Zotonic (the Erlang CMS) claims to be “Typically 10 times (and much more) faster than PHP content management systems”. I am going to use Siege to do some basic performance benchmarking against the demo installations of Zotonic, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Habari. The performance comparison is an interesting claim for Zotonic, particularly because one of Zotonic’s primary features is “Speed”, as listed on their Features page, available from the site index. A quick scan of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Habari about pages show that these PHP content management systems do not put much focus in performance (no “performance” or “speed” references on any of those pages). I am sure that the development teams are attentive to major performance bottle necks, and that page loading speeds is important to these projects, but in the context of Zotonic’s claim, none of these PHP CMS options claims speed/performance as a fundamental feature.

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I do not know why this is so difficult. I have multiple GMail accounts, and dealing with multiple accounts within GMail has always been a weak point (IMO). I first gave Evolution a try, but quickly alterred course when I realized how slowly Evolution loads IMAP messages (is this particular to GMail?). After scouring the internet to find 64 bit Thunderbird for Linux, or 64 bit Thunderbird at all, really, I set about to get things configured.

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Background

Code For America: Farmers Market API

Hacker News Commentary

Impatient? Want the JSON? It’s over here.

My thoughts

At first, I thought this was great, and I started thinking about whipping together an Android application that used the API. After putting together a couple of screens and thinking about how little control I had over performance, I started to side strongly with cousin_it from the Hacker News commentary. How large is this data set really? And since any updates are going to need to manually push anyway, what is the benefit in offering the API?

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_If you don’t care about how hard it is to find these, and just want to get the archives:

• Firefox 5.0.1 Linux x86_64

• Firefox 6.0 Linux x86_64

• Thunderbird 5.0 Linux x86_64

• Thunderbird 6.0 Linux x86_64 I’m linking to the latest en-US, non-Beta releases at time of writing. I do not plan to update this, but the ftp is well organized, once you find it._

Let’s cut to the chase: check out Mozilla’s default offering to 64 bit Linux users:

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I recently started a position with a new company. I am excited about the opportunity, and look forward to learning new skills and using new software/services. One particular service that I was happy have an opportunity to use (not because I particularly want to, but rather because so many people/organizations make use of it) is QuickBooks.

I have not gotten very far into the process of using QuickBooks Online, but I must admit that my initial reactions are bleak.

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