Here are a few pictures of the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that is being held at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas. It has been really interesting so far, and as you can see, it is also a quite big event:

A few months ago, I made the decision of stop traveling and attending conferences. I was spending almost all of my time traveling and giving talks, which left me very little time for doing real work.

However, I'm going to continue attending the most interesting conferences and meetings. It does not make much sense for me to spend months traveling as I did the past year, but it is definitely worth attending a few of them.

The Linux Collaboration Summit is one of these events, for instance. The second edition is taking place at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas from April 8 to 10, 2008.

So, tomorrow I will be heading to Austin. It's a quite long trip from Spain, but if the meeting is as interesting as the first edition (held at Google, in SFO), it will be well spent time.

El Geek Errante #34 is available now. If you are a spanish speaker, I bet you already know El Geek Errante. It is one of the best Spanish spoken podcasts available on the Internet.

A couple of weeks ago, during an OpenSolaris community meeting, a met two of the "mothership crew" members (long story here, you would have to listen to their first podcasts to get it). They interviewed me for their last podcast. We spoke about Cherokee 0.6: what is new and what is coming on the upcoming releases , the OpenSolaris technology and community, a few F/OSS related gossips , and some questions with which they wanted me to comment on the Linux and OpenSolaris development model and community differences.

We had a pretty entertaining evening recoding this podcast. I hope you will like it! :-)

With a couple of the "El Geek Errante" authors

Here you can find the MP3 file [Spanish, 70:44m].

We have finally released Cherokee "Shake well before using" 0.6.0!

A huge amount of work has been put on this release. It has taken us more than two years to complete it. There are too many changes to be listed here; as a summary, the most important improvements over the previous Cherokee 0.5 series are:

• Administration Interface: You will not need to edit a text file in order to configure the web server any longer! A user friendly web interface will assist you to set up your site.
• 20% to 25% faster Even if our previous Cherokee releases perform very well, Cherokee 0.6 is even faster!
• Load balancing support has been added. It can distribute load between multiple FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP servers from within the web server.
• The authentication support has been improved by adding new modules for validation against MySQL and LDAP servers.
• A new documentation system has been integrated, which has allowed the developer team to significantly improve the user documentation.
• This is the safest version of Cherokee ever. A new recovery mechanism has been integrated to ensure that the server will always be up and running.
• Looks nicer: new themes and icon sets have been included.

The source tarball is already available for download.

Links: documentation, mailing list, bug tracker and svn.

A few days ago Amazon was awarded with patent on how to redirect a user to a more relevant page than a standard 404 error: "Page Not Found". It is kind of interesting because I developed a Cherokee handler for this back in 2002, more than one year before Amazon filled their patent.

I wonder how longer this patent craziness will last.

Guess what happens in Spain when you go to a computer shop and you pay an unfair, and I would dare to say, illegal tax?

You get a few blank CDs for a little extra charge!! Check this out:

• Intellectual property tax: 6,10€
• Blank CDs: 2,40€

By the way, I don't know whether you have though of it, but this twisted tax has helped to increase the black market quite a lot: Many shops declare just a little fraction of the CD/DVDs that they import, and therefore they pay this tax only for the declared quantity, but they always charge the tax on the media that they sell.. otherwise, they would not support the abuse.

A unfair tax collected by an association is a damn bad thing; but when the tax is more than 250% of the price of the item it becomes insulting. Someone should stop this intellectual property madness right away.

After more than two years of work, dozen thousands of new lines of code, bug fixes and improvements.. time has finally come for Cherokee 0.6.

I have just branched trunk. The release should be ready by tomorrow. Hurrah!! :-)

Here are a few pictures of the second OpenSolaris Viernes Tecnico in Madrid:

Giving a short talk at the OpenSolaris Viernes tecnico

Some of the attendees

Today I will be attending a new Viernes Tecnico. In case you haven't heard of the Viernes Tecnicos, they are a set of technical talks organized by the OpenSolaris Hispano community.

