Weblog: Archive

As hinted earlier, we have integrated the OpenPsa project management system with the Digital Business Ecosystem P2P network.

This allows organizations to manage projects handled with subcontractors or a Keiretsu using tools that can communicate across corporate boundaries.

See my slides from the Tampere workshop

We went with Kerttu to a fencing lesson for the first time yesterday. The sabre course feels interesting, and the connections to Kendo, the other sword sport I've practiced are definitely visible.

A very small course at Ylioppilasmiekkailijat, so we practically get private instruction.

Before Kendo I've also practiced Iaido, the art of drawing the Japanese sword, and of course Viking swordfighting. Kerttu has some experience with the foil.

The riots in France are running for the 12th night, and the country is now in state of emergency. John Robb of Global Guerillas is analyzing the situation:

The open source war in France continues to rapidly evolve (as of Sunday night). Not only did it increased in scale (the torched car index reached 1408 cars on Sunday) it has also increased in scope (982 of those torched cars were outside Paris and Germany/Belgium reported their first incidents). The tactics of this new Blitzkrieg are also evolving. Higher value commercial targets are being torched and policemen are being engaged in wasting attacks -- incidents that engage and tie up forces. There are even signs that bazaar transactions are present: a commercial bomb factory, with 150 incendiaries on the "factory" floor, was found.

Meep, Our correspondent in Toulouse writes:

The situation is turning into more serious also here. Last night a car had been pushed to the metro tracks, forcing me to call monsieur to pick me up after I got out from the lecture at eight. Today they said that metro would be running until six p.m., but the doors were closed already after four. I spent one hour walking the four metro stations to the first working train, getting at least some exercise. Buses are not running at all in the city, as one had been torched last evening.

No word from Lettu in Paris yet.

Updated 15:10Z: Got message from Lettu later today. Seems like she hasn't really encountered any of the riots, except via news:

From my point of view, the whole riots could be a media trick, as nothing unusual has been seen or heard.

Apparently there have been some problems with trains going to the airport, as they cross the northern suburbs where the troubles are centered. Stonings, armed guards, and other interesting things. However, I still live in my safe little bubble. ... Reminds me of old-fashioned village life.

O'Reilly Radar comments on ZDNet UK's Is Open Source A Bubble Ready To Burst? article:

I've always viewed VC funding of open source as being like telco investment in infrastructure: even if the telco can't figure out how to make it work, the copper's still in the ground, the fibre's still laid to the home, the source is still available for people to continue building upon. What's insane is promoting VC funding of closed source companies: if they go south, their software is either sold at bargain basement prices to a competitor (net improvement to world: bugger all) or ends up locked in a trunk in an investment company unlikely to ever see life.

While Venture Capitalists are getting hesitant to fund Open Source business, software entrepreneurs are also finding that they need less money to get things done. This and the dwindling exit market make VCs feel the squeeze.

It is interesting to follow the venture market now that we're wondering how to get the Digital Business Ecosystem applications out to the market more effectively. The market has definitely changed since we started in 2001.

Via Boing Boing and Signal vs. Noise.

Updated 2005-11-10: Apparently Open Source investing is really picking up. Via Bob Sutor.

The yearly meeting for COSS members was held in connection with the OpenMind conference in the auditorium of Werstas, the proletariat's central museum of Tampere. As Nemein participates actively in several COSS projects like the Digital Business Ecosystem, I left the Espoo office early to take the bullet train north.

In addition to the official agenda, the meeting contained several presentations about current Finnish Open Source initiatives.

COSS in 2006

The Centre for Open Source Software has been performing accordingly to the targets set for 2005, and will continue to operate from within the Hermia Technology Center. The complete operating budget for 2006 will be estimated at 300k€, compiled from member organizations and Finnish public funding.

The focus areas for COSS in 2006 will be lobbying Open Source and Open Standards in the Finnish public sector, helping member companies in their business development, and acting as a central international contact point for the Finnish Open Source industry.

Open Source business research

OSSI is a research project funded by Tekes and run by HUT, Kauppakorkeakoulu, and other research organizations. Its 800k€ budget makes it one of the largest OSS research projects in European public sector. The project is now in early stage, with its website and blog expected to open soon.

