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