Weblog: Archive

The 11,000km trip was amazing, including diverse places like St. Petersburg, Crimea, Georgia, Istanbul and Kosovo.

Part of the 900 photos I took from the trip are available online.

I wanted to ensure that wouldn't be a problem on sites built with Midgard CMS and MidCOM. On an IRC discussion with Torben Nehmer, I pointed him to Alexander Alapite's Conditional GET support library for PHP.

However, it looks like this is not an issue, as MidCOM already supports conditional GET if its server-side caching system is enabled:

torben: bergie: the midcom cache does include last modified and expires headers by default, so http head requests in a cached system already work fine with browser caches
torben: at least with nathan-syntronics.de i have a greatly reduced bandwith through this
torben: bergie: apart from that i would wait with further stuff until mrfc 6 has been implemented (or rejected), now that you are here, we can actually start discussing it again

MidCOM's caching engine can be enabled in the "MidCOM Site Settings" interface in the MidCOM site template (midcom-template).

In addition to providing the correct expiry headers, the NGO Geeks provided Midgard Caching Headers patch to the original "Simple Dynamic Site" template that have since been included to midcom-template.

Here is the settings interface:

It would be nice to get some actual testing figures on how well the current HTTP Conditional GET code in MidCOM works.

On a related note, this weblog has been upgraded to latest CVS HEAD of MidCOM 1.4 technology preview today. This brings new features, like the latest HTMLAREA goodness.

The conversion was done by Nemein consultant Henri Kaukola. The old site had been powered by the NemeinNavBar system. Conversion to MidCOM was handled using my nnb2midcom.php script. MidCOM offered several advantages to the old setup:

• Clean, file-like URLs
• "Edit this page" integrated authoring tool
• Availability of different components, or site features
• Easily configurable metadata fields for content
  

As the site was going to be upgraded anyway, we took the opportunity to convert Helia's layout to table-free XHTML and CSS. This reduced the size of the site front page from 16,88KB to 9,37KB, a 45% saving. Approximately same saving should apply to all pages on the site.

The new layout should help with page download times, server load and scaling the site down to mobile devices and screen readers.

To make implementing UTF-8 in Midgard easier in the mean while, Torben Nehmer has posted a handy UTF-8 with MidCOM guide.

More information about internationalization in Midgard can be found from Midgard Documentation.

Of course, even after Unicode is the default encoding in Midgard we will have to go through many MidCOM components to ensure they conform to test suites like Sam Ruby's Atom Unicode test. There are now problems like MidCOM bug #78 reports.

Some ISVs use no-cost products or open source strategies quite effectively. For example, SleepyCat is a very successful small ISV that developed its own software. At SleepyCat, they use an open source strategy. Their product is wildly popular.

However, it's easy to forget just how expensive it is to build software. The ideal loss leader is something that is quite cheap. Although the cost of goods on software can be zero, software development is really expensive. If you are building a piece of software for the specific purpose of giving it away, you are accumulating a lot of costs that need to be repaid in some other way.

The way Nemein works is that we sell and contribute to existing Open Source projects. The initial cost of building the application has already been carried by somebody else, like in the case of Aegir by Hong Kong Linux Center and in case of MidCOM by Link-M.

Our clients get the application itself for free, and only pay for deployment, training and support. If modifications or improvements are needed we will either do them ourselves or outsource the work to one of our Midgard partners. In these cases the client will pay normally for the project.

Even OpenPSA, which was built from ground-up by Nemein has been mostly project-financed. One client paid for the first CRM version, one for the Project Tracker, one for the Group Calendar, etc. And since then smaller improvements have almost always been financed by some deployment project.

The tutorial seems to solve the main problems I've had with OOo on my iBook, including keyboard mapping and PDF generation. What it doesn't help with, though, is the horribly slow start-up time.

Another interestion option would be NeoOffice/J, a Java port of OpenOffice 1.0.3 that runs natively on Mac OS X. As an X11 server won't be needed the start-up times should be noticeably faster.

NeoOffice is still under development. The project page states:

As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users.

In the related Slashdot discussion however, someone commented:

I think NeoOfficeJ is a fantastic implementation of OpenOffice. I switched to it because NeoJ will load associated files when you double click them. OpenOffice in its current OS X X-window implementation doesn't do this very consistently. On top of that the integration with OS X is just so much cleaner and friendlier.

More information can be found from the event press release:

Open Source CMS Conference 4
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Wed, Sept. 29th - Fri, Oct. 1st, 2004

OSCOM is proud to announce that registration for OSCOM.4 is now open, at $500 for three days. OSCOM.4 is a conference on open source content management with assistance from the Apache Software Foundation for the ApacheTrack content.

The conference program includes several interesting sessions, including corporate blogging, business planning for Open Source CMS and several PHP technology presentations.

Disclaimer: I'm member of the OSCOM 4 organizing committee.

The connection went down first time around noon, and returned after 2pm. Now the connection has been down since around 3:45pm.

When trying to reach Elisa's Network solutions site to find out when things will start working again, the ColdFusion server only responds with:

An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the server.

The most likely cause of this problem is that the server is not currently running. Verify that the server is running and restart it if necessary.

Unix error number 146 occurred: Connection refused

Finnish Teleservice Center (FTC) has an announcement about the situation. Elisa hasn't given any information on when the network will be up again, and their announcements page is also silent on the issue.

This outage has again reminded me about the importance of having local copies of data. For example, I can't send any invoices because our OpenPSA installation is in the affected network. Time to create a replicated setup of the important data? That would help offline working as well.

Luckily my blog is hosted by Nehmer.net in Germany instead.

We watched the contest from Kaivopuisto near Cafe Ursula. The whole central Helsinki was very crowded, but by lane splitting a bit with my motorcycle we could easily find a good viewing point.

The contest has been set up in the memory of the shelling of Viapori by a British and French fleet during the Crimean war in 1855. The citizens of Helsinki gathered to the Kaivopuisto area to watch the 46 hour long bombardment of the sea fortress, and the flare rockets shot by the fleet at night. Two of the firework shows re-enacted these scenes by simulating cannon shots from the walls of the fortress.

This year the contest was won by Tähtiraketti with their show Evolution. Spectator SMS votes went for Ilotulitus with their show, The Art, Science and Technique.