Weblog: Archive

Kerttu needs a computer to accompany the Psion notepad for her biology studies. Since I didn't want to get a desktop system, I took one of the old company HP Omnibook 500 laptops and set up Linux on it. This gave me a perfect opportunity to try the new Ubuntu distribution.

The first installation was a problem because the system had some data from an old Red Hat 8 installation that I wanted to preserve. Ubuntu refused to install on the existing filesystem, and only worked after I copied the data to my iBook and let the Ubuntu installer format the hard drive. Other than that the installation was very smooth. Ubuntu probed all the hardware correctly, including my D-Link WLAN card and the display. However, on startup X refused to work.

To solve this I had to manually install the xserver-xfree86 and xbase-fonts packages.

After that the system has behaved nicely, presenting a very attractive desktop with a good set of tools preinstalled, including Firefox and Openoffice.org. The only problem that still lingers is that the Omnibook display tends to turn white after a while of use. This is a known hardware problem apparently caused by loose display connector.

Blogging on GNOME

Having a new GNOME installation in front of me allowed me to finally test the blogging functionality of the desktop.

By default Ubuntu doesn't include any blog-related tools, but they were easily available from the universe repository. Simply edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and uncomment the two lines pointing to universe. You can probably also enable them in the Repositories window of Synaptic.

After editing the APT sources list, I fired up Synaptic package manager, which is the default package installation tool for Ubuntu. The three packages relevant to blogging were blam, an RSS news reader, gnome-blog, a simplistic blog poster and blogtk, a slightly more comprehensive weblog editor.

Blam is an RSS news reader. It uses a three-pane layout where the subscribed channels and their unread item counts are shown on left, headlines of current channel on top and the content at the bottom. Blam also adds a notification icon to the GNOME panel reporting when new items are available. Unfortunately Blam doesn't do too well in comparison to the popular Mac OS X newsreader, NetNewsWire. The UI feels much clunkier and simple tasks like removing multiple subscribed feeds are not possible. Integration with desktop blogging tools is also missing.

The blogging tools, gnome-blog and BloGTK also fare quite badly against the common Mac OS X or Windows tools for the task like MarsEdit and ecto. Neither application supported RSD auto-probing of MetaWebLog settings, or uploading of attachments using the metaWeblog.newMediaObject API. Gnome-blog aims to be a quick tool for blogging notes, and its simplistic interface integrated with the GNOME panel fits this paradigm well. However, with BloGTK the editing of existing posts has been needlessly hidden under a menu item. The email-like paradigm used by MarsEdit would work much better, as would initiating the edit calls from Blam.

Note: There was an issue preventing the GNOME desktop blogging tools from being used with Midgard CMS. A single line fix was committed today based on my tests. Now blogging from the GNOME desktop to Midgard should work. Another small step in the GNOMEgard program.

This post has been made using BloGTK and then edited using MidCOM AIS to add images and categorization.

Kerttu and I held the housewarming party for friends last night in our new home. A very nice evening with over 20 guests. The dishes were well received, with caipirinhas and salmon rolls being the most popular offerings. Producing the caipirinhas from cachaça given by Tim was somewhat of a show, as we had to use a bokken sword for breaking the ice cubes.

We themed the evening around dishes from Russia and nearby countries. This meant lots of smetana, sour cucumbers, suhariki, churcheklas and pancakes topped with condensed milk. On the beverage side we served all kinds of improvised drinks based on Ukrainian pepper vodka, Georgian chacha and Polish zubrowka. To our surprise, several people actually confessed to liking chacha. Churcheklas, the Georgian sweets produced from nuts and grape juice were also consumed with great enthusiasm after initial confusion on whether they were sausages or peppers.

It was very nice to meet so many old acquaintances during the evening. Maud's avec Unto was an old live-roleplaying friend from mid-90s, Arwen had returned from her studies in Sweden, and the Midgard project founder Jukka is starting his own company. It was also pleasant to see my brother Ville and his wife before they depart to Brazil for the winter.

