Archive for the ‘Python’ Category

Cherokee on steroids: v0.11 now with reverse proxy

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

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 ;)

Cherokee Webserver

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.

Python can do a lot of things

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

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).

The family keeps growing

Friday, November 14th, 2008

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.

cherokee-polska-small The family keeps growing

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.

New day, new release: Cherokee 0.10

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

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!

Cherokee Webserver

As always, stability and performance have improved, some bugs have been fixed and new features are available. Lately our MySQL load balancer module has been attracting a lot of attention. Download Cherokee and follow the cookbook to give it a try.

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

Handle with care: This baby is a heavy hitter by its own merits! ;)

Cherokee 0.8.0 “Hard as a rock” released!

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

The day has finally arrived. After a lot of hard work, we are finally releasing 0.8. It has improved quite a lot in this time. It is faster, much more stable and has been thoroughly tested and documented, at last!

Unfortunately not everything are good news. After putting in a lot of effort fixing the Windows build, we finally decided to postpone this until 0.8.1 the next major release. It has been too long since the last release, and having so many improvements it doesn’t make much sense to hold the relase back just to offer it simultaneously to all platforms. This was the only thing holding us back beside some bugs that had to be fixed, so now this is our one big remaining task for the next release ;)

Cherokee Webserver

This is our best release ever. By far. Improved performance, interface and documentation enhancements and lots of new features: much faster I/O cache, huge FastCGI performance improvement, updates (and binary upgrades) are now handled gracefully with no downtime, the load balancing is better and a lot more. Alvaro just sent the official release note minutes ago.

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here is the download link. Enjoy it! ;)

UPDATE: I’ve just updated the documentation available at the site.

UPDATE: A quick update to fix some minor bugs has been released: Cherokee 0.8.1.

Cherokee Quickstart

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Many users have told us that they would love to have some more documentation about Cherokee. One of the tasks before relasing 0.8 (which is almost ready by now) is documenting.

Yesterday I wrote a small tutorial that will be part of the documentation. It is a simple walkthrough to set up a couple of virtual servers, basic authentication (PAM and flat) and some redirections.

It will be available at the official site as soon as we make the release, at http://cherokee-project.com/doc

cherokee Cherokee Quickstart

Here it is for now. No screenshots and not much styling in my blog, sorry. It’s just a  quick cut&paste. There’s a lot of other stuff I should be documenting instead of blogging ;)

Configuration Quickstart

This section briefly describes the whole administration web interface provided by cherokee-admin. This is the only recommended way of configuring Cherokee. If you are looking for development information, you should refer to the appropriate section, especially cherokee.conf file specification.

We will first show a quick overview of the available options, followed by a simple walkthrough. You can learn more about the options in their specific documentation entries.

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Cherokee on Windows: improving the building environment

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

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.

Cherokee Webserver

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.

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Cherokee on Windows

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Our next release of Cherokee, 0.8.0, will once again have a native Windows package.
A few moments ago it was officially announced at the mailing list.

We had plans to finally fix it in the very near future, but Alvaro decided to speed things up a bit. This guy is amazing! ;)

I’ve been rather busy these days and haven’t been paying all the attention to the project I would have wanted, but everything started moving on Windows’ side of things just a couple of days ago. I really didn’t expect it to be ready this soon, but here it is: Cherokee Windows Build. The development branch already compiles and works on Microsoft’s OS. Just check out the latest SVN version and give it a try.

Alternatively if you can live without Windows and want something more stable, you can just download the latest official release, Cherokee 0.7.1 Cherokee 0.7.2 (as of June 12th).

Cherokee 0.7.0 “Land Shark” released!

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

A couple of months after the previous Cherokee stable release, and once a lot of work and testing has been done, here it is: Ladies and gentlemen, Cherokee 0.7.0 is out!. You could take a look at the official announcement, but what you should really do is try it out. Seriously. Every single one of us is working hard on the project -make that extra-extra-hard working in Alvaro’s case-, and the results are clearly visible.

Cherokee Webserver

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing list. The Summer is almost here, and this one will prove to be extremely productive. Just trust me for now. It will ;-)

Here is the download link.

Wiilson: Wii-Skybot extreme (Skybot + Wii + PWM)

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

A couple of days ago I mentioned this in the post about extending libStargate for a class assignment we had. The team was formed by Miguel, Gonzalo and myself, and we received a pretty good grade, by the way. I wanted to write again after having some patches sent to the main author of libStargate by the end of this week, but it turns out I won’t be able to properly test them until after that. Since a lot of friends have been having problems with their own projects, ours is going to be temporarily cannibalized until their time is up. Wish them luck! ;)

Anyway, I’ll post again once  I have the things properly tested and I’ve spoken to the people of IEArobotics. For now, here is the link to download Wiilson if you want to try it out.

As mentioned earlier, it is just a PWM Wiimote implementation to control a Skybot. The Wiimote is interfaced thanks to the excellent pywii library, Orienting the Wiimote makes the bot move and it goes faster or slower depending on the inclination of the controller. Changing from mode ‘A’ to ‘B’ (or ‘1′ to ‘2′) overrides this behavior and controls the bot with the direction keys of the Wiimote, being able to alter speeds with the ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ buttons. It’s not pretty, but it is a quick hack and works fine. If you want something better you’ll have to wait for the release of pybot, a Python module to control (extended) libStargate managed robots with PWM support. The only class present right now is to control the Skybot as it is out of the box, so PWM support is software based -you’d have to rewire it if you wanted a hardware version of this, much better but totally out of the scope-.

Coming up soon, at least as soon as our bot gets de-cannibalized if that is even a word!

By the way… I think I’m getting to love this stuff. I’ll have to buy a Skypic or Arduino for myself. You can’t ever play around enough with these things. And to think it was always there and I never knew!