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New horizons

After almost 4 great years working at Sun Microsystems, it is time for me to move on and re-focus my career. I am not quite ready to talk about where I am heading toward. The only thing I can say by now is that it is going to be a really interesting adventure that I have always had in the back of my mind.

Today was my last day on duty, and I spent it giving the keynote of the OpenSolaris/OpenJava Day 2008. What a nice 'last day', don't you think!? It has been a good way of meeting and saying 'so long' to a few of the people I have worked with during these years.

Keynoting at the OpenSolaris/OpenJava Day 2008

It has been a really tough decision to leave Sun. By far, it's the best company I have ever worked for. However, I'm pretty motivated to face a new professional challenge, and that is the only reason that has finally pushed me to take the step... It is time to make a bet and put my money where my mouth is! :-)

Administrating Remote Cherokee Servers

There is something about the Cherokee administration interface that have been generating the same question over and over again since we released the first version a few weeks ago: "How can I administer a remote server?".

The configuration interface server (cherokee-admin) binds only the local network interface, so it is not possible access it from anyway else by the machine where the server is running.

There are two possibilities if you really want to access the administration server remotely:

• You can launch cherokee-admin with the --bind parameter. In this case the server would bind to the new specified interface; most probably your local network interface.

  This case is the easiest one, but also the most dangerous case as well: anyone on your local network would be able to access the server configuration, which does not look like something desirable.

• The second option is in my opinion the right approach to the problem. The basic idea is to run cherokee-admin on the local interface, and then create a SSH tunnel from your machine to that local port in the remote server.

  You need SSH access to the web server box, but we can assume it is granted to you - at the end of the day, you are the web server admin. So, the easiest way to run the server and map the TCP port would be:

  ssh -L 9090:localhost:9090 remote-web-server "sudo cherokee-admin"

  after which you could browse the remote administration interface in http://localhost:9090/

I hope this help to clarify things.. :-)

Cherokee: Windows build

After a couple of days fixing a few minor bugs, I have got Cherokee (trunk) to build and work on Windows again! Of course, it does not use Cygwin or any other additional layer.

To say the truth it hasn't been as tough as I thought it would be. The hardest part was to take the first step: install Windows and the development environment in a virtual machine. The rest was fairly straight forward, actually.

Anyway, I have learnt a couple of interesting things along the way:

• The "Msys + MinGW + msysDTK + Emacs + Python + a few misc missing utilities" bundle is not trivial to install. So I have packaged it up for the next the I need it (Cherokee-Win32-comp).
• The rxvt I/O has been broken for a long time now. The best workaround I have found is to edit the msys.bat file and comment out the startxrvt invocation.

Anyway, I will continue polishing our Windows build for a few more days.. <sighhhhhh>

The South Pole strip

I would like to point you guys to a comic strip that I good friend of mine (and Cherokee contributor) has started publishing.

It is called South Pole. Basically, it is a story around three main characters who live on the 7th continent: Antarctica. A penguin named Linus (what a perfect name for a penguin, don't you think?); Bob, a polar bear born in Greenland; and Scott, a white fox.

It is definitely worth reading. Give it a try! Here you have the RSS feed. Enjoy it! :-)

The Cayac Project

I have just seen that the Cayac project guys have released its first set of packages.. which is great news!

Cayac is a bundle of different web technologies that makes much easier to deploy your preferred web infrastructure on OpenSolaris.

I'm specially happy because they chose Cherokee over the rest of the web servers. Now the installation is almost trivial because of Cayac and the web server administration is quite straightforward because of the administration interface that Cherokee 0.6 shipped.

What used to be a tough work that could take hours compiling and editing pseudo-XML files, has become a trivial process where you don't need to compile anything, nor to edit a single file by hand. What a change! :-)

CommunityOne 2008

The first couple of hours attending CommunityOne have been very interesting.. here you have a couple of pictures about it:

Testing ZFS.. the rough way

Green and Hahn introducing IPS

I'll upload some more picture later on.. :-)

OpenSolaris Summit 2008 pics

I have just uploaded some of the pictures that I took during the first day of the OpenSolaris Summit 2008:

Teo, the world is bigger than that

After reading Ted Ts'o comments on OpenSolaris I cannot stop thinking about how partial someone can be. From Ted's point of view, OpenSolaris has failed to build a community (as published in Slashdot), and if you read his post, you would probably think he is right.

Well, I think he is.. but only from a Linux-centric point of view. Actually, if you assume that the Linux development model is the only way to develop F/OSS, he would probably be right. However, if you are more open-minded than that and you know about other F/OSS development models, you will probably know that OpenSolaris' and Linux's models are different, and of course both perfectly acceptable. In fact, each model has its own advantages.

Let's see how different both communities are. Firstly, Linux was born Free Software, while Solaris has been opened after a long time being a closed product. Have you thought about how difficult that process has been? That is a huge amount of tough work that the OpenSolaris community has done in order to liberate such a huge project.

Besides, the OpenSolaris development model is quite different because of a number of technical reasons. IMO, the first one is something as simple as that we want to ensure its quality by following a number of processes. Another very important technical point is that we want OpenSolaris to continue being binary compatible (ABI) with the previous Solaris revisions, which is something Linux could not even dream of. Again, nothing of that has anything to do with Ted's comments; the most important thing here is that, as long as the operating systems goals and objectives are different, their communities are different as well.

And please, do not get me wrong; I have nothing against Linux, nothing at all. In fact, I like it a lot. However, I do think that trying to compare Linux and OpenSolaris communities from a Linux-centric point of view is simply wrong and an unfair comparison. So next time someone feels the need to compare them, it would be so much better if he could base the comparison of each operating system technical merits. Obviously, both communities are different, we all know that.

UEM: Free Knowledge Conference 2008

A couple of days ago I went to UEM, the university where I obtained my CS degree. The LUG organized the "UEM: Free Knowledge conferences 2008" and they invited me to give a talk.

I'm glad they invited me, although I have to confess that it was kind of weird to be in the university again, remembering so many memories, checking what changed, and cheering people who I hadn't seen for about 5 years. It was like traveling back in time for a few hours.. and that made me realize how many things have changed - for good - after all these years :-)

If you are in Madrid, you are still on time to come along. It is worth attending.

A Day in the Life of Five Evangelists

There are sometimes when you play to be what you are not, and experience says that most of them end up in some sort of trouble. A few months ago, I played to be an OpenSolaris evangelist within a group of 4 more colleagues for a few weeks.

I must say that there were some tough days, there were even a few days when we had almost no sleep; but on the bright side, we met many people, we gave a bunch of talks on the technology that we develop, and of course we had a lot of fun.

Here is a video that the some Netbeans folks have compiled about one of the adventures we went trough. The story begins with: "In November of 2007,five Sun engineers had planed to fly from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, Argentina to present NetBeans and OpenSolaris at two universities.. ".

You wonder what happened. :-)