All in all, a very good evening and trial run for the apartment. Last guests left around 3am.

Today we woke up late in the afternoon, and lit the customary two candles to the windowsill to celebrate Finland's 87th indepencence day. On our way to dinner we saw the torch parade of student unions on the market square.

I've finally implemented the planned year 2005 layout on my home page this weekend. Due to arranging the housewarming party yesterday it is still somewhat unfinished, but still nicer than the old one.

Main reasons for revising the site layout was that I needed more space for some intended metadata. In addition, Kerttu has been bugging me about how boring the old layout was. Some new metadata planned include linking all content items to location, weather and related items based on categorization. Current location can be reported with a simple SMS interface.

The header image is a photo of the Caucasus ridge in evening taken from Shilda, Georgia northeast to Dagestan.

Thanks to Adam Douglas for helping me fix some issues with clearing floating elements.

Please tell me how you like the new layout.

For years there has been talk of getting Microsoft Windows supported in Midgard CMS. Now the situation seems to be progressing, being lead by Daniel S. Reichenbach from Best off. As most production websites are run on Unix, why are we interested in running Midgard on Windows? The Motivation part of mRFC 0011: Midgard on Windows Platform replies:

Having Midgard available for the Windows platform would lower the barrier of entry into the project. Web developers could easily check the system out by installing it on their desktops and smaller companies could run their Intranets with MidCOM or OpenPSA installed on their Windows-based file or print servers.

In addition to server usage, the Windows port would ensure that Midgard is available on all major desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). This would bring interesting possibilities with replication, including offline usage of Midgard-based business applications like OpenPSA.

With the new mRFC, the situation sounds quite promising. Some key quotes from my chat with Daniel:

bergie (13:30:52): dsrbo: BTW, there has been win32 discussion again on midgard-user. Where did that thing end up in the end?
dsrbo (13:32:13): that ended on my win32 partition i've not used for months now :( although it could be patched to work again with little changes
bergie (13:32:42): so it actually works?
tarjei (13:33:06): cool
dsrbo (13:33:19): the project workspaces for visual studio need some updates, and this should be it.
... dsrbo (13:38:06): we could have one installer with apache2, php4 plus midgard and all apps done, it's just a matter if time. write a draft what you would like to have included in a midgard win32 distribution and make it mRFC, then I can implement it by the book :-)
bergie (13:40:22): dsrbo: what kind of schedule do you think would be possible?
dsrbo (13:42:39): bergie: I will be busy with earning money until 21st Dec. Afterwards I have two weeks time for such a thing. So, if you can draft a complete mRFC until then, I could make it my new years present

Tomorrow has been marked as the Beautiful OpenPSA Day in our corporate group calendar. The idea is to gather the whole team together to fix OpenPSA usability and eye candy issues. The date was set down when we decided to move Midgard CMS closer to the GNOME desktop usability-wise in an effort known as Project GNOMEgard.

Here are some ideas on what we should get started tomorrow:

• Usability
• Migrating forms to more accessible model using XHTML labels and fieldsets
• This will be a long road. The login screen and some individual screens now implement this
• Implementing access keys for switching between different tabs in OpenPSA applications
• Access keys in top menu are:
• 1: My summary
• 2: Calendar
• 3: Sales or Contacts
• 4: Projects
• 5: Documents
• 6: Personnel
• 7: Reports
• 8: Support
• 9: Email
• 0: Logout
• Implementing as much as GNOME Human Interface Guidelines as is practical
• Eye candy
• Switching Documents to use GNOME document icons
• Adding GNOME stock icons to buttons where appropriate
• Selecting identifier icons for several different resource types in OpenPSA
• Person
• Company (or department)
• Document (attachment)
• Event (calendar reservation)
• Project
• Task (or TODO item)
• Using GNOME palette for the default UI colors

I'll update this document as we go. If you have any additional items, please let me know.

