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Next destination The Gambia
It's been a while since the last time I post something unrelated to my work or the projects I'm working on. Of course, that doesn't mean I've been doing nothing but working. In fact, a whole lot of things have happened in the past few months.
The thing I personally enjoyed the most was an amazing, one month long trip to Southeast Asia. I must admit, I didn't know much about the region, and I was very pleasantly surprised about what a great place to visit it turned out to be.
Thailand
Laos
Cambodia
Vietnam
Singapore
Indonesia
Actually, we have been eager to make a new trip since we came back in October. We wanted it to be something different. Since our previous destination was Asia, and Europe and America was not appealing enough at this moment, we chose Africa as the next destination. More specifically, we planed a week long trip to The Gambia.
We'll be leaving to Banjul within a few hours. I am pretty excited about it! :-)
What does that mean? Firstly, I'll be off for a week. I won't commit any code to Cherokee, CTK or any of the projects I'm involved with. Ohhh.. and I'll forget about 'bellow zero degree Celsius' temperatures, it's quite warm over there. Hurray!! :-)
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Cherokee Summit brochure
Since the Cherokee Summit 2010 was announced, there's been a couple of friends who have asked me for an announcement brochure/mail they could circulate in their organizations.
Here is the small PDF file (~100KB) we have written for the occasion so you guys can let your colleagues know about the summit. It includes both English and Spanish versions.
Do not hesitate to send it to any coworker or friend who would be interested in attending a High Performance and Scalable Web event.
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Cherokee Summit 2010
It's been a while since people started asking us about holding a conference fully dedicated to the Cherokee project. As you can suppose, putting together a conference needs an immense amount of work, so it took us a while to get the ball rolling.
However, now we are ready to announce the details "Cherokee Summit 2010". It will be held on the 7th and 8th of May, in Madrid, Spain. This will tie in with the 1.0 release of Cherokee, and so we will be also having a 1.0 release party on Saturday May 8th!
All the details including a schedule of speakers will be made available at the conference's web site: http://summit.cherokee-project.com/
Besides the Cherokee related subjects, the summit will also be covering other High Performance and Scalable Web topics, so our fellow developers from projects such as Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP or Apache can also join the discussion.
It is important to notice that we have managed to make Cherokee Summit free for all the attendees, which looks pretty good compared to the usual ~1000€ fee for similar conferences.
On the downside, the conference will be limited to around 80 people, so if you’d like to rub shoulders with a a bunch of heavy-duty web infrastructure developers, be sure to register as soon as possible.
We look forward to seeing those that can make it.
It is going to rock!
Update (Mon Jan 11 16:00:14): Unixwars on the Cherokee Summit.
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Configuring Cherokee
If you are reading this post, odds are you have previously read about Cherokee. I've written many times about how easy and straightforward the Cherokee configuration is, and how simple it is to configure other third party web applications on Cherokee.
In this occasion, I'd like to draw your attention to a few videos on how to configure some of the most widespread web applications and frameworks on Cherokee:
Most of the videos are less than 2 minutes long - including the opening and the ending. That should give you an idea on how plain and simple the configuration process is.
This first batch covers: PHP (MP4, OGV), Django with Flup (MP4, OGV), Django with uWSGI (MP4, OGV), Ruby on Rails (MP4, OGV), Wordpress (MP4, OGV), Video Streaming (MP4, OGV), and a General Introduction (MP4, OGV).
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Cherokee has got Unicode support
I'm just writing this short post to show you guys this screenshot:
It's the upcoming Cherokee 0.99.33 version, featuring its new Unicode support. Isn't it cool?
If you didn't find it pretty interesting, odds are your mother tongue doesn't use non-ASCII characters. In that case, believe me, it is extremely desirable for a program to support the Universal Character Set. Basically it allows Cherokee to be deployed everywhere, independently of the local language or alphabet. So, let's just say that this new Unicode support removes some adoption barriers, which is always a great thing.
If everything goes as expected the new version will be released within the next few days. Meanwhile, you can always download the trunk snapshot and give it a try.
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Cherokee Web Server Introductory Screencast
We have recently uploaded our very first Cherokee Web Server introductory screencast. It's a 5 minutes video to introduce the Cherokee configuration interface:
We will record more videos in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully they will help us to show the World the cool features that Cherokee offers. Enjoy it!
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Cherokee's new status page
A few days ago we released a new version of the Cherokee web server. Besides fixing a few minor issues, Cherokee 0.99.22 shipped a few new functionalities. Even if they are quite useful, most of them would be boring to explain: parsing improvements, better scheduling, improved system resources management, etc. However there's a fancy new feature I wanted to show you here: We've got a new Status page! Hurray!!
Cherokee-admin 0.99.22 status page
Of course it's been an incremental improvement, so all the previous features (localization, server management, etc.) are still in place. Speaking of which, I'm just wondering, have you seen how the page looks in Chinese?
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Protecting against the Slowloris HTTP DoS
As I bet you already know, Slowloris is a HTTP client that can easily take the most widespread web servers to their knees, including:
- Apache 1.x
- Apache 2.x
- IBM HTTP Server
- Zeus Web Server
- Squid caching proxy server
- lighttpd 1.4
- A few Verizon products, etc..
There's something specially relevant about this DOS attack: It requires very low bandwidth in order to collapse a production web server, which makes it specially dangerous.
Do not panic, though. There is a really easy solution to the problem. As Daniel Robbins (Founder of Gentoo Linux and Funtoo) explained in his Slowloris DOS Mitigation Guide: Cherokee is the way to go.
First of all, the Cherokee web server is not vulnerable to the attack, so if your organization can switch to a newer web server, the problem is solved.
In case you couldn't migrate there would be another option. Since Cherokee ships a reverse HTTP proxy with different load balancing mechanisms, it could be deployed before your current web servers. Cherokee would act as some sort of Layer-7 filter, so it'd protect them from collapse under attack.
Personally, there's something I really enjoyed about all this stuff. When Slowloris was released and we tested it against Cherokee, we didn't have to change a single line of code to fix the server... Cherokee was already safe. :-)
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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!! :-)
