Today both courses will be officially over. In fact, both the final exam of AI and final review questions of ML are due tonight. It’s been 10 weeks of thrill, and I’ve enjoyed both courses tremendously. The dedication, generosity, and enthusiasm displayed by all the three professors has been inspiring, and from here I want to give my most heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in making the courses a reality.

Concretely (-grin-), I want to express the utmost respect for the professors involved. I tip my hat to you, Sirs. To anyone interested in knowing about the subject, I strongly recommend taking a look at the links provided for the courses. In fact, the Machine Learning course is scheduled to be repeated in January, and I have no doubt that the Artificial Intelligence one will also have some form of continuation eventually. In my opinion, this  Stanford School of Engineering Initiative makes the world a better place. In particular, the final session of Office Hours has made me realize that I’ve come to feel fully involved with the courses and instructors. Really, quite moving. I did have some good professors back in the old days, both in Med School and Computer Science, but rarely have I grown so fond of  an instructor. I’d really love the chance to meet them face to face simply to thank them in person.

I’ve learnt a lot of stuff, I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m already enrolled in several of  the new courses that will start in 2012. There’s a lot to choose from: Natural Language Processing, Probabilistic Graphical Models, and a long list of endless instructional joy. Additionally, a bunch of earlier (and equally interesting) courses are available through Stanford Engineering Everywhere and MIT Open Courseware. If you feel like learning new stuff, I wholeheartedly recommend them. If the experience is anywhere similar to the one I’ve had, you’ll be amazed!

UPDATE: I sent an appreciation mail to each of the professors involved, and it turns out professor Norvig actually took the time to reply. Nothing short of astonishing given the huge amount of such emails they must have received. As I said, amazing experience, amazing courses, and amazing professors. Totally recommended.

As was to be expected, I didn’t have the time to migrate things immediately, so it took a little while longer. I’ve been making some time now and then, and I think everything should be ready by now.
Thanks for your patience.

I’ve migrated the blog to a new server and will be moving some more domains in the following days. It’s not really powerful machine, but Cherokee isn’t resource hungry anyway and everything seems to be running smoothly.

If you happen to find anything broken, please let me now.

With this version we’ve also launched the Cherokee Market, which is totally integrated with Cherokee-Admin. The change is much more than superficial. Besides having a new section in Cherokee-admin, this is going to change the way that people interact with their webserver infrastructures.

Remote services such as saving and restoring the webserver configuration are now enabled by default, and getting real job done has never been easier. Through Cherokee Market, downloading and deploying Web applications on your Cherokee servers has never been easier. In fact, with only a couple of clicks and a few seconds, you’ll have a completely functional and highly optimized environment at your disposal.

It was the natural way to go for the configuration wizards we’ve been enjoying for the last couple of years, and I’m sure that in the near future everyone will wonder how could they have ever lived without this.

Take a look at the quickstart video. It shows the installation of the Cherokee Web Server on MacOS X, and deployment of Drupal 7, all in a matter of seconds. I don’t really think it can get much easier than that.

Everything was recorded, so we will upload the slides and videos of all our sessions really soon. For now, only the photo gallery is available. Take a look at the mugshots.

I’m really glad we could make this Summit. It surpased all my expectations. By far. It was an unbelievable experience, and we had lots of fun. Take a look at our family photo. If you want to know which of the guys above is me, here’s a clue: “In brightest day…”.

I’m really looking forward to the next summit. Cherokee Summit 2010 was awesome. I’m sure the next one will be even better.

I’m sure that meeting many of the developers of Cherokee in person will be the highlight for me.

If by any chance you’ll be in Madrid that weekend, don’t forget to register in time and join us.

It’s gonna be legen… wait for it… dary!

Main characters:

European Space Agency

The Cherokee Project

Plot:

This is a love story. Nuff said! :)

Before writing about it,  I wanted to give it a run to see if it could be of any help to a rather absentminded guy. I’m sure many long time Emacs users out there are forgetful at times. I know I am. It seems to fit the profile somehow ;-)

Since I couldn’t rely too much on my memory for these things, I had to find a task management solution. That’s where Org-mode comes in.

If you are like me, maybe Org-mode can save the day. I seem to be able to organize my time a lot better since I started using it.

Org-mode is a mode for keeping notes,  ToDo lists, and project planning in Emacs, with a fast and effective plain-text system. It seems awfully spartan  and simplistic at first, but it is nothing less than magnificent in features. Being a part of Emacs is also a plus for me, since it is the first thing I install on any platform I happen to be working. Besides the OS independence, not being tied at all to a particular application does get extra points. Formats may vary over time, but plain text files are here to stay.

These days I’m using it as an outliner, as a note-taking application, to manage my accounting and, most importantly, as a Getting Things Done (GTD) tool. I don’t quite yet use it for Web and PDF Authoring, but it never hurts to know I could if I wanted.

And for now the deal is working pretty well for me. It is very flexible, has lots of other uses, and also a very rich and knowledgable community, so I totally recommend you take a look at some of the links of this post. It will be worth your while.

You can read Alvaro’s announcement, or you can check out the Summit web-site.

Cherokee will be an important topic, but it won’t be the only one. Those will be a couple of days fully dedicated to High Performance and Scalable Web topics, so there’s room for everyone to join in.  We are commited to reaching the 1.0 milestone of Cherokee by then, so we will also have a party to celebrate it.

It’s going to be fun. I’ll be a speaker at the summit and I’m really looking forward to personally meeting many of the members of the project. Thanks to our sponsors we’ve managed to make the event completely free, so don’t forget to register while we still have free spots!

UPDATE: We’ve written a little brochure (~100KB) that can be used to  let your colleagues know about the summit. Do not hesitate to send it to any coworker or friend who would be interested in attending a High Performance and Scalable Web event.

From here I’d like to thank P.V. Anthony for his invaluable advice on audio production and my old friend Sara Genge for lending her voice to the project (and for her awesome fiction writing, but that is another story).

After all, this is the country where the Government has just spent almost 750K€ as a covert gift to SGAE, our equivalent to RIAA, also known as ladrones. Beware, no copy-left music there. It is shameful in so many ways that I better not get started.

Saying Creative Commons is not an option is outrageous. Not just because I’ve always been a FLOSS advocate and CC simply fits in my mindset. I believe these kind of options simply make the World a better place.

Take this as an example. My friend Álvaro had a CC song playing today. It is called Code Monkey. Not only did I love it, being a geek and all. Knowing it was CC, I googled about the author, and it turns out Jonathan Coulton releases his work under CC. He used to be one of us (and forever will be), but he switched fields from IT to music, and he seems to be doing pretty well. Kudos to you, sir! I love your work.

I’m pretty sure he would have had a hard time trying to live from his art through mainstream media (yes, Mu$ic Indu$try, I’m talking about you).

Not only does he succeed and has made my day a lot more fun. I also found out his work has been used in award winning works, which is something permitted by the licensing used. This music-clip won several Anime contests back in 2007. I’m not saying it is like winning a Nobel prize. But Madonna is not going to win one either. And quite frankly, seeing that Henry Kissinger once won the Peace Nobel prize, this shouldn’t even be considered as a dignifying example.

Check out the videoclip. I for one had a warm fuzzy feeling listening to Jonathan Coulton‘s work. You can buy all his pieces at really really inexpensive prices.