I saw Blade: Trinity last night. The movie is "eh, OK." Plotline is glaringly weak (even for an action flick about vampires ... I mean, really!) and the action is OK (it's typical Blade stuff, I didn't remember anything that seemed to jump out at me in terms of cool stunts). There are pretty good one-liners (none which I can remember, sorry!) that made me go LOL a few times...

But I'll tell you what you need to watch the movie for: Jessica Biel. I never realized how HOT she was... goodness. Forget Kate ... I'm all about Jessica Biel now!

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Speaking of oversized things (like this segue??), I've spent most of today working on the new Tabulas 2.0 templating engine. Did you know that the current 1.0 engine is really bloated? If you right click and do a view source on any page, it'll show you how many mySQL queries are being sent to generate the one page; with my Tabulas homepage, there are 97 queries being sent... WHOA. That's a lot.

I've cut down the queries so far (this is a first pass) on the new templating engine down to 62 queries. Let's see if I can cut that down even more...

The problem is there are two approaches to the way I'm currently doing things: (1) do all data manipulation and then send it all out and (2) do things incrementally and send it out to the browser in smaller portions. The problem with (1) is that it requires a LOT more RAM, but the benefits are that I can cut down on the number of SQL queries. Since the data isn't being sent, I can store all SQL queries in a buffer and then combine the similar queries into one query like SELECT field FROM table WHERE id IN (ID1, ID2, ID3) instead of doing three separate queries of SELECT field FROM table WHERE id = id1 (and two more).

The problem is with method (1), I'm freeing up the mySQL server, but the burden then gets passed onto the PHP server for processing (and it's important to note that less SQl queries doesn't necessarily mean it's easier on the mySQL server!)... but with the way I plan on figuring out the Tabulas network, being CPU-bound doesn't seem like a bad option; CPU will scale easier than the RAm required for the DB.

I'm having a friggin' blast doing this (no sarcasm). Man, it's nice to do something you really love doing and turns out to look "produtive" to others... isn't that the American dream?