OSSI's sister project ServOSS is a development project for building internationalized Open Source professional services business. The project is mainly funded by Tekes, and is still looking for corporate partners operating in the OSS services industry. Participation fee for companies is 2500€.

Localization issues

Finnish OSS localization project, "Kotoistaminen", got organized in summer 2005. Keeps "volunteer" localization work of OSS projects open, but tries to fund the trouble spots. Currently normal desktop environments and major applications like OpenOffice.org and Firefox are localized, but the quality differs.

The localization project aims to build a bounty system to allow end-user organizations to fund translation work. In addition to actual user interfaces, help texts and documentation should be translated, but this process is still severely lagging.

One idea for boosting localization efforts would be to utilize the Rosetta web-based translation tool from Ubuntu's Launchpad project. Rosetta allows different translations for a string to be submitted, and then project owner can choose the best option. Rosetta would be an excellent tool for Midgard's localization as well, but this would require the proposed transition to Gettext.

Finnish Ministry of Justice will be piloting usage of OpenOffice.org 2.x in 2006, and for them the quality of localizations will be important. Spell checking is also imperative. Currently Finnish spell checking can be handled through the Soikko application, but it doesn't run on Windows.

Hunspell-fi aims to create a spell and grammar checker that supports difficult languages like Finnish and Hungarian on multiple platforms, and could be a Soikko replacement.

OpenSynchro

OpenSynchro is a GPLd integration tool developed by SmileHouse, a proprietary web store vendor for connecting web stores with warehouse management, procurement systems, ePayment systems, etc. The idea with OpenSynchro has been to make eBusiness system integration easier with it than with regular EAI tools.

OpenSynchro can be used for transferring product, order or customer information across different systems. It can also be used for ad-hoc data migration needs, placing it to similar usage area as the Exorcist migration tool for Content Management Systems.

OpenSynchro was developed with public funding, and its Open Sourcing decision was partly based on desire to give something back to the community. SmileHouse also sees it as a better marketing method than making it another proprietary product.

The target users of OpenSynchro are in the SME sector, as there eBusiness integration is most severely lacking. Being based on Java, MySQL and Tomcat makes it quite platform agnostic. It includes several component plugins like XSLT, SMTP and others. The base architecture is familiar from Exorcist, providing source (exporter), converter (transformer) and target (importer) parts. The system can be configured over the web.

Nokia 770

N770 is the Linux and Open Source usage pilot for Nokia. It is also Nokia's entry to the broadband device business. It is sold directly from Nokia.com, bypassing the traditional reseller channel. The target market is portal companies and broadband network providers.

Boot time is about 38 seconds. After that, online access can be handled either via WLAN, or using bluetooth connection to a mobile phone. The device can be controlled by some buttons, and a stylus stored inside the hard case. For typing the options are a virtual on-screen keyboard, or a bluetooth keyboard. For easier reading, the whole screen of N770 supports zooming.

The left-hand bar provides the access buttons to the main use cases; web bookmarks, email and other applications. The idea is that the device is a web browser, not a full computer or a smart phone. However, other applications can be installed as .deb packages, and they will appear in the "Others" menu.

Maemo is the Open Source community kicked up by Nokia to support third-party developers building applications for the N770. The next product for the series will be a software package adding VoIP support. The Hildon user interface is based on the GNOME libraries. Nokia tries to work actively together with the Open Source communities their tools are based on.

N770 could prove to be an interesting tool for keeping meeting notes and handling OpenPsa tasks on the road. With a Bluetooth twiddler, text entry could be quite fast. N770 ships for 369€, compared to the 745€ Communicator.

Laika is an Eclipse development environment built by Helsinki University of Technology for N770 application development.

In the evening we will be meeting Bob Sutor, the IBM Vice President of Standards and Open Source.

If you get this error message when trying to start Apache, then you're out of semaphores:

# apachectl start
Ouch! ap_mm_create(1048576, "/var/run/httpd.mm.22903") failed
Error: MM: mm:core: failed to acquire semaphore (No space left on device): OS: Invalid argument
/usr/sbin/apachectl start: httpd could not be started

The easy fix is to just remove all semaphores owned by Apache:

# /usr/bin/ipcrm sem $(/usr/bin/ipcs -s | grep apache | awk '{print$2}')

Got the fix from cacti forum.

