Sadly of late I've been stuck writing nothing but PHP during my work hours. Short of a few major internal disasters I've done nothing I would count as interesting enough to really post about, until recently.

A week or two ago I made some modifications to our internal Nagios monitoring system - http://nagios.com/ - which saw me writing a Python-powered sms script which takes Nagios messages and passes them to our SMS provider API and delivers them to my phone.

The code isn't exactly pretty and it's rather simple but it does the job and uses LXML to actually generate the message that gets posted to the API - http://iamkura.com/sms

Fortunately the last week or so has seen me working heavily with Xapian (http://xapian.org/), Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/) and the wonderful Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) to see which is better for various modifications to our projects. Xapian failed miserably in my book when it came to being used with PHP so was dropped very quickly, Sphinx showed itself to be a very, very fast full text search engine and will definitely be used in the future but, for what we need so far, Solr is by far the best and it's faceting ability is amazing.

More to come on that last paragraph in the following week including "howto" articles on installing, configuring and using Sphinx and Solr.