A better home for flat-files..

I don't use databases at corz.org, in a word, hatem! I tolerate them for other domains I fiddle with, but here at the org it's flat-files all the way, baby!

Flat files are beautiful things. You can pick them up, split them up, read them, edit them, join and gzip them, give them cute icons, chuck 'em in the trash, and all the rest; they are desktop objects, with the kind of tactile response I expect from such things.

As I/O speeds increase, and RAM and hard drives get dirt cheap, flat-files make more and more sense; and over the years, I've developed quite a few database-like manipulations for flat-files, something which makes an increasing amount of sense as time goes on. Databases, and database servers are ugly, nasty, complex things that just beg to be knocked over and abused.

So, living on a server that was also a MySQL database server was more than a little annoying and I'm thrilled to say that corz.org now happily lives on a proper RAID-1 volume, and you can feeeeeeeel the difference on every page. Apart from the speed increase, there should have been no other visible signs of the transition. Thanks to the fine support team over at Las Vegas Communications, I had everything running like clockwork before the DNS even knew what had hit it.

There's probably a few silly spiders still crawling around the old server; but their DNS will catch up soon enough. There are far too many world-wide search engines, anyway. In fact, I suspect they are breeding. Hmmm …

On the subject of search technologies, it's great to see corzoogle back to its old self, and happily returning full-text searches of the entire site (around three thousand documents) in a second or less. I expect downloads will rise sharply.

There have been too many updates to list, so I won't.

for now..

;o)