The first thing I did was go to my favorite restaurant in town, the Thai place. I don't even know what it's called, but it's right across the street from my apartment and I typically go there at least twice a week. They had wondered where I was. I told them I was in London and (truthfully) that the Thai food I had while I was there didn't hold a candle to theirs. They just nodded and smiled as usual.

Besides Thai food, it's terribly nice to have the following: cable modem Internet access and my stereo. London was nice, but home is where the heart is. ;-)

While I was in London, I did consulting work for Jamkit , which is owned and operated by Seb Bacon, a really fine person. His customer, for which I did onsite work, is an ecommerce company specializing in travel. They are in the process of migrating their web front end from a Java-based system to Zope. My work there consisted mostly of configuring a test Zope/Squid cluster and hammering away at it in the pursuit of emulating various loads that will likely be experienced during production.

I had known before that Zope and Squid made a terrifyingly effective combination. But these folks were keen on using the ESI features of Squid kindly funded by Zope Corporation and developed by Robert Collins. I've found ESI makes the Zope/Squid combination even more terrifyingly effective. ESI is a technology which allows the edge servers (the cache servers) to perform page assembly out of other (possibly also cached) snippets of HTML or text. Although I found a few small problems in the Squid ESI implementation (I haven't yet reported them to Robert), it's basically excellent. It can really increase site responsiveness and take a lot of work load off back-end Zope servers.

Because these folks are willing to "buy in" to ESI so early in their development process, they are using it in intelligent ways, keeping their cache hit rate high while still doing basic personalization. I believe their resulting website will rock, not only due to ESI but because they are a smart bunch of guys in the first place, and I think they'll find clever ways to maximize Zope and the other resources they've committed to the process.

All in all, a successful and fun trip.