Yes, it is true. I’ve been scammed. Sort of.
The other day I listed for online sale some computer equipment I had laying around, and this was bound to attract scammers. I don’t know why, but it happens, and it turns out almost always these guys are from Nigeria. It could be that laws there are not very strict with these matters, or that it is a traditional way to make ends meet in a tough situation. But it’s no wonder most eBay auctions specifically forbid Nigerian bids.

As I was saying, I received several fishy offers. Note that I’m posting the scammer’s private information on purpose :)

For example:

[...]
Received: from [196.3.183.73] by web59915.mail.ac4.yahoo.com via HTTP;
[...]
From: kerry jones <kerr_jone@yahoo.com>
[...]
Hello,
  am kerry by name am now in united kindom for a
purpose.....am sending this item to a friend in lagos nigeria....i will
like to let you know that am paying you through pay pal....i will want
you to send me the total cost include the shipping cost to
lagos-nigeria..you can also call me on this phone number now
+447024017578..please get back to me asap.

It’s astonishing how many guys fall for it. I guess the phone is a VoIP UK number, but hey, guess what?

This friendly guy that is “now in united kindom for a purpose” is writing from Lagos, Nigeria! GeoIP sure is a nice thing. Which by the way is supported in Cherokee, in case you’re wondering how to use that on a web server. Pretty handy.

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);
}

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.

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 :)

.

As advanced yesterday, the release is here! I wasn’t too sure when we would polish the final details, but everything is ready now and it doesn’t make much sense to postpone the event.

The previous major release was five weeks ago, and since then Cherokee has kept getting better. It already outperformed its competitors as it was. Now prepare yourselves to be amazed.

Besides improved performance, the list of enhancements includes a state of the art MySQL bridge and load balancer, SNI support, important usability enhancements for Cherokee-Admin, better help system, several bugfixes and a bunch of some more cool things.

As always, here yo have the list of relevant links:

• Alvaro’s official release note.
• Our mailing lists.
• Download link.
• Cherokee-Project’s website.

I hope you enjoy it. This is serious stuff!

Just to let you know, at the Cherokee Project we’re developing frantically these days and we’re done with most of the pending issues we had in mind.

Cherokee 0.9 is about to be released, and as always it comes with interesting enhancements. And yes… once again there will be a performance boost.

I’ll get into details when we ship the product. Stay tuned!

Ok, this is officially not something to blog about. Especially if you want to keep your girlfriend and go on being one of those rare Slashdot readers that actually have one. But Alvaro just gave me a little something he and Lidia brought me from their last trip to Las Vegas.

Isn’t it great? ;)

UPDATE: Just when I believed it was so obvious, a friend asked me about the meaning of this. And there I thought everyone knew the Starfleet Insignia from Star Trek. I think the one in the mousemat corresponds to the periods between 2351 and 2371. Not quite sure about that. I can’t say that I’m a hardcore Trekkie anymore. Listen to what I’m saying: Sometimes I even forget whole Star Trek races! Unforgiveable!. Luckily every single computer I’ve had since the early nineties has been named after one, so at least those … ;)

As it was anounced some time ago, Cherokee 0.8 will once again have a native Windows binary. We’ve been having a lot of requests because our Windows users haven’t had the chance to taste Cherokee-Admin since it was born.

Beware that the Windows build has to be taken with a grain of salt under Windows. A lot of work is still needed since some major changes -like a totally rewritten I/O cache, a lot more efficient and stable- will be coming by the time 0.8 is released.

These are the necessary steps to setup a suitable building environment.

Like Alvaro said in his blog, installing the whole bundle of needed tools is not trivial. In fact, there was a strange problem with the provided autotools (automake 1.8.2 and autoconf 2.59) of the previous environment that made us have to manually tweak things in order to successfuly finish the compilation of Cherokee. This has been tested on a Windows XP virtual machine.

This is what you need to install.

It is rare for me to post something not related to computers. Some could say it is rare for me to post. Period. But lets just stick to the first sentence or I might very well get lost before I even finish talking of what I wanted to tell you about in the first place.

What was that again? Ah, yes! Posting about non-computer stuff. There is always a first time.

Yesterday I went to the Teatro Bellas Artes to watch a show called ¡Comicapela!. The group of performers is called b vocal, and I must say everyone had a great time with them. A really comical show with all five team members singing a capella in a Bobby McFerrin fashion. Yes, that’s right. Every single instrument was voice made.

I really enjoyed the evening. They’ve been there since June-11th, and the representation lasts until July-13th, though it is possible that the show gets extended until the end of the month. Here is a link to buy the tickets. If you have the chance and you’re Spanish spoken, the show is totally recommended!