On the Symfony blog, there's an announcement from Fabien Potencier about the framework's new release process (details here).

To make a long story short, Symfony now manages its releases through a time-based model. If you want to learn more about the Symfony release process, or about the first Symfony Long Term Support release, or about the release date for next version of Symfony, please take a minute to read the new process. You are also going to learn when we will start working on Symfony 3!

The full details also include a timeline they've projected for the upcoming 2.x versions of the framework, right up to the 3.0 release. The goal of the process is to provide transparency and predictability to the Symfony frmework's releases with 6 month releases and and open plan presented to the community up front.

Anthony Ferrara has a new post to his blog today looking at true random number generation as it relates to predictability and bias. He also talks about a method/tool you can use (based on RFC 4086) to generate truly random numbers - PHP-CryptLib.

When we talk about "random" numbers, we generally talk about two fundamental properties: Predictability and Bias. Both are closely related, but are subtly different. Predictability in reference to random numbers is the statistical problem of predicting the next value when knowing any number of previous values. Bias on the other hand is the statistical problem of predicting the next value when knowing the distribution of previous values.

He looks at how predictability can effect true random number generation and a common mistake in generation related to bias in the calculation method. He talks about some of the functions PHP includes to work with randomness, but notes that they all have their flaws. He points to the PHP-CryptLib package as a solution (adhering to the guidelines in RFC 4086 for randomness). He includes some sample code of how to use it to generate random numbers, tokens and sets of bytes. You can find the full source over on github.