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Back on Road
For almost a year, I've been trying to keep my focus exclusively on my work. Anything not directly related to my short or medium term goals was discarded without any hesitation. At the beginning I thought it was the smartest thing I could do. In fact, I did notice the difference: more working time meant more stuff done, and consequently more short/medium term goals accomplished. That's was good.
Now, I think I kind of screwed up with that decision. Turns out that the extra focus, ~16 hours/day working, has kept me from doing a whole lot lot of things I like. I stopped working out, running, traveling to conferences/congresses, etc. Even though I was doing the right thing, to much of a good thing isn't good any longer (chocolate is a good example).
If you are reading this, chances are we have met in some conference/congress/IT event (it's just statistics and odds). Well, that's one of the things I stopped doing, so during these last months I didn't meet as many interesting people as I'd liked to. That's definitely one of the things I've been missing the most. I miss networking with peers, and keynoting about subjects I'm passionate about.
Unlike the last time I wrote about a shift in my life (there were people who actually thought I was becoming an actor), this time I'm serious about it: I'm going to start changing the things that haven't fulfilled me lately. First of all, I won't long (kindly) reject invitations to give talks/keynotes in events. I'm back on road!
Tomorrow I'll be heading to Innovate!Europe, Open Innovation III, and the prize giving ceremony of the annual Free Software contest. I'll spend a single day on each event, so after three days, I'll be back in Madrid with plenty of time to continue working. Doesn't it sound like a much more balanced plan? It does for me.
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Running Cherokee on an iPod/iPhone
I'm absolutely delighted to see that Stefan has ported Cherokee to the iPhone/iPod. This is great news because of a number of reasons, but mainly because this new port turns my iPhone into a much useful device.
From now on, I'll be able to share some of the 16Gb of information that my iPhone stores with the people around me: iTunes MP3 and M4V, iPhoto pictures, etc.. and it will not matter whether they browse my content from an iPod, a BlackBerry, a Linux box, or even a Windows netbook. All of them will access the same Cherokee web server run by my cell phone.
Here you have a short screencast:
It's pretty impressive. Congratulations Stefan, good stuff!! :-)
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Becoming an actor!
Lately, I've thinking about a shift in my life. I've weighed wins and losses, and I'm committed to change it. I'm done with technology! I've worked enough. I won't design software any longer. Neither I will continue working on High Performance architectures. It's been enough already.
From now on, I am an actor!! (a director, or singer would work for me as well).
In case you haven't thought about it, that's the perfect job. Here in Spain, being an actor is simply awesome. It isn't because of the fan clubs or anything, it is simply because of the "create once, profit for life" sort of work you enjoy. In fact, it is even better than how is sounds, and I'll tell you why. Independently of how poor your creation is, you will earn money. But wait, it gets better. It doesn't even matter whether people go to the theatre to watch your film... you'll make money for life-time!
Previously I used to give off about all this mess. I wrote about the SGAE, their unjustifiable 250% intellectual property tax. Damn it, I even invited them to sue me!. But, you know what? I'm fed up with all those things. I will not complain about all this craziness any longer. I'm falling to the dark side; I'm becoming a Spanish actor... and I mean it!
I bet life will be much more pleasant when I won't have to worry about whether or not I'm creating something worthwhile. At the end of the day, the government will continue subsidizing the film industry, so why would I care anyway? The past year, subsides were higher than the total profit of all the Spanish films combined.
I know there will be many of you who don't agree with my change of life. In fact, odds are you'll be ashamed of me.. but, who cares?! At the end of the day, you will continue being charged with an extra tax for me and my friends whenever you buy a hard drive, and cell phone, or even a printer!! Well, and even better, all your Internet connections are about to get filtered in order to protect my creations. Hahahaha!! Come on! Confess that you're feeling pretty lame right now.
The very best thing of my new profession isn't that though. The thing I like the most is the helplessness position you guys are in. Who can you blame for the situation? The government that allows it to happen. Will they do something about it? Of course not! So, who else can you ask for help? The industry. Folks, your only choice is a bunch of big companies that are being hit by all this over protectionism. I can think of big telco companies that will lose half of their DSL clients the day after they are forced to filter contents and/or sites, for instance. I guess that hardware manufactures, companies building media stations, multimedia hard-drives, MP4 players would be in your side as well, although they seem to be doing nothing about it.
My advise, don't be a fool and join us! What's the point on working each single day? Don't you see that you can work once and make money for a long time? You might screw a few million people's rights along the way.. but, think it twice, it will make viable that parasite lifestyle you always dreamed of !!
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Octality - SGI deal
Yahoo News has published an article on the deal that Octality and Silicon Graphics have signed. Basically, we have partnered up with SGI to provide High Performance Web training in the EMEA region.
