Only one more week to go!
I’m going to remind you all about the first Cherokee Summit. It will be held next week in Madrid (7-8 May), and I’m really excited about it. We will release Cherokee 1.0, will rub shoulders with many members of our community, and we’ll define the road-map for Cherokee 2.0. I’ll be giving a tech-talk along Jonathan Hernandez, so you know when and where to find me.

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!

It’s been a while since I started using Org-mode. Like four months or so. When I discovered it I knew I would blog about it sooner or later, but I didn’t want to rush things.

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.

On a previous post I introduced our first Cherokee Project screencast. We were going to wait for a new and improved website before we made them public, but what the hell! Why wait? I’m sure the new Cherokee-Project Screencast Collection will come in handy for many of you.

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).

No, don’t worry. I’m not going to play with you and expect you to work for free as my personal advertisement company. I have to recognize that I’m astonished that Microsoft got away with it with all it’s Windows 7 craze, which once again proves that there are lots of guys out there that outsmart me by far. I’m talking about their PR guys, mind you.

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.

I’m sure plenty of sites will talk about it, so I’ll keep it short. Precisely 18 years ago, Linux was born. I’m told Linus -nicknamed Linux back then- wanted to call it Freax, but it didn’t stick.

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.

Lately I’ve been wanting to buy a netbook. I’m not an impulsive guy when it comes to buying new gadgets, so I have been postponing the moment. But having an unexpensive, semi-disposable system laying around can come in quite handy.

I mention this because the time to buy is getting closer and closer, and yet I’m astonished that so little people out there are making a big fuss over the next big thing: ARM netbooks and Linux. Sure, we already have some of these out there from Skytone and Elonex -and probably others-, but those are fairly limited machines performance-wise.

I’m talking about cheap mini-laptops that can be used to surf the web, write reports and even play 720p video, all with an extremely low power consumption, 10+ hour battery life and very little heat generation. These machines are already on their way, will use newer and more powerful ARM processors and will hit the market in the following months.

I believe this is, in fact, a silent revolution that doesn’t even ripple the surface. This will change everything. And why is that? Well… for starters there is a huge market for something like this, like the sells of anything Netbook-related have been steadily showing lately. An it seems hardly possible that Microsoft will release an ARM enabled Windows XP. This means Linux will get yet another boost in market share when these machines become mainstream, although I’m pretty sure Microsoft will still claim a 90%+ share in the netbook segment. Despite this alleged 90%, the rules of the game have changed, and netbooks are not playing by Microsoft’s rules any more.

Things are changing. And with this, cheap, ubiquitous, multimedia network-enabled machines will become a reality. And those will be powered by free software, at last. Debian has been supporting ARM chips for a long time, Ubuntu does since release 9.04 and other mobile and embedded devices have a long history with Linux. And lets not forget about Android! Oh man, I can hardly wait to get my hands on one of these jewels!

It’s a revolution.  It’s quiet, but it’s happening.