Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

LigHTTPd and Apache - Symfony benchmarks

At work, we’re developing a brand new in-house CMS based on the Symfony framework. As it uses no mod_rewrite rules or other Apache dependencies and is a "clean break" for us, I figured it would be an ideal candidate for benchmarking under LigHTTPd, comparing it to Apache 2.2 in order to give me some statistics to compliment my last blog entry on the subject. The results from the "ab" Apache-benchmark tool are pretty stunning - although I’m still at a loss as to explain ju...

Migrating from Apache to Lighttpd

In my role as a sysadmin, the bulk of the Unix systems I administer are web servers, running the now standard open-source stack of Apache, MySQL and PHP (note that whatever my personal misgivings may be about those elements, they are pretty much the standard now and what’s been mandated at work). If you’re using PHP on Unix, it’s pretty much taken for granted that you’ll be running it through Apache via mod_php. In fact, it almost goes without syaing that if you’re doing a...

PostgreSQL 8.1.4 out

PostgreSQL 8.1.4 has just been released, and Blastwave has updated packages as usual. This is a  major update security-wise; if you’re running a PostgreSQL server you really need to upgrade as soon as possible. The PostgreSQL site has a page detailing all you need to know about this particular problem, and how it may affect you. Packages will be making their way out to the mirrors shortly, and I’ll also be updating my PHP packages the moment the upstream source is released.

Whoah.

I found one of my favourites quotes from Carl Sagan again after loosing it a while back and felt compelled to post it here. It just blows me away each time, particularly when you put it in context with this picture, taken by Voyager 1 as it was 4 billion miles away from Earth and swung round for one last photo of "home".