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.

We wanted to brag about our little baby. After all, not every serious web server out there has a killer interface to configure it. Take a look at our Cherokee Web Server introductory screen-cast.

You might want to see it at full screen for readability.

It’s just one of many to come. We’ve got some more planned, so I’ll let you know when they’re ready.

Well, it seems like all the charade I had during several weeks is nothing compared to what this guy accomplished: he actually managed to ship a lot of worthless heavy junk, at the scammer’s expense, of course. The death threats he received afterwards would make for some of the best tag-lines ever.

It turns out there is a whole Community out there that have made a hobby out of scamming the scammers. Looks like fun!

They even have a brand of laptops to bait the scammers. The name is … wait for it … Anus Laptops. As you can see, just the brand name is more than enough to produce some peculiar conversations. OMG! Simply genius!

If you expect a party kit from us you’ve come to the wrong place. We actually believe our software is so good that it is a prize for its own merits. It has been a while since I last announced one of our releases, mainly because I didn’t have much to add besides what was told on the official announcements. As always, a lot of development effort is being invested in our flag product, and this is something that doesn’t go by unnoticed. This weekend we decided to release Cherokee 0.99.25. As you can tell by the .25 part, lots of fixes and enhancements have been added steadily release after release.

I hope you enjoy it. We’ve tried to update all the documentation for this release, and we’ve automated most of the recipes in our cookbook by adding lots and lots of configuration Wizards, so hopefully you’ll be able to set up anything in a matter of seconds. As always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here are links to download the tarball and the online documentation.

If you click on the image you’ll download a MIDI file of a piece that was played on violin at the ceremony. The Super Mario Bros theme, by Köji Kondö. Hey, you gotta love those geeks! ;-)

Congratullations, Alvaro and Lidia! I hope you have a fantastic -well deserved- Honeymoon. Best of wishes to both of you on your new life.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Regarding Linux portability, one could easily loose track. Some hobbies can change the World.

• Wifi: it ships an Atheros AR9285 wireless card. From the Official Linux Wireless wiki we can see that it is supported on kernels >= 2.6.29. Jaunty comes with 2.6.28, but it is not a problem:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

• Sound: Update ALSA. This is for the latest snapshot:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/\
alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot.tar.bz2 -O -| tar xvj
cd alsa-driver-unstable
./configure --enable-dynamic-minors
make
sudo make install-modules
echo "options snd_hda_intel model=hp-dv5" | \
sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Problem solved. Reboot and enjoy.