Friday Night Dinner: The Salusbury
The Salusbury Pub has been a feature of Queen's Park for as long as we have lived in the area. They recently had a refurbishment, and as we had never eaten there, we decided to give it a try.
We were on the earlier side, and it was quiet when we arrived.
For our starters, my wife ordered the Parmesan Churros. Instead of them being sweet as you'd expect in their dessert form, they were fluffy, light, and savoury, with delightful Parmesan twang. I had a single oyster, which was served in a cucumber and jalapeño "hot" sauce. It was only slightly spicy, and didn't overpower the flavour of the oyster itself.
As her main, my wife chose the Roast Venison. It was served with caramelised onions, some chard, and a jus with cranberries to tie the whole meal together. The venison itself was perfectly cooked, and still pink on the inside. For my main course, I selected the Somerset Saxon chicken, served with herb gnocchi and girolle mushrooms. The chicken was well cooked, and had a well-seasoned and crispy skin, while the meat was soft and moist. The gnocchi were light, with the herbs adding some flavour. The girolles and sauce made it all work better.
We were still a little peckish, and decided to share a dessert. The menu had an "apple crumble". However, it wasn't an actual crumble, but rather a soufflé with apple flavour, and some crumbs to add some texture. Some vanilla ice cream cooled it down a little.
The courses at the Salusbury were excellent, and we should really have tried going much sooner. As it's pretty close by I am sure we will return.
Xdebug Update: November 2025
In this update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in the last month.
In the last month, I spent around 28 hours on Xdebug, with 24 hours funded.
Xdebug 3.5
Most of this month I spent on making Xdebug 3.5 ready, to coincide with the release of PHP 8.5.
First there were a few bug reports from the alpha releases, and I found some issues with the new Native Path Mapping myself. I also fixed a crash bug, and released the last pre-release version: 3.5.0alpha3.
After that release, I worked with the author of the PHP Debug Adapter for Visual Studio Code to bring Xdebug's control sockets to Windows. This held up the release of Xdebug 3.5 a little, as we wanted to get this right.
With this, I also created documentation for the Xdebug Control tool, which can be used to talk to Xdebug to initiate debugging sessions, and to force pausing running code without setting a breakpoint beforehand. This is only available on Linux and Windows.
Documentation Upgrades
While working on the documentation for the Xdebug Control tool, I went down the rabbit hole, and revamped the layout of the documentation's front page too. Instead of a single list with bullet points, there are now sections, and some images depicting the different features.
I also added a section on Flame Graphs. This feature that I added in Xdebug 3.3 was not yet documented.
PIE and PECL
I also documented how to install Xdebug with PIE, the new installer for PHP extensions based around the packagist ecosystem.
PIE is replacing the legacy PECL tool and website. Installing Xdebug with PECL is no longer the preferred installation method. Using PIE is strongly recommended.
In the future, there will no longer be new versions of Xdebug uploaded to the PECL website. In the mean time, releases through PECL will be delayed.
Xdebug Videos
I have created no new videos in the last months.
All Xdebug videos can be watched on my channel.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or via email.
Business Supporter Scheme and Funding
On GitHub sponsors, I am currently 42% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug.
If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.
In the last month, no new business supporters signed up.
Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page, a profile on GitHub sponsors, as well as an OpenCollective organisation.
If you want to contribute to specific projects, you can find those on the Projects page.
Xdebug Cloud
Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.
Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.
If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailing list, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.
Shortlink
This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/xdebug-25oct-joe
PHP 500
Two weeks ago, I was on a plane from Leeds, where I had given a "What's New in PHP 8.5" talk at the Leeds PHP user group, on the way to Amsterdam. Later that day, I would give a similar talk for the Rotterdam PHP user group, hosted by my friend Damien Seguy. My list of talks indicated that that would be my 500th talk I would ever give.
Damien and I have known each other for quite some time. When we met at the International PHP Conference in Munich earlier this year, we were reminiscing about this. I thought we had met at that same conference, but back in 2002.
Damien insisted that it was a year earlier, and he had a t-shirt to prove it. But then, if I would have been at that 2001 conference, I would likely have given at talk there too. But it wasn't in my list.
After digging around with the Wayback Machine, eventually I found evidence of this — the conference's website doesn't go back far enough either.
I could not really find the whole slide deck though — not even the Wayback machine had all PDF pages archived.
This did however mean that the talk that I was going to give in Rotterdam would be my 501st talk. I was reluctant to tell Damien, as he indicated that he would try to make a thing out of it.
So I did tell him, that no, my 500th talk was "last night in Leeds", and not tonight. Despite his grave disappointment, he still thought it be nice to at least mark the occasion — with a badly photocopied PHP $500 bank note.
It wasn't a fake image, as there are actually PHP $500 banknotes, as PHP is the PHilippine Peso. He did promise to do better, and a week or so later, an envelope arrived with an actual PHP $500 note in it to celebrate. It's going to go up framed on my wall. For the first time I was actually paid in PHP!
Thanks Damien, and the PHP community to have listened to my 500^W 501 talks!
Shortlink
This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/php500-joe
Life Line
Updated a bar
Updated a restaurant
Updated a pub
Updated a bar
Updated a restaurant
Updated an attraction and a museum
Updated a restaurant
Updated a bar
Updated a brewery
I walked 7.4km in 1h17m31s
I walked 1.0km in 8m59s
I know my French is pretty terrible, but I'm sure I'm closer to the correct answer than what's shown here...
I walked 1.2km in 12m04s
I walked 6.4km in 1h11m52s
Merge branch 'v2022'
Merge pull request #169 from psumbera/solaris-2
I walked 7.0km in 1h6m48s
Fixed some ffing sidewalks again.
I walked 10.5km in 1h40m26s
Updated a pet_grooming shop
I walked 8.6km in 2h12m58s
I walked 8.7km in 1h24m16s
Updated a restaurant
I walked 2.4km in 24m20s
I walked 6.6km in 1h4m32s
Shortlink
This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/salusbury-joh