Besides the talk, I will be doing an interview for El geek errante, one of the very best podcast I have ever listened. We will talk about OpenSolaris, Cherokee and another bunch of F/OSS related topics. It is going to be fun, and I am almost sure that there will be tough and politically incorrect questions, which will make it even more fun. ;-)

I will most probably try to take advantage of the environment to quickly demo the Cherokee 0.6.0 release candidate. I hope people will like what we have developed for this upcoming version of the server (and of course, their feedback will be very welcome)!

I'm back working after a weird week off. My original plan was to travel to Mexico DF for giving a couple of talks in a congress and hanging out over the weekend. However, my plans turned upside down when I got the flu a couple of days before departing.

So, what would you do if you are sick and eating antibiotics as it was candy? I know that it does not sound like the most common thing to do, but I chose to work on the upcoming version of Cherokee. I was not feeling the best, but even though, it was quite productive.

After writing around 150 new Kbytes of code, the administration interface (cherokee-admin) is working now. I cannot say that I am glad I couldn't attend the conference in Mexico, but at least this past week has been very fruitful. So if you are interested on new and fast web servers, be tuned, Cherokee 0.6.0 is around the corner!

Guess who did "the biggest Open Source deal ever" a few days ago? It is interesting to see the buyers and the prices (the seventh position is less than 1/6 of the first one).

A new version of Solaris Express Developer Edition has just been released: SXDE 1/08. It brings a bunch of new features, upgraded software and bug fixes. In fact, there are so many that I don't think I will have the time or energy to describe all of them on this post.

Solaris made easy

I am going to go through which, for me, are the most important features of the release:

xVM: the Sun xVM hypervisor based on the work of the Xen community allows running Solaris, Linux, and Windows virtual machine guests on a Solaris host. It supports the two types of virtualization: full virtualization and paravirtualization . If you think of it, a virtualization mechanism like xVM is very important nowadays, I would even say a basic requirement; and now you have it by default, without having to buy or install any extra software. If you have not used it before I recommended you to start by reading xVM(5) and visiting the Xen community at OpenSolaris.org.

CIFS Server: a native, kernel-based service supporting file sharing in Microsoft Windows networks. Like it or not, it is a defacto standard, so the most pragmatic approach is to provide the best possible implementation in order to make OpenSolaris fit into heterogeneous environments.

Web Stack: It includes all the applications of a common AMP stack (not strictly speaking): Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Python, Squid and HTML Tidy. Besides, I would like to point out that the upcoming 0.6 release of Cherokee - which is not shipped with SXDE - has performing amazingly on SXDE during my tests.

Desktop: The desktop continues improving: GNOME 2.20, Firefox 2.0.0.9, Flash 9, etc. You can even install Compiz with a single command!

And there are many other new features on SXDE 1/08: new NIC drivers (Broadcom NetXtreme II, ADMtek Centaur and Comet chips, Macronix, Davicom and AMD-8111), new wireless drivers (Intel Centrino 3945 and 4965), EIST support, new Xorg, suspend-to-RAM support on x86, architectural changes like /usr/gnu, improved HAL support (USB, Firewire and IDE), StarOffice 8, Xvnc client and server, Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) support, automatic discovery of network attached printers, among many others. :-)

Here are a few pictures I took at the first OpenSolaris "Viernes Tecnico" that took place in Madrid a couple of days ago:

The sessions are organized by OpenSolaris Hispano, the Spanish speaking OpenSolaris community. There are five more "Viernes" programmed in Madrid for the next months. However, I would like to point that even if this first set has been planned for Madrid, the talks are meant to be organized in many other locations as well. We chose Madrid simply because there were a whole lot of people in the area who wanted to attend.

I'm glad to see it has been such a success. I will try to be in the next one as well, it is definitely worth attending. :-)

Daniel just pointed me to this article that the Spanish edition of Linux Magazine runs on Cherokee (thanks!):

   

Do you know how SIGSEGV feels like? LOL!