The icons above are deep linked from their authors' sites. I know this is the wrong approach but I'm in a bit of haste. Sorry.

Updated 2004-12-15 14:35: There have been quite many CSS and API changes today, including a complete overhaul of the UI colors to GNOME palette and introduction of the openpsa_icon() interface for easily using icons from library in the applications.

Before:

After:

This is a good start, but getting OpenPSA to the GNOME level of usability will still be a long road.

There was an interesting story in a recent Yrittäjä magazine about a concept called nanocorporations, or networked small businesses.

Nanocorporations are formed by one or two individuals around a core competence. They are able to manage growth and larger projects by networking with other similar units, which again can network with other units. This all forms a fine mesh of interconnected and dedicated companies which should be able to react more swiftly to changes of business climate.

This concept should sound familiar to most readers of my blog. While Nemein slightly exceeds the maximum size of a nanocorp, our operational model still closely resembles it. We focus very tightly on building web based information systems on top of the Midgard platform. To provide more complete solutions we then work together with individual programmers, graphical designers, media consultancies and hosting providers. Most of these are also companies of similar scale and working model.

The big question is how to manage projects efficiently when such a big number of subcontractors are involved. In most cases this is handled by setting up a single project area in OpenPSA where all are given accounts. However, this forces the contractors to manage the work using our system instead of their own.

I'm now trying to figure out a good way to handle this so that each organization could manage their part using whatever management system they prefer, but so that all could also see the work being done by others. For now this could be called a Keiretsu model.

The basic idea is that we should have a technology-neutral but tightly specified API systems could use for communicating with each other. To make things easy we could build it on top of the XML-RPC layer. When such API would be available it would then be up to the different systems to implement it. As support from larger financial or ERP systems is highly unlikely, plugins could be developed by third parties.

The API should be relatively generic:

• Project Management
• List projects or tasks
• Modify a project or task
• Create a project or task
• List hours reported to a task
• Add hour report to a task
• Sales
• List sales projects
• Modify a sales project
• Create a sales project
• List contacts in a sales project
• Modify a contact in sales project
• Add a contact to sales project
• List activities in a sales project
• Modify an activity in sales project
• Add an activity to sales project
• Support
• List support tickets
• Modify a support ticket
• Create a support ticket

All operations would be run with an user account, letting the system in the other end handle access control. This would also allow desktop tools to utilize the same API for communicating with the server. For example, it would be easy to imagine GNOME Planner and Gnome Time Tracker communicating this way with back-end project management systems.

For calendaring an existing API like SyncML or GroupDAV could work better.

As a side note, nanocorporation seems to be a fairly new word. Google lists only 19 hits. The main proponent of the term is the Sohodojo portal.

The secondary airport of Helsinki and an important historical monument, Helsinki-Malmi (EFHF) is now under threat of demolition from the City planning council. This would rid Helsinki of its only airport accessible to smaller planes and effectively kill a whole branch of Finnish aviation industry.

Threat to aviation and security

Closing Helsinki-Malmi would remove Finland of its second-busiest airport. In addition to being a busy private and small aviation airport, Helsinki-Malmi is also the main center for pilot training in Finland. In the unifying Europe travel and communications are increasing in importance. Especially to remote countries like Finland it is very urgent to ensure a smoothly operating flight industry in order to not get isolated from centers of politics and commerce. This is not viable if flight training has to be dispersed to more remote and expensive locations.

Helsinki-Malmi also operates as the secondary airport to Helsinki-Vantaa in case of strikes or catastrophes. If Helsinki-Vantaa would be temporarily closed for some reason, like it was during a strike in late 80s, Helsinki-Malmi provides a convenient location. Routing the flights in such situation to Pirkkala or some other airport would make air travel difficult.

In addition to the hard values, Helsinki-Malmi is an important recreational area for citizens of Helsinki. Parachutists, private aviators and flight enthusiasts would lose the only location for their hobby near the capital. Closing Malmi would make Helsinki one of the few major European cities not accessible by smaller aircraft.

