seems to be in the same style, with a new reserved word "use".

The RFC has been accepted and the code is in PHP's trunk. Well, it was about time, right?

Of course, PHP will still helpfully truncate your 64-bit database id columns by converting them into floating point numbers, if you're using a PHP version compiled on a 32-bit system, but of course not on a 64-bit system, because it wouldn't be PHP if it behaved the same on two random computers. But now you will be able to do that with real up-to-date, all-the-hype scripting language style in PHP 6.0 ;-).

I didn't touch my newsreader in a while and promptly I missed quite a bit of interesting things. Here are the most important:

Django

Large file uploads: Revision 7814 finally lands the patch from ticket 2070 and finally allows Django to handle arbitrarily-sized file-uploads.

Ruby's security vulnerabilities

Man, I'm late to that particular party, but some serious vulnerabilities have been found in the main Ruby interpreter. Unfortunately it seems that the official maintainers messed up as well and only 3^rd-party patches are available right now, because there's no known stable release code in the codebase that a quick patch release could be based off.

I think the most important lesson that can be learned from this, as Simon Willison points out, is that you need to keep release tags around in your SCM system, but also that you should never blindly trust any part of a system. At least it makes me wonder what surprises lurk in the Java VM or CPython.

Diablo III

Has been announced. Userfriendly pretty much hits the nail on the head.