Christmas is here, but at Alek Komarnitsky the Christmas party has really started, and you can take a look at it here. The setup, Alek told The Inquirer, includes 17,000 lights. That's down from the 22,000 he had in 2002 but a disasterous burn-out in 2003 means that Alek is playing it safe. Or at least as safe as 17,000 Christmas lights gets. The Christmas lights are operational from 1800-2200 Mountain time, so feel free, Alek says, to log on and fiddle. It's a fantastic way to spend an hour. On a technical note, the website front end is pretty impressive. Using a custom mod_perl module, all the modules to display the page get loaded at once, and Alek has been able to increase performance of the webcam from 4 connections a second up to 20 with only minor code alteration. Pretty impressive stuff.