Helsinki-Malmi is also an important base for rescue helicopters and the Finnish border guard. The state has recently made huge investments into the border guard helicopter base in EFHF, and these investments would now be lost.

Historical value

As one of the few operational examples of 30s functionalist architecture, and such is listed as one of the 100 most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund.

As the previous main airport of Helsinki, Helsinki-Malmi has also played its part in several events in Finnish history. It has housed Finnish and German fighters protecting Helsinki from Soviet bombers in WWII, and was the site where Mannerheim's funeral procession started.

The value of Helsinki-Malmi is not only in the round terminal building, but in the whole, functioning airport milieu. Destroying that would be irreversible and completely pointless. It reminds of other cases where regimes have destroyed important heritage for the purpose of vanity.

Unrealistic housing plans

Malmi was originally selected as the site of the new Helsinki airport contrary to recommendation from pilot hero Charles Lindbergh because of its unsuitability for housing. The whole airport has been built on top of a swamp, making the construction process very expensive. In the end a new main airport had to be constructed to Pakkala because the landing strips couldn't take the weight of new, heavier passenger aircraft.

The swamp would make house construction too expensive to be viable still today. The city planning council is proposing development of small private apartments to the area. The heavy-duty foundations required when building on such area to prevent houses from sinking would make the apartments very expensive.

At the same time there are several far more suitable locations available nearby. Only few kilometers northeast of the airport begin the drier forests of Sipoo. In addition, the city is gaining new housing areas as Port of Helsinki moves to the new Vuosaari harbour. There are also plans to evict the military from the Santahamina island just few kilometers from the center.

This all proves that Helsinki is not running out of viable construction space. And it has to be also noted that the population numbers in the capital have been shrinking lately, even further removing the need for new housing.

Dubious legality

Helsinki-Malmi was rented to the Civil Aviation Administration for 99 years back in the 30s. Now the City of Helsinki wants to evict them on the clause that the airport must be used for civil aviation. For some reason City of Helsinki chooses not to recognize that private aviation and flight training are also counted as civil aviation. This is a very dubious legal standpoint.

The democratic commitment of the city must also be questioned. The decision and talks about the future of Malmi were pointedly scheduled after the recent city council elections, and all major parties declined to comment the issue. This is understandable as the city wants to close the airfield against the will of a vast majority of residents of Helsinki. This is not how democracy is supposed to work, but then again we live in another system called "representational democracy".

Not too late to act

The current decision was only been a recommendation from the city planning council. The actual actions still have to be ratified by the city council. Apparently the decision will be made before Christmas.

It is not too late to save Malmi. Sign the petition, contact your city councillor and follow the news on the matter. Closing the Helsinki-Malmi airport would be an irreversible action affecting aviation safety and training possibilities, and destroying an important historical milieu.

Sign up now

Note: I have some bias on the matter as I'm currently attending a Private Pilot License course arranged by Malmi Aviation Club and Flying Club of Finnair. I also enjoy going to Helsinki-Malmi to watch vintage aircraft like AN-2 and Tiger Moth which make EFHF their home airport.

Updated 12:37: Helsinki City council will decide the fate of Helsinki-Malmi on Monday Dec 20th. There will be a demonstration at 15:30 in front of the City hall.

Updated 2004-12-20 12:47: I got a reply about this post from Sakari Pulkkinen from the Malmi project team in city planning department. He suggested that I should contact the city council about this which I have now done.

He also made a comment regarding one of the claims in my post. This is a quick translation from finnish:

"The whole airport has been built on top of a swamp" is not true. The area has a clay basis and can be used as regular construction area. The basis is better than soil for exaple in Pikku-Huopalahti or Arabianranta.

Regarding this I have to admit I don't know the truth. My sources were the statement of earlier chief major of Helsinki, Raimo Ilaskivi and the description in History of Helsinki-Malmi.

Anyway, the next point of action is the demonstration starting in 45 minutes.