Our training courses are focused on High Performance Web Infrastructure, High Performance Web Development and on the Open Source products that we have developed - such as the Cherokee Web Server.
By the way, by some reason Yahoo News has linked "Cherokee" - the Open Source project, to "Cherokee Inc" - the clothing brand. That's obviously a mistake. :-)
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Setting up a HTML5 on-line video site
Today a friend asked me how to set up an on-line video site. It seems that he read my previous post on the new Audio / Video Streaming plug-in shipped with the latest version of Cherokee, and he felt like it was time to upgrade his web server and site content.
I proposed him to support both the HTML5 and Flash methods for playing the videos. This means, to use the new tag <video>, and only relay on Flash whenever the browser does not support HTML5 embedded videos.
We found a problem on the very first test we did, though. Even if the two web browser that we tested did support <video>, we didn't find a common video format supported by both of them. The test showed Firefox 3.1 supporting Theora and failing to play H264/AAC, and Safari 4 playing H264/AAC but not being able to reproduce Theora.
The solution? Convert the video to the two formats and make both available. If you have done it previously, I bet you know that video converting is one of those time consuming tasks that can easily get messy. Of course, after converting a few videos we found a problem with one of them. Long story short: after some research the solution was to compile FFMpeg/trunk with some other libraries:
FFmpeg version SVN-r17752:
--enable-shared --disable-mmx --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis
--enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad
--enable-libfaac --enable-gpl
Here is a very simple example of how you can use the <video> tag for the modern clients, and Flash as second and more secure option. Do not hesitate to read the example page source to check what the syntax is. Beside the Theora/H264 issue, supporting <video> + Flash is really straight forward.
<video controls>
<source src="test.mp4">
<source src="test.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs=theora,vorbis">
<a href="test.mp4" id="player"></a>
<script>
$f("player", "flowplayer-3.0.5.swf");
</script>
</video>
By the way, the video streaming is served by Cherokee's Audio / Video Streaming plug-in, so independently of whether <video> is used, the connection bandwidth will be limited to the video bitrate. Doesn't it look interesting for optimizing your server bandwidth usage? It allows the server to handle more concurrent users, at the same time that it helps to save the bandwidth of the videos that are not completely watched.
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Cherokee 0.99.0 Hits The Streets
Here I am, with the announcement of our latest version of the Cherokee Web Server. It's been a month since the previous stable release, so we have had some time to work on a couple of new interesting features:
- Traffic Shaping: Now Cherokee supports traffic shaping without requiring any external module. Bandwidth limits can be assigned to individual rules independently of the handler that servers the connection. This means, it doesn't matter whether it's serving and static file, replying FastCGI or rendering SSI, it will be able to set fine-grain (per-connection) bandwidth usage limits.
Audio/Video Streaming: Well, this is one of those highly visible features that you love to talk about! :-) We have written a new Cherokee module for streaming media files. This plug-in works with the new Traffic Shaper, so the right after Cherokee figures the media file bitrate, it can limit the connection bandwidth usage to that value. In that way, if the client stops watching the video before it's finished, the server wouldn't have wasted bandwidth. This feature supports almost all of the most widespread media formats (encoders and containers): flv, mp3, mp4 (h264), mpg, avi, ogg, mkv, etc.
Besides the bit-rating analysis, this plug also supports the ?start= parameter. That allows some web based players to seek to any position to the file while it's playing. This is a pretty neat feature that even today some tube sites are still missing. The seeking support is currently working only for FLV files. The H264 support is on the way, hopefully we'll finish it soon.
Here you can find a few examples that I've uploaded to my server:
Besides this two fancy new features, we have also fixed a few bugs, and implemented some lower level stuff: Chained SSL certificates, SSL client certificates support, internal error redirections, etc.
Enjoy it! :-)
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Times Open
I have just come back from the Times Open, a day-long event held in the New York Times headquarters. The conference has completely been worth attending. It was a developer focussed conference, so right from the beginning it looked very promising to me. Of course, topics were not very technical, but an overview of what the New York Times is up to, plus a number of more general topics on the trends of the Internet.
Anyway, first things first. Here is my hat-tip to the New York guys for the great work they are doing opening up their content. In fact, it isn't just that they are going to provide API for the general public to access their content, but also that they are working hard on the technical side of things to let that happen. Kudos to them!!
Many interesting ideas were exposed during the even, but I'd like to highlight one of them over the rest. I'd summarize it with the headline "Technology more relevant than Economics". It sounds weird, but I think it's been true in this case; allow me to explain it. NYTimes is working on this effort to open its content, to provide APIs to the users, and basically to open to the world. That's absolutely great, but as you may have noticed, there was not "revenue" nor "business" in the introduction... quite yet. What is that mean? Well, it seems that they are still figuring out what the business model will be, and meanwhile the new set of APIs will start working next week.
