Lighttpd is a very small, very fast, very lightweight webserver program that’s been gaining in popularity in recent years; while it doesn’t have all the features of its more bloated predecessors, what it does, it does very well. I’ve written about it before – servers running Lighttpd serve up most of the images, and all the downloads, for this website – and countless others have sung its praises, but I was interested to see that it’s powering the immensely popular electoral-vote.com website this year. It couldn’t keep up with election-day traffic in 2004, running Apache, but the webmaster, according to an update posted earlier today, anticipates that it should handle today’s traffic – so far, over 140,000 pageviews per hour – without any problems. There’s no doubt that the servers he’s using this year are more powerful than what he was using four years ago, but I strongly suspect that switching to a high-performance webserver has made every bit as much difference, if not more.

Today, a roundup of strangeness, short-attention-span style: Cooties, cats, dead presidents, and another nail in the coffin of the War on Drugs. But first, a word from my inner Jewish mother:

Did you vote yet? No? Well what are you waiting for, a direct order? Go, vote already. The history of the future of the free world depends on you!

We now return to your regularly scheduled oddness….
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