Ok, sorry, this is a teaser to a series of more posts I'll try to get put up over the course of the week, but I will give out free samples:

1) IRL: Wow... where to begin. I moved into my own apartment by myself, it's quite a different experience. I've been working 5-6 days a week just to cover my expenses, and managed to get promoted to assistant manager in less than a year. Now if I could only get a raise...

2) Server tweaks: Because no server is ever good enough, I've been very busily working on my servers and network infrastructure. Long story short, I've made some major architectural changes to my LAMP stack by replacing Apache's mod_php with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager).

3) Introducing Connor Behan: My friend has been renting space on my server from me for 2+ years and he only recently got around to actually using it. Lots to share about our adventures with Arch Linux + Lighttpd/PHP-FPM (and some caveats about the latter), and setting up multi-core Apache Solr to serve search queries for two Drupal sites.

4) APT repo and LAMP-related back-ports: I needed to back-port PHP to get PHP-FPM on Lucid, and while I was at it I decided to do the same for Apache, and Lighttpd. And since I went to all that trouble, naturally I needed a repo to house them in.

So, that's what I plan to cover over the week in more detail including how-to's and pictures. Stay tuned.