I'm currently living in Thailand (remote programmer) and it's a great country to do these kinds of things from. When it comes to the visa situation here it's kind of difficult, I have a Thai wife which kind of takes care of that for me, otherwise your best option is probably getting a student visa. The internet connection is not the fastest (max 100k/s to the EU/US) but it's very stable even out here in the jungle.
PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the fact that there are so many. Just take a box and do some small modifications, voila, done!
A word of caution though, last I tested canvas+processing was a lot slower than flash+flare, ie. don't use canvas for stuff like the link maps on vizreader.com