Weblog: Archive

• Midgard 1.x is starting to show age. The framework was designed back in 1998
• Code quality in 1.6.0 alphas and in some major modules like Aegir is really bad
• The competition is getting tougher
• Installation is still horribly difficult
  

• Apache 2.x support
  
• Integrated PAM authentication support
• UTF-8 as default encoding
• Multilingual content support by default
• MidCOM and Aegir bundled as default
• Datagard, the new database installer

• There are too many administrative user interfaces, but they all share the same weaknesses. Solutions could be:
  
• Unify the UIs to Aegir 2 and MidCOM 2
• Add WebDAV support to make development more file-based
• Aegir* and Nemein* libraries are too hard to access, making it difficult to build on top of them. Solution:
• Start using PHPdoc for documenting the libraries and get an unified backend OO framework
• Demand PEAR coding standards
  
• Midgard does not support read-level access controls
• Midgard must get closer to the PEAR and PHP communities
• Midgard lacks a package format that would enable deleting packages
  

Ximian Build Buddy is a tool for building binary packages for different Linux distributions.

After reading all documentation available, I decided that Build Buddy is the right tool for publishing our Open Source software which has been created in the last years. A perfect test object is the Midgard Application Server for which several people have contributed specialized packages for their systems, but no official binary releases exist where the RPM build does the same as the Debian installation, etc.

In addition to the actual tutorial, I look forward to seeing the packages he will produce.

• Ticket locking: edit view displays if somebody else is editing the ticket
• Archiving of old closed tickets to separate topic
• SLA handling: notifications if ticket is due to be handled. The service levels can be configured on per-type basis, but can be changed for individual tickets

More information:

Other companies are finding that commoditization is a great weapon to use against an archenemy. Sun Microsystems, for instance, is heavily promoting StarOffice, its inexpensive open source alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office. Sun knows that if it can commoditize basic business apps, it can begin to break Redmond's stranglehold on the PC desktop.

The same pattern can be seen in the content management scene, where Open Source CMSs are driving the prices of a CMS solution down. This is visible at least in Finland, where several proprietary CMS vendors seem to be ready to forgo any license prices to just distribute their app.

Hopefully our OpenPSA package can do the same to the Professional Services Automation scene.

Via Scripting News.

• rapid release schedule
• regression tests
• do one thing well
• avoid over-design
• a central vision
• documentation
• avoid standardsism
• up and running in ten minutes or less!
• developer responsiveness
• easily update-able wiki pages

Points like these are important as we restructure the Midgard Project to address recent popularity concerns.

Via Gregor J. Rothfuss.

The actual Midgard developer meeting started in friday afternoon, and continued until sunday. There was much piwo and good discussion. Especially Alexander's Ragnaroek presentation was impressive. Hopefully he will finish the white paper based on session notes soon. We also enjoyed some Cuban cigars to celebrate Kaukola's graduation. The local restaurants like Sphinx and Ali Baba were quite nice. Poland is certainly the place to go for eating ;-)

Poznan had a very nice looking old city, but unfortunately there was little time for tourism. Maybe in June, if a project proposal works out.

On the return trip we picked up Luihu from Berlin and drove 22 hours straight to Stockholm. From there we took the Midgard-powered ferry back to Helsinki. Sauna on the ferry was excellent medicine for aching muscles from the long drive. The Land Rover worked again quite well as a road trip vehicle, despite having to change a tyre in Denmark at 5am.

WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It’s happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.

Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.

Via Miguel de Icaza

For instance, OSS offers enterprises the opportunity to be more self-reliant through source code modification. It allows incremental project and upgrade schedules, free rein in integration decisions, and direct interaction with the OSS community. It creates the opportunity to implement projects in a way that is consistently mindful of enterprise goals, rather than the goals of a proprietary software vendor. OSS allows enterprises to select from a broader range of hardware and software vendors and service providers than proprietary solutions. For these and other reasons, the pace of Linux and OSS adoption continues to accelerate.

Via Slashdot

I almost got my hands on something I'm familiar with, PHP-code. Bergie had a meeting and I was doing some debugging and fixing with Kaukola though I learned that it's not something to tell to a customer. The correct word was deploying or something...

The eventual plan is to activate the Midgard community to build up an active Planet Midgard resource, much like the one used by the GNOME community. Blogs, or in this case, Plogs are a great way to keep the community aware of new developments.

Juhana is a computer engineering student from Helsinki Polytechnic, and has worked previously as a grave digger. The plan is to familiarize him with Midgard and MidCOM in the next few weeks, and then give him actual client projects as the summer holiday season begins. We did the same process with Kaukola, and it seems to have worked well. ;-)

As an analogy, the news reader acts like a customizable newspaper. You can pull a variety of content from a growing number of sources into one place, to be read however you choose. Sources like major news media outlets (BBC, Reuters, Washington Post) to non-news content providers (Apple’s iTunes Music Store, the Government of Canada, USGS’ World Earthquake updates) to smaller independent voices (BoingBoing, VanEats, Sidesh0w). The only stipulation is that the source must provide a feed; many are.