Alexey Zakhlestine has designed two new "Powered by Midgard" buttons users can display on their site to support the CMS project:

Reminded by this, I uploaded a bunch of other Midgard buttons to the project site as well.

In the other news, today's main activity was creating an OpenPSA Sales based storage back-end for a major consumer competition run by A-lehdet. The competition site is completely built in Flash and sends vote and registration data via a HTTP POST to Midgard.

It will be interesting to see how the solution, and especially the campaign user interface in Sales will handle the expected 100,000 registrations. I expect we will have to lighten the campaign member listing screen quite a bit. I'll post some technical notes and code related to this later when the campaign goes live.

The other activity today was a demonstration against closing the historical Helsinki-Malmi airport. There were about 150-200 aviators gathered in front of the city hall, and the air was filled with chants and supporting horns of passing cars. My yesterday's blog post about this got some attention from the city council members, including several very supportive emails. It actually seems to have started a small flamewar within the group.

I've posted some photos from the demonstration. It was also covered in the newscast of Uudenmaan Uutiset and in a brief Helsingin Sanomat article.

I've today upgraded the RSS and Atom news aggregator of Midgard CMS, net.nemein.rss to utilize the latest Magpie RSS release. The main new feature in Magpie 0.71 is support for multiple character encodings.

This means that news aggregators like Planet Midgard can now safely read feeds whether they are in UTF-8, ISO-latin-1 or some other encoding and trust that they will be displayed correctly in both web and the aggregator RSS feed. End-users of course must still have the required fonts installed to be able to display the output:

დიდი მაგლობა (big thanks) to Steve Minutillo and the Magpie RSS team for fixing this issue!

Updated 2004-12-23: Another new feature in net.nemein.rss is that now it should tell MidCOM's caching to expire the aggregator pages every half hour, just like the Magpie RSS cache has been set to do. This means that the subscribed RSS feeds will be checked for relevancy once every 30 minutes also if MidCOM's cache system is enabled on the site.

While this uses some bandwidth, Magpie RSS utilizes Conditional GET in its queries. If the feeds support the 304 headers they will be downloaded only if they have actually been changed. See the Regular Sucking Schedule blog for more information.

Contrary to earlier reports, the RSS feeds generated out of MidCOM components like de.linkm.newsticker do not yet support Conditional GET. Bug #143 has been filed on this.

This Christmas breaks away from an old tradition honored by a group of my friends. Since '96 we've gathered to spend the holidays together, eating and drinking vast quantities. As the Suicide Surfers are away, this Xmas will be different. Joe complains:

Relating to traditions, I just heard yesterday, that some pigs have lost their wings and adapted to the middleclass with intentions of having christmas somewhere else than in Drunkenland of Flying Pigs and Suicide Surfers. But our team keeps flying.

All the best to the 'Surfers who are spending their holidays drunken and homeless on the beach.

As I write this, Kerttu is baking and I'm waiting for the oven to free up so I can put our ham there. Yesterday we decorated the Christmas tree.

Merry midwinter feast to all!

My old Nokia 6820 phone had a weird issue that made it keep the backlight of the keyboard lit all times. This made the battery run out in less than a day, which was very irritating.

As Kaukola had praised the Sony Ericsson K700i I decided to buy one for myself. Obviously the first thing I tried with it was synchronizing my calendar and contacts with it using iSync. Both had issues.

Calendar synchronization worked without any major hurdles. The only big complaint is that it doesn't support timezones. My Mac is configured to be in the EET timezone (GMT +2), and so was my phone. Unfortunately the phone expected that the incoming events would be in GMT when they were in EET, and so moved all of them by two hours. This was solved by setting the phone to the GMT timezone, which is obviously not a pretty solution but has to pass for now.

