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

Congratulations Alberto, it's good to welcome you on board.

By the way, I still have to publish a tutorial that we wrote down a few days ago on how to compile Free Software on Windows (actually, we used Cherokee as an example of an autotools based application). We found a couple of little problems while we were compiling the latest stable version, and both Alberto and Brian wrote excellent patches to fix them. I'm gonna commit both of them as soon as I get access to a Windows box (both look alright, but I want to test them out).

So, as I said.. I'm glad to see that the family continues growing. :-)

A new pure load balancing handler landed in the Cherokee repository. It's going to be part of the upcoming 0.6 version, and I bet, one of the most popular functionalities in the medium term.

The best of being a Cherokee handler is that it's integrated with the rest of the server architecture, which in this case means that it allows to configure the load balancing behavior based on directories, extensions or regular expression rule entries.

In fact, being a handler allow you to configure it to be active only for some requests, and that turns Cherokee into a web server plus HTTP load balancing daemon from now on, which again is great news.

By the way, the load balancing handler and the "balancer" plug-ins are completely independent. It allows to choose the load balancing module that best fit to your needs and use it with the generic load balancing handler. Actually, it's possible to deliver independent plug-ins implementing new balancing techniques that work with the handler. Isn't it sweet? :-)

I'll try find some information about additional load balancing methods. Right now, we have only implemented a simple round robin one, and it would be pretty nice to ship the most interesting ones with the very first release of the Cherokee 0.6 branch in February.

Here you have a new Cherokee release (from the stable branch):

• Higher performance
• Support for local paths in the configuration
• sendfile() support improved

• Little memory leak in iocache
• Content-Range header
• Time management fixed
• Non-free docs removed
• BSD compilation fix
• A few miscellaneous fixes

Enjoy it! :-)

Yesterday I discovered that this month the "Solo Linux" magazine (a Free Software focused publication) has included and article on Cherokee.

The article is quite good: It explains how to install and configure the current stable 0.5 version on Linux, and even if all that configuration stuff will change for the upcoming 0.6 release (in which we'll include an administration interface) it's still very interesting for people who are already running it, or people who want to know about its features. It also includes some benchmarks that clearly shows why Cherokee rocks ;-)