UnixWars

I have talked previously about Cherokee’s MySQL Database Bridge, so I won’t be repeating myself. Check the information about the Cherokee handler module and the recipe for MySQL balancing on our main site if you are interested.

Besides being the fastest implementation of its kind, it is really easy to use and offers a lot of scalability advantages.

For those of you using PHP we’ve finally pushed upstream a wrapper I wrote for this feature. It should facilitate the use of the MySQL Database Bridge: the PHP-MySQL API has been replicated and can be found under dbslayer/mysql_wrap.php in Cherokee’s source tree. It should provide an easy to use method of benefiting from the advantages offered by Cherokee without having to modify your applications. This will definitely be in our next release, so give it a try and tell us about it! ;)

I’ve been writing a wrapper for Cherokee’s MySQL load balancer to transparently replace PHP’s MySQL functions and provide connection pooling and database balancing at absolutely no cost. And I encountered a problem wanting to override those built-in functions.

It looks like the override_function() has a bug that prevents from using it to override two or more functions, since it issues this error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare __overridden__()

Judging by the C code for PHP’s override_function() function, instead of hardcoding the overriden function name it was planed to generate random names, but for reasons unknown to me this never happened.

Anyway, I can’t believe the fix for this is so simple and yet the solution didn’t appear in PHP’s excellent online documentation. It had me lost for a while, but it’s as simple as renaming the overriden function!! This is from the wrapper I mentioned, that will be distributed with Cherokee shortly:

foreach ($substs as $func => $ren_func) {
    override_function($func, $args[$func], "return $substs[$func];");
    rename_function("__overridden__", $ren_func);
}

You know those times when you stumble upon a good idea and think it is plain genius?

Alvaro told me about it this morning and I just had to share it with everybody. This is what you will find if you visit http://apache-es.org, a community in Spanish built to talk about Apache and system administration.

The “aviso” part is a warning:

Apache-es.org, the only Q&A site about Apache that is running Cherokee!

As I said: plain genius!

Yesterday we reached yet another milestone in Cherokee’s development towards World Domination. After almost a month of hard work, our newest creation hit the streets. The official anouncement hasn’t even been made yet, but Cherokee 0.11.1 is out in the wild.

Besides our regular bug fixes and performance enhancements, it is shipped with some new features. SSI support was being requested every now and then, the SSL infrastructure has been reworked and the new reverse proxy is working flawlessly. The Windows build is not a reality yet, but great advances have been made towards that end. Cherokee is currently working under Windows, but the admin is not. And it has to be cross compiled, for now. Anyway, we’re one step closer to releasing a binary Windows build ;)

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here are links to download and read the online documentation with tons of new information and recipes. Enjoy! ;)

UPDATE: Link to the official anouncement.

This weekend I had a little accident with the mountain bike. A truck came out of nowhere in the middle of the mountain -like they always do-, I got surprised, fell and took the hit with my bare hands. I’ll be spending some days with raw-flesh-style palms.  What can I say? I’m a fashion victim. Sort of.

Anyway, I was having my injuries treated at my sister’s when my nephew came by. He’s a three year old, so every answer I gave him about the accident raised another question.

This one was priceless:

Uncle, do you want my training wheels?

But it is not omnipotent. Leave that to Q. I stumbled upon this funny answer from back in 2005 and I had to share it. That guy is a genius! ;-)

I’m curious how I can make Python print text in color.

That depends strictly on your printer. With my hp LaserJet 1200, no way — not even Python’s power can overcome the hardware’s limitations in this regard… it’s a black-and-white printer and that’s all there is to it! If I did have a color printer, then I would have Python produce the appropriate postscript code, or “escape-sequences” in whatever printer-specific language a given printer requires to have it output color text (or, depending on my operating system, printer driver, filters, etc, I might have to send appropriate “escape-sequences” or whatever to the DRIVER in order to convince it to drive the printer appropriately).

I posted a note about this at Cherokee’s main site, but I totally forgot to tell you over here. My bad.

However, it’s never late to share good news. A couple of days ago Cherokee’s family incorporated a Polish Cherokee Community as new member!

And they took a huge leap forward by creating Cherokee Polska, which isn’t just another site about Cherokee. So far they’ve translated everything, documentation included. And the effort has been worth it. They received thousands of unique visitors on their first day, and that is only the beginning.

From here, I wish to extend my most sincere congratulations to these guys. Great work!

Since Cherokee has been steadily getting better and better, I expect more localization initiatives will keep popping up. We’ll see it in time. That’s a given.

We’ve been really busy lately. After my adventures in Venezuela at the Infociencias and the Open Source World Conference 2008 in Málaga -I know, I know… I still have to talk about that and post some photos, but the days are not long enough!-, we’ve finally made the time to polish some last details.

Today, Cherokee 0.10 has been born! Even if you’re not into this FOSS World thingie, you should know that this is the fastest web server out there!

Hi there. I haven’t yet had the time to blog about last week’s event at Venezuela where I spoke about Cherokee. Hopefully I’ll be posting some photos really soon. After I came back to Spain on Sunday, I wen’t straight to Malaga to the Open Source World Conference 2008. I’m meeting lots of really interesting people and seeing some friends I haven’t been in contact with lately.

Any way, this was just a quick note. I’ll be making some time to write about these last days once I get home by the end of the week.

Stay tuned until then!

Hi there! Just a quick note to let you know I’m in Venezuela for the week. I’ll be attending the XXII Jornadas Infociencias in Barquisimeto where I’ll be talking about Cherokee. It’s my first time here, and I’m enjoying learning about Venezuela’s people and culture. Today I was told there’s this decree 3390 that makes mandatory the usage of Free Software for public institutions. Things sure look bright for FLOSS over here!

I’ve spent the whole day going around, seeing places and meeting people, and I’ve learnt some things:

1. The sights are awesome.
2. Trying out the popular dishes is a must! Arepa, hm…. ;)
3. And everyone over here is really friendly.

I’ll make my point with a photo that was taken when I visited a lab at the Universidad Centroccidental “Lisandro Alvarado” (UCLA-Venezuela). Someone mentioned that I was one of the guests at Infociencias and everybody wanted to be in the photo :)

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