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 ;)

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.

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

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

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.

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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!

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).

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.

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.

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!

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be playing around with a bot project to interface our Skypic board and the Wiimote as an assignment in class.

Hacking these things has been fairly easy thanks to some pretty handy pieces of software we stumbled upon at IeaRobotics and a bit of Python magic. The tools of the trade were Pydownloader to program the Skypic, libStargate to interface the PC and the bot, and finally Pywii, a wonderful Wiimote library.

We ended up implementing a new server for the Skypic that should enable a smooth control of the acceleration applied to the Skybot in response to the Wiimote’s movements. To handle it we had to extend libStargate. Our job wasn’t particularly hard to do, but up until now you only had the chance of applying an all-or-nothing type of movement. Now the acceleration is proportional to the pitch and roll values of the controller. Since the controlling code is in the PIC instead of the computer, the effect is really smooth.

The bot has dual power. 6V for the Skypic and 9V for the servos. If only we had used 12V for these the effect would be nicer yet, but overall its fine.

I’ll clean the code a bit before submitting the patches to the project’s author, and I hope to have it ready and submitted this week along with a new wrapper class around libStargate to control specifically the SkyBots with PWM capabilities. It is called pySkybot, by the way.

Last week was a bit slow, and this one doesn’t seem as if it is going to get any better. This week we’ll have some hollidays (from Thursday and through the weekend), so maybe something interesting will come up. In the meantime I’ll share this little flash game I stumbled upon the other day. Nothing special, but entertaining. As always, I’m hooked. I’m starting to think that I’m some kind of junkie when things have to do with puzzles. Enjoy! ;-) (more…)