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.

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!! :-)

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!

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

   

I have just released a new version of the tiny Cherokee PySCGI module: a 100% Python module implementing the SCGI protocol.

The latest 1.3 release fixes a potential communication issue between the application and the web servers. If you are using PySCGI the upgrade is recommended.

Bruno has just sent these videos made of some of the pictures I took a few days ago of OpenSolaris enthusiasts during the World Forum on Free Knowledge. It's pretty cool!

I have a tough question for you guys: Could you guess which is my door?

Yesterday, Cesar gave me this amazing door mat. Thanks dude! I love it.. :-)

I have spent the last few days in the World Forum on Free Knowledge - a very interesting event held in Venezuela - in which I have met many old friends from all over the world. I am very glad they invited me again this year. It is always good to hang out with interesting people. :-)

This year we have dedicated a whole lot of time to discuss about communities, emerging Free Software trends and cooperative P2P technologies. One of the best things of this forum is the variety of people attending to it (developers, government employees, researchers and even students) and therefore the diversity of points of view. It is kind of surprising how many different reasons people have for supporting F/OSS (In fact, I have even found people who support it for reason I cannot agree with!).

I gave my talk on the OpenSolaris project: its community, development and technologies. Most of the people already knew it and many of them had even installed it or run one of the live CDs, so some of them asked a few interesting questions after the presentation - mainly focused on the licensing and business model.

Besides, I gave away a bunch of OpenSolaris starter kits (DVDs with 'live' distributions, SXCE and documentation), and frankly, I had a very good time doing so. Check it out: OpenSolaris at the World Forum on Free Knowledge. :-)

I have been using OS X for a couple of weeks so far, and I have come to kind of like it. However, today I have discovered something that seems to be pretty broken to my understanding. Check out this screen-shot:

Under /Library/Printers it is got 3.7Gb of printer drivers!! Isn't that madness? It is about 1.4Gb for Epson drivers, 755Mb for Xerox, 688Mb for HP, 480Mb for Canon, and so on. Of course it is neat to have a bunch of pre-installed drivers, although to spend around of 4Gb only for printers drivers may be (cough!) too much. :-)

After being a week in California attending the OpenSolaris Developer Summit and an internal Open Source summit held at Sun's campus in Santa Clara, I am on my way to Mexico for a few more congresses.

Quite sadly, I could not fly from SFO to Mexico, so I have had to go through Houston/Texas.. and, what could I say about such an unforgetable experience? :-)

The first thing you see after landing is a bunch of t-shirts and stickers with the quote: "Don't mess with Texas".. which, I suppose, is the equivalent of the "I love x", "I've been in x" or the "You are very welcome to x" banners that you read in the rest of the world.

However, besides that little hospitality difference, what shocked me the most was a sweet but severe voice announcing over the airport PA system: "Any inappropriate remark or joke concerning security may result in your arrest. Thank you."

It could be because European people usually have a different point of view about many subjects (including freedom), but I could have never imagined that you could be arrested for joking... not even in Texas!!

This is more a note for my self (call it 'public back-up' if you wish) about my Emacs configuration file than a real blog entry. It has been a long time since the last time I modified it, but today I've had to do some work to get Aquamacs (GNU Emacs for OS X) to work with it.

All the changes I have done are enclosed by a (featurep 'aquamacs) check, so they shouldn't interfere in the rest of the installations (OpenSolaris and Linux).

I cannot believe what I have just read. Do you think this kind of attitude (and yellow press) helps someone but the FOSS FUD spreaders?

• Slashdot: Linux Creator Calls GPLv3 Authors 'Hypocrites'

Doesn't Linus realize that he is shooting himself in the foot when he says those things?

<sigh!> I guess they have started to feel some pressure: there are people who want Linux to go GPLv3 while OpenSolaris gets more popular each day. Maybe it's because of my way of thinking, but if I were in that situation I wouldn't waste my time arguing who is the biggest hypocrite. Would you?

Please kids.. behave!! ("live and let live" would be enough) :-)

I have just completed the last piece of the puzzle. The Picture Gallery Browser module is finally up and running! :-)

alobbs.com is running Cherokee and a Python based application server I have written explicitly for my site (including blog, photolog, content editor, picture galleries, statistics and so on).

It performs way much better that the PHP applications I used to run, and besides I'm much more confident about the quality of the code - if you have read some of the most extended PHP applications nowadays, I bet you know what I am talking about.

So, from now on, this is my web stack:

The yellow components are applications I have written and that I am currently maintaining.. which means that if something goes wrong with the website, I won't be able to blame anyone but myself. Rock on!! :-)

I have an open question for you guys. I'd like to get rid of a Open Source project mailing list. It has been quite a pain to maintain it the last months, so I have been thinking of moving to somewhere else.

For me, to administer the mailing list is just something that has to be done in order to keep the project up and running. It would be exactly the same if we would move the list to a third party service provider, and I hadn't to expend time on it.

My first thought was Google groups: their spam filter is good, the administration interface is easy to use, and it allows web posting (what you could understand as some sort of forum integration). So far everything was pointing me to migrate the list over there.. although I had a couple of problems when I tried to migrate the archives and subscriber list.

First of all, it doesn't support to import the previous mailing list archive, which in this case is a quite important issue. Of course, I thought it was not such a big problem because, at the end of the day, that is something that twenty lines of Python could easily solve.

Anyway, it seems that there was something that I didn't take into account. Long stories short: Google groups didn't like my importing script, and it banned me because I was supposed to be spamming a mailing list with a single subscriber (myself). Cooool!

The second problem was to import the subscribers list. It doesn't allow you to import the subscriber for security reasons (which is something I can understand). The big problem was that, when I submitted the list for their approval, they rejected it.. which, again, looks pretty much like a stopper for the migration.

It is clearly a push and pull situation what we have got here. It is up to them whether they want to take advantage of our content for displaying their advertisements. The thing is that, even if the service provides some pretty cool features it also lacks some basic functionality that we would need for the migration.

So, do you guys know where could I move the mailing list to? Which mailing list provider do you like the most? :-)

First of all, you will have to install the cross compiler:

# apt-get install mingw32 mingw32-binutils

$ cd /var/tmp
$ mkdir pthread-win32
$ cd pthread-win32
$ wget ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/pthreads-win32/pthreads-w32-2-8-0-release.exe
$ unzip pthreads-w32-2-8-0-release.exe
# cp ./Pre-built.2/lib/libpthreadGCE2.a /usr/i586-mingw32msvc/lib/libpthread.a
# cp Pre-built.2/include/* /usr/i586-mingw32msvc/include/

PATH=/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin:$PATH

CC=i586-mingw32msvc-gcc
LD=i586-mingw32msvc-ld
AR=i586-mingw32msvc-ar
RC=i586-mingw32msvc-windres

$ svn co svn://svn.cherokee-project.com/cherokee/trunk cherokee

$ ac_cv_func_malloc_0_nonnull=yes   \
  ac_cv_func_realloc_0_nonnull=yes  \
./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc \
--prefix=/usr/i586-mingw32msvc      \
--disable-readdir_r --disable-tls   \
--enable-static-module=all          \
--enable-trace --enable-static      \
--enable-shared=no --enable-beta    \
CC=i586-mingw32msvc-gcc

$ make

-rwxr-xr-x 1 alo alo 2600254 2006-12-28 15:54 cherokee.exe