One theory on why this goes wrong is that the events in my calendar originate from OpenPSA Calendar, which doesn't add any timezone information to its vCal entries. Here's a typical entry:

BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:ead00e1735d94f14a5c21d1888a5c48f@midgard
SUMMARY:Midgard site wizard
CLASS:PUBLIC
DTSTART:20041228T090000
DTSTAMP:20041228T090000
DTEND:20041228T180000
DTCREATED;TZID=US-Eastern: 19700101T020000
DTLAST-MODIFIED;TZID=US-Eastern: 19700101T020000
CATEGORIES:MEETING
LOCATION:Home
END:VEVENT

I've posted bug #22 to OpenPSA about this and it has been fixed in the 1.10 release.

Contacts synchronization started out just fine, but somehow mystically broke overnight. When I tried to synchronize again this morning iSync aborted with some error. I then removed the K700i device from iSync, and re-added it. But then it created duplicates of all entries, so both my phone and my Mac had entries as "firstname lastname" and "lastname firstname".

I was able to delete all contacts from my phone and remove the duplicates from the Mac Address Book. However, even after this iSync persistently tried to "salvage" the duplicate entries from a Backup Conduit. After some struggle I decided to keep from synchronizing contacts between the two for now. Very aggravating! I've posted an iSync bug about this.

In the other news, I've finally added Midgard CMS to the CMS Matrix. Several people have mailed me and asked for this, but unfortunately their submission form didn't work on Firefox earlier. See the entry on Midgard.

Updated 2004-01-08: The calendar synchronization has been working pretty well for two weeks already, but I haven't yet braved trying to get Contacts synchronization working.

Minor annoyance has been that the phone doesn't allow turning shutter sound off. This is a firmware setting that can't be overridden even by setting the phone volume to silent.

Today we've migrated our OpenPSA installation to UTF-8. To stress test the OpenPSA - iCal - K700i synchronization, I created a calendar reservation that mixed Scandinavian, Cyrillic and Georgian characters. Both OpenPSA and iCal showed them correctly, and the phone showed things correctly with the limitation that Ericsson hasn't installed Georgian fonts, so boxes were shown instead of those characters. Quite cool level of internationalization!

I've today updated my blog to display the location the post was made from. The location is linked to blog postings, photos and moblog entries based on their timestamps.

This is done by maintaining a database of locations with the times I've been in them in Midgard CMS. To report a new location I simply send an SMS containing the city and country information to my website. This "ends" the previous location entry and creates a new one.

At the moment I'm content with granularity of storing location on city basis and time on per-day basis. However, far more detailed information could be added by connecting a GPS navigator to the system. While this would allow for cool new information like linking photos to maps, it would force me to carry and connect a bulky device, and cause potential privacy issues.

I'm also including the METAR weather information pulled in using the Services_Weather PEAR package. For now the weather displayed is the current one, but I'm thinking of storing the weather conditions on entry posting time to Midgard. That way you could see the temperature and other details related to a photo, for example.

Related to yesterday's geolocation post, these maps seems to be the current meme on Planet Debian:

This summer's trip added another 9 to the sum. Create your own visited countries map.

The map is very similar to the ones generated by the World66, an open content travel guide.

In the other news, Separator, a native Mac OS X hex viewer application by Alexey Zakhlestine's Milk Farm Software is now available. First time I've ever translated a non-Midgard app.

Happy new year to everybody, especially in the Midgard community! I was going to post something about how the Midgard world will look like in 2005, but Kaukola got ahead of me. This year has been a very good one for the project, and the next promises even greater advances and exciting new technologies.

There are also looks at PHP in 2004 and in 2005. The look back for the Midgard community was posted already in May in preparation for the 5th anniversary of the project.

But anyway, please enjoy the new year celebrations! While this fireworks picture is from the summer it should still depict the mood:

We spent the last new year in Клуб Fireball, St. Petersburg. This year will be more traditionally in Ravintola Ateljé.

Updated 2005-01-01: We had a good time in Ateljé, with drinks, cigars, board games and a big group of friends. Thanks to everybody for attending!

...and in the morning we went with Kerttu to Cafe Ursula on the Kaivopuisto shore to watch sunlight play on the winter sea.