Both RSS and Atom are content management standards recommended by OSCOM.

Updated 11:28: There is now a more linking-friendly URL to the description at http://www.mezzoblue.com/subscribe/about/

Before Henry Ford unleashed the practice of mass production on the world, every little town had a few dozen artisans who made the lives of citizens easier. A cobbler made the shoes, a tailor sewed suits and a carpenter built furniture. Mass production sounded the death knell for many specialist craft jobs, and the rise of computerised supply chains finished off most of the rest. But now, a century later, the trend is reversing itself. The new craftsmen do not stitch leather, cut cloth or saw wood: instead, they write software.

Via Ranchero Software.

I've thought for quite a while that small teams of developers collaborating with each other by using Open Source software can create much better solutions than huge monolithic organizations. This was also a central theme in Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar.

• MidCOM has been upgraded to the latest 1.3.0 release
• Aegir has been upgraded to latest 1.0.3 nightly
• Removed unnecessary buttons from the "Edit this page" editor and added button for inserting images
• HTML <title />s on both OSCOM and Kupu front pages are now more descriptive, as supported by midcom-template
• CSS has been fixed to show correct font size for tables also on IE
• Planet OSCOM now has a handy sidebar, including information on how to subscribe to it
• Board listing has vCard and FOAF output

In addition, the new Kupu logo was added to the kupu.oscom.org layout earlier.

The form styling templates provided in the tutorial utilize two HTML form-specific elements for defining the structure of the form: label and fieldset.

For usability and accesibility reasons, every form element on a page should have an associated label. Not only do labels let you focus a form element by clicking on its label text (no more fiddling around clicking on the exact circle that is the radio button), but they enable non-visual browsers to create an association between the label text and the form element, allowing each distinct item to be more readily identified.

We have been looking at making the MidCOM editing forms more accessible. This solution is starting to look really good. Time to post a bug?

Examples like the columnar form also throw Rambo's notion that OpenPSA couldn't be built using MidCOM datamanager because it uses very strict form layouts out of the window.

Via Web Standards Project.

Updated 9:56: Posted bug #50 to get MidCOM datamanager to support this way of building forms.

Updated 2004-05-24: Torben accepted this enhancement into the roadmap for MidCOM 1.4.0

The BBC article mostly concentrates on the British historical aspects of the island.

Vis, nearly thirty miles south of Split off the coast of Dalmatia, has had an interesting half century. It was where Tito made his headquarters in World War II: soon afterwards, he seized control of Yugoslavia, which he ruled autocratically until his death in 1980.

Via Volodja Vorobey.

The Routa MC website has bunch of photos from the Summer Source event.

Hopefully there will be opportunities to visit the island again...

The idea with collegiality is that badmouthing and competing in cut-throat fashion is not productive. What the competing systems should do instead is evaluate each others' strenghts and weaknesses objectively and embrace common protocols and standards for interoperability.

This interoperability would enable users to build their own "Frankenstein CMS" by selecting best building blocks from different Open Source CMSs, or to replace an old solution as their needs evolve.

What would then be good interoperability targets? For example, to be honest, the standard discussion forum component for Midgard CMS sucks. Why are people not using phpBB instead, then?

The reasons for this are quite simple. While both run on the LAMP platform, it lacks integration in several areas:

• It doesn't use Midgard's layout templates
• Features like "Latest comments" or "Comments on this page" are difficult to pull from phpBB into a Midgard page
• User accounts and permissions have to be managed separately
  

Layout management

Comments listing

User management and authentication

Link and media management

Wrap-up

What makes this tragedy a bit more personal is that I spent six hours in the terminal on my February trip to South Africa, and was quite impressed by the futuristic architecture:

Nat Friedman writes in his blog:

An architect in Cambridge, Brad Bellows, is quoted as saying: "We don't want to purge the world of future Golden Gate bridges, Notre-Dame cathedrals, and Concordes. It should not be lost in the aftermath of its failure that Terminal 2E was a gorgeous piece of work."

Having read Lost Europe: Images of a Vanished World last week I can only echo that. So much great architecture gets destroyed either in wars or in the name of progress.

To celebrate these developments, my website is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license 2.0. This can be identified in the "Some rights reserved" link in bottom of each page, and in machine-readable RDF metadata included in the pages.

Apparently, not everybody is completely happy about the new licenses. Luis Villa writes:

Was cool to see that Creative Commons released new licenses, and I updated my stuff, but there is no longer an option to do non-attribution licenses, which makes them fairly non-free, DFSG-wise. That is unfortunate.

DFSG is the Debian Free Software Guidelines, a set of rules on what kind of software licenses can be allowed to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.