I am a huge fan of FastCGI, due in large part to prior time spent using it while developing web applications in C++. At the same time, I am something of an Apache 2 fan, but my past experiences with mod_fastcgi and Apache 2 left much to be desired.

So, lighttpd appears on my personal radar; by all accounts (verified now by personal experience) the FastCGI support is excellent. On top of that, server/site configuration is also a breeze. I won’t even bother to discuss performance (top notch).

Just that fast, I’ve stopped using Apache and started using lighttpd. I’m sure I will eventually encounter some reason why I should use both, but so far that reason does not exist and lighttpd is far and away my new favorite web server.

Why did I bother?

Django! Trying to deploy a Django site with mod_python under Apache was kicking my head in, in no small part due to the complete lack of actually useful documentation on …

I am a huge fan of FastCGI, due in large part to prior time spent using it while developing web applications in C++. At the same time, I am something of an Apache 2 fan, but my past experiences with mod_fastcgi and Apache 2 left much to be desired.

So, lighttpd appears on my personal radar; by all accounts (verified now by personal experience) the FastCGI support is excellent. On top of that, server/site configuration is also a breeze. I won’t even bother to discuss performance (top notch).

Just that fast, I’ve stopped using Apache and started using lighttpd. I’m sure I will eventually encounter some reason why I should use both, but so far that reason does not exist and lighttpd is far and away my new favorite web server.

Why did I bother?

Django! Trying to deploy a Django site with mod_python under Apache was kicking my head in, in no small part due to the complete lack of actually useful documentation on …

Today I (finally) got my Solaris 10 x86 server from Sun.

This is one of those lower-end x64 “Ultra 20″ machines that they were “giving away” if you purchased a 3 year support contract. My intention has been to make it my primary work/development machine, so with that in mind I have been messing around with it today, trying to get accustomed to the OS (Solaris not being an OS I have ever used very much at all) and spending time figuring out how I can continue doing the things I do under Linux.

A quick review, from the perspective of someone who is effectively a “first time Sun customer":

The machine itself is interesting looking, though plain. Better than a white box, but no SGI. (No Sun either, for that matter, compared to the appearance of their higher-end machines. You get what you pay for.)

The first thing you notice after plugging it up and turning it on is that there is no useful hardcopy …

I am certainly not the only person to have ever noticed the mean-spirited way people and primates assault things which are new or different or not understood or simply disliked, however there is a specific instance of this herd/mob insanity which I have only recently come to recognize for what it is.

This is, simply, the hostile reaction to innovation from the disapproving herd.

No, I am not realizing for the first time that some people don’t like new or different ideas. It is, however, the first time I have actually put this together while looking at the RDBMS market and comparing, say, MySQL and its competitors.

Specifically: the storage engine concept in MySQL, whereby one may choose to utilize different storage engines, which may have different capabilities suiting themselves to particular needs or environments. If you need transactions, you use a transactional storage engine. If you do not need them nor the overhead …

I am not a huge fan of Java (though I have come to like it) and certainly not a big believer in hype, so it has taken me some time to investigate Lucene.

Once upon a time I needed to search the details of approximately 2-3 million “documents” (call it 2GB of data), serving up the results many times a second. MSSQL’s fulltext search was simply laughable with this relatively small load; many queries would not even return at all (unless one wished to wait for hours, and one did not), so MySQL was tried instead.

While it was a lot better than MSSQL’s, this is unfortunately much like observing that having a concrete block slammed repeatedly into your face is a lot better than being dead. True but useless. Neither of them scaled very well, so growth prospects were dim.

So today (years afterward), on a whim, I decided to try Lucene in this environment and see what it could do. I very crudely indexed …