Monday, December 09, 2002

portable.nsd status I've got the FastCGI listener talking to an OpenACS-loaded TCL interpreter on Win32/Apache1.3x. I need to implement some of the ns_* web serving API's, but it seems pretty decent. I was surprised how easy it was to use mod_rewrite to funnel all your requests through a single fast-cgi script. I am very grateful for the Zope folks, who've paved this road before and left some good breadcrumbs. Apache 1.3x on Windows is horrible for production work, because it's essentially single threaded, single-process - simultaneous requests queue up. But I'm not worried, because mod_FastCGI for multithreaded Apache 2.0 is working in CVS, according to it's author Rob S. I'm looking forward to giving that a try, and also figuring out the IIS analog to mod_rewrite. (Well, perhaps 'looking forward' is quite the right term). 3:10:56 PM      comment []  trackback []

IDC Study revisited An interview with the author of the MS-commissioned study of the cost of Linux vs. Windows. I was initially pretty skeptical that the study revealed anything of substance, but on second thought it does make some sense. An organization who looks at Linux and open source as simply freedom from licensing fees is misguided. That's the point MS is trying to get across, and they're right. It took me a long time to get up to speed on Unix development coming from my Windows background, and it probably would have been less expensive for me to just stick with (shudder) only their development tools and servers for a long time. But once you've made the investment in skills/retraining, you're in pretty good shape TCO-wise with your newfound freedom to choose the exact mix of proprietary/freeware/services that's right for you. You have no choice when you have an irreplaceable vendor dependency - your mix is what they decide to sell. The training or services component has to be there, but look at it this way: one multi-cpu Oracle license replaced with Postgres buys a *lot* of training for your staff, and benefits your organization a lot more in the many instances where you don't actually need Oracle's advanced features. I wonder if someone (Ximian? ) will sponsor an after-leaping-the-gap study and release those results? Update: maybe someone has done this study? 1:29:36 PM      comment []  trackback []