Dave is interested in Squeak Smalltalk programming, training in Aikido, lifting kettlebells and all things wiki. Dave contributed to gardening and martial arts pages when Wikipedia was just beginning. For some unknown reason, my User page was deleted in April 2008. I have restored the contents of my earlier page below.
Dave is busy bringing a Confluence wiki to life at his employer. When the weather in the North East gets warm, Dave likes to dabble in the garden. He can also be seen flying through the air when he is doing Aikido. He has contributed to articles here at Wikipedia on Aikido and Gardening. His homepage is at http://aiki.pbwiki.com
The following comments are from back in 2001
I do have a question about how Usemod wiki scales up. How many pages does this site now have and has the search capability showed any signs of slowing down with a large number of pages? - dr
Please see Wikipedia Announcements for some recent statistics (and how to check them yourself). So far, I personally have noticed a very slight slowdown in search results. I believe User:Clifford Adams or perhaps someone else like Jimbo Wales is planning to write a search program in a more efficient language than the one we're using. I don't know the details and they do, so I'll shut up now. :-)
Anyway, welcome! The gardening articles are great! --User:Larry Sanger
Yes, we are noticing some slowdown of the search function. As I understand it, it basically greps the entire site. Works great for small sites, but will not scale, for sure.
I do have a (vague!) plan to make a more efficient search function, and I'll submit the patches to CliffordAdams, but not, as Larry thought, "in a more efficient language". :-) It's all perl, which is the only thing I'm good at, anyway.