PureGin.org

This week I gave a talk for the Vancouver Island Java User Group on integrating Apache Solr search into web applications. Since the group is, of course, Java-focused, I didn't dwell overly much on Drupal except to demo a non-trivial example of integration showing some of the more advanced capabilities of Solr search, including faceted search, search spelling correction, "find similar content", and so on - all available out of the box with Robert Douglass, pwolanin, claudiu.cristea et al.'s excellent ApacheSolr module for Drupal.

Slides are available here.

After the usual amount of sys admin fiddling, I've moved most of my Drupal sites onto a new server: an Apple 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini. Over the coming weeks I'll be doing some performance tuning and testing to see how it stacks up against the old server, a Dell SC 1425 dual Xeon box.

I wiped the Mac Mini's drive and installed Ubuntu 9.04 server, which took a bit of fussing, but turned out to be pretty easy once I figured it out (more details on that later; basically I had to install 8.04 and do an online upgrade to the newest version)

The box is sitting beside me - tiny, silent, consuming only 23W or so at idle, 110 at full CPU, compared to almost four hundred watts for the old server. Actually, I suspect that these figures are a bit on the high side. I'm planning to actually measure the power consumption, but that's a project for another day. I suspect that the humble Mac Mini has one of the best performance ratings per Watt consumed of any server anywhere. The new (2009) ones are even leaner. I have to say that I'm in awe of this little box.

It's running 'headless' (needs no monitor or keyboard to boot up) thanks to a bit of hardware hackery that I found here. I took photos and documented the (pretty quick and easy to do) assembly of the dongle in this flickr photoset.

Next steps: install a faster, more robust drive (perhaps an SSD?) and get SELinux working. Also web performance benchmarking.

Finally updated my blog site to Drupal 5, after several years of "Oh, I'll have to get around to that one of these days". One of the main holdups was that some of the content was pretty messed up (by a very early version of a Drupal 4.7 updater, perhaps?) but with the help of a little PHP coding, all is well. I keep saying this, but next upgrade really will be easier.

There's a bit of theme tweaking still to do, but I'm going to keep things simple.

A few days ago I gave notice that I will be leaving Raincity Studios.

It's been almost two and a half years - first with Bryght, then with Raincity after the acquisition of Bryght last October - and they have been very good years.

I had the chance yesterday to see some of the first demos of new versions (and in some cases, first releases) of File Framework, Mail API, and XMPPClient, three really amazing new modules for Drupal. All three modules were developed for OpenBand on behalf of its clients.