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Starting from the top:

• I use Rocket Dock to get keep some frequently used apps handy. I’m using the built in WhiteCristal theme with opacity set to 50%. The icons are based on the Serenity Icon package. I had to rustle up some of my own icons. My files are here with PSD template included. Just copy and paste the layer styles.
• CD Art Display (formerly Winamp CD Case) is a free desktop program that shows the current song cover in a skinnable display. It has support for AlbumPlayer, Helium Music Manager, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey and partially supports qmp, MP3Toys, musikCube and foobar2000 (Winamp API Emulator plugin). The skin I’m using is something I whipped up with some inspiration from the Heaven o.o desktop and the Pure Adium skin. You can get that here
• The clock, calendar and todo list are all done using Rainmeter. The todo list uses a font called Hand of Sean. Very nice. The stacks on the left are done using a combination of Rainmeter and StandAlone Stacks. My skin files are here
• I’m using the Windows 7 style by giannisgx89 and StartKiller to hide my start button. You might have to patch your system to allow you to use custom themes, though. I used VistaGlazz for that; make sure you read the instructions and are clear about what steps to take!
• Last but not least, is Launchy; very useful, especially for a keyboard junkie like me.
• Wallpaper from here

That’s it for this episode. My quest to find the Ultimate desktop continues next week on Linux. Also cominig soon: Shortcut Sorcery with AutoHotKey.

That’s where Lighttpd comes in. It’s ,according to its site,

�designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems”

Anyways, what we’re interested in is the small memory footprint and the effective management of the cpu-load part.

Installation

We need to get and install lighttpd, PHP and MySQL:

Guides available from:
Instructions from Lighttpd Trac
Lighttpd installation instructions from *Nix Craft
Lighttpd+PHP+Perl+MySQL installation guide for Windows users
Lighttpd+PHP+MySQL Installation guide for Ubuntu
A few notes:

• The settings for fastcgi suggested on the Lighttpd wiki will load a large number of php-cgi process that you probably will not be using. I’ll probably suggest you set

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2"

  instead of

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16"

  You can make adjustments later if you feel the need.

• You need to modify the default my.cnf to make things a bit more effcient. You can follow this guide to get you started.

Does it help to use lighttpd instead of apache? Yeah, it does. I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks and it’s been able to handle my requirements without problem. My final opinion? Well, it is not as full featured as apache but if you have a limited memory budget or are just looking for a lean mean web server, you really should take a good look at lighttpd. Now if you don’t mind, some of us have real work to do and can’t spend all day reading other people’s blogs .

The main issue however was caused by the thickbox.css file used by the NextGen Gallery plugin. That I fixed by using a more compliant thickbox.css file from TheStable.info.That fixed my validation problems but unfortunately does look quite as good. I tried using the NextGen Smooth Gallery plugin which makes allows me to use NextGen Gallery’s excellent managament features and Smooth Gallery’s drool-inducing presentation. Bad idea, even more CSS errors.

Turns out all I needed to do was download the SlimBox plugin, enable it then go into the NextGen gallery settings and change the thumbnail effect to lightbox. That’s all. I get standards complaince and drool-inducing effects.

Edit: However, it seems like posts in which I include galleries won’t validate a XHTML compliant. That should not affect the home page itself since none of the galleries appear there. Have to take a further look into this.

Update: Turns out the problem wasn’t caused by the NextGen Gallery plugin(at least not directly). Seems like the NGG plugin may create validation problems for you if they are explicitly placed within tags(Thanks, Mule!). So I think I now have my layout and design problems licked. Now to focus on writing.