...The need for speed.

Looks like the Google really are serious about this whole "page speed" thing, they've only gone and released an apache module for optimising your files and web pages as they're served. Which is nice.

mod_pagespeed is available now, and having had a quick chance to play, I'm thinking that my little old blog is possibly not the ideal proving ground - I think I may be more CPU/disk bound than html performance, as I didn't immediately see a difference. Mind you, I do have nginx in front of my apache server, so that may be speeding things up already - if I had my desktop set up properly I could just ssh into it, and instantly provision a new virtual machine as a web server, and deploy my site to it. But I don't, so I'll just leave that for now.

So far, I've discovered that running nginx in front of an apache instance with mod_pagespeed enabled kills the css on my wordpress blog. At least with the default, out of the box mod_pagespeed settings. More experimentation to come.

But not tonight. I must get an early night, as tomorrow is promising to be a looooong day, starting with an early breakfast and a guinness at the Cock Tavern, Smithfields, and then the London DevOps talk on Google App Engine in the evening.

<random tech tip>
Again, an Appley tip today, but if you have an iphone/ipod touch/ipad, and you'd like to mount it/them as a disk, then you can. There's an app called Phone Disk (wow, they thought long and hard about that name, which is normally a paid for app, but is free until the first of December. I imagine that there will be a shiny new version in short order, which is a paid for upgrade, with some shiny new feature, but either way, it's free, and it works on OS X and Windows machines. Get it from www.macroplant.com/phonedisk/
</random tech tip>