Anyway, the thing I enjoyed the most about the event was not the presentations, nor the Tim's O'Reilly keynote, nor the stunning view of the Hudson river. Actually, it was the people. I could not tell you the number of attendees, but we were not that many people in the room. The thing is, I met quite a few people, and all of then were pretty interesting. There are not many conferences where you start a chat with a random guy and be confident that you won't reject having lost fifteen minutes with some sort of elevator talk.
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A very Intense, Never-ending, Fruitful Week
I'm glad I came to New York. After a few days here, I've done a bunch of things, but more importantly, I've met many interesting people. It's been very tiring, although it has definitely worth coming.
Yesterday night, for instance, I met @damog and @maggit for dinner (two old friends who moved to live over here). It was quite a long time since the last time we met in Mexico City, so it was great to hang out with them for a while. As you can imagine, dinner ended up late, so I didn't have much sleep time.
Today, I woke up early to attend the The New York Open Coffee Club Meetup. I must admit that, when the alarm clock rang I kind of hesitated for a while whether or not it was worth attending. My proactive side battled his villain (my lazy side). I'm glad it won, so I finally went to have a coffee with such an interesting group of people. The things I liked the most about the meeting were: first, the open-minded discussion, and second, the diversity. Even though we all were into technology, there were no two people working on the same stuff. My recommendation, if you have the chance, drop by for one of these informal meeting.
Tomorrow will be another pretty interesting - and I presume, intense - day. I will be attending Times Open at the New York Times headquarters. It is a one day long, invitation-required, developer focused conference. Tim O'Reilly will be the keynote guess speaker, and the open.nytimes.com team will be attending as well. Doesn't it look like a hell of a good plan? It certainly does for me.
So.. as I've already said, it's being a very intense, never-ending, and fruitful week. Though, the best thing is, I forecast many other good times to come before I head back next week. :-)
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28 Hour Day
There are days that go by in a blink. There are others that seem to last forever. The main differences for me is the work load/stress, and the fact of knowing what is laying ahead for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow is going to be one of those never-ending days for me. I will have to wake up early, so I don't get stuck in traffic while heading to Madrid downtown. CENATIC (A Government Organization that promotes F/OSS and open technologies) is running a pilot course, to which they have been kind enough to invite me. Of course, I don't want to miss it. It will be pretty interesting to see how what these guys are working on.
Right after the CENATIC pilot finishes, I will have to cross the city to give a talk at the LibreSoft's Master on Free Software. Once again, I'm glad the Master course organizers invited me to speak about the projects I'm working on. Even though it isn't one of those big and fancy conferences, the LibreSoft group is formed by great researchers (and Free Software advocates), so it will be a pleasure to collaborate with them.
When I finish my talk, I'll have to hurry to head back home. I will have just a few hours to pack before my flight departs to New Your City. It'll take me an hour to reach the Barajas airport, around seven of flight, and a couple of hours more to get from Newark to my hotel in Manhattan. At that moment, it would have finished for me the never-ending day that started around 28 hours before.
Now that I have written it, I'm realizing what a hell of a day it is going to be. (sigh!).. I'm looking forward to it though. :-)
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Cherokee 0.98 released
At last! After a couple of months of tough work, Cherokee 0.98.0 has been finally released.
Here is the summary of the most important changes on this release:
- I/O caching: A number of I/O-cache issues have been fixed. I have to admit that to fix these bugs was a hell of a task. Long story short: I had to write a new distributed stressing tool, and then I needed a few client boxes running hundreds of processes in order to reproduce the issue locally. Now, I'm proud to say that the I/O cache is rock solid: it handles really high concurrency loads with no hassle.
- Binding: The listening mechanism has been rewritten, so the server can bind to an undefined number of IPs/ports without suffering any performance penalty.
- Documentation: A bunch of new cookbooks have been added.
- Redesign: Cherokee-admin has got a new theme. It's cleaner and much more usable.
- Load Balancing: There have been some improvements regarding the load balancing capabilities of Cherokee. Firstly, a new IP Hash load balancing plugin has been integrated in the stable branch. Besides, another of the new 0.98 features allows to dynamically off-line Data Sources whenever the server detects that something goes wrong with one of them.
- Server Info: The information server handler has received some attention as well. Now, it allows third party monitoring applications to fetch information from the server in real time. This is one of the most flashy new features of this release, actually.
This is our best release ever. Upgrade it encouraged.