Zend, IBM and others have announced a collaboration project to create a Zend Framework using the following mission statement:

• Keep PHP competitive among other technologies including Ruby-on-Rails, Spring, .NET, etc..
• No framework today supports extreme simplicity
• Provide "clean" IP to enable commercial use
• Structured development process will lead to uniform code base
• Take full support of PHP 5

The general community feeling on Planet PHP seems to be quite scared, as the new framework "threatens" to change the way PHP applications are developed, by providing a common set of tools and development methodologies. This is obviously a big change for everybody used to work either in the free-form fashion, or using one of the community-built frameworks.

The need for consistency

However, even though I'm a developer in one of the PHP application frameworks, I see the need for some standardization. Now the common ground shared between all the different PHP frameworks is just the language itself, forcing all projects to focus on building lots of low-level plumbing infrastructure instead of focusing on the features that could differentiate the applications.

Each application project or framework having to write their own low-level services means that by large the applications are not compatible with each other. If you want to for instance run a site that would contain blogs (using Wordpress), forums (using SM Forum) and photo galleries (using Gallery), each of them would most likely use different user and permission system, style templates and configuration tools.

This kind of inconsistency has lead to the state where each framework and CMS rolls their own instead of using the best-of-breed PHP applications. This means huge amount of wasted effort, and an opportunity for other programming environments like Ruby on Rails to pass PHP frameworks in functionality and appeal.

This situation is similar to the effort wasted by all the different Linux desktop environments in the past. However, instead of two or three serious contenders, the ease of PHP development has given rise to hundreds of different frameworks and content management systems. In the desktop environment scene, the different projects are already collaborating on lots of the base infrastructure, and are now starting to do the same in the look-and-feel space.

If done well, the Zend Framework could do the same for PHP projects. If done badly, it would merely introduce a yet another framework to the space.

Midgard point-of-view

Looking at the still-vapourwareish Zend Framework from the point-of-view of the Midgard Project, I see the possibility of benefitting from it. Currently MidCOM 2.5 framework is about 75k lines of code. Much of this is because functionalities like ACL and style engine have not yet been rolled into the Midgard Core, but also because lots of other base infrastructure like localization must still be done by MidCOM.

Now, if you think about Midgard, it consists of several separate parts:

Data abstraction layer

MgdSchema allows developers to abstract the database storage, and use query tools, access controls and extensibility with it. As common database abstraction is one of the Zend Framework goals, the way to access these tools would possibly change for PHP-level Midgard. But as Midgard's scope extends outside the PHP world also to Java Content Repositories, using a straight SQL abstraction system would be out of question. It remains to be seen, if Midgard's database abstraction layer could be used as a storage provider for the Zend Framework.

Style Engine

Templating and page assemply have traditionally been the strong points of Midgard, as often noted by CMS Watch. The power of it was slightly broken by the double standard imposed by MidCOM, but this is now getting wrapped back together.

The style engine and URL handling of Midgard is definitely something that should be still possible to keep as-is, even if something like Zend Framework would be used beneath.

User interfaces

The user interface layer would benefit a lot of collaboration and shared tools. We're planning to follow Tango visuals and the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines to quite a big degree in Midgard. This part of UI is best collaborated using shared CSS rules and XHTML naming standards like Microformats.

However, form handling and AJAX are something where the Zend Framework could make things easier, consistent and more secure.

Development tools

The Zend Framework also has the possibility of making Eclipse the standard development environment for PHP development. As this is already the recommendation for Midgard developers, we are obviously eager to see the rise of better PHP tools for it.

So, what's going to happen?

The Zend Framework project seems to be still a quite early stages, and despite claims that some code and specs exist, they still remain to be seen by the PHP developer community. Even in this stage, it would be crucial for the Zend Framework project to be available for peer review. Otherwise, it will be seen as just a corporate intrusion into the formerly open PHP framework space. Statements like this don't help much:

We're now working on setting up the collaboration infrastructure and engagement guidelines. We expect to have them ready by January 2006. In the meantime, we will use this medium to share progress on the project development.

I feel some urgency in seeing what is going on and planned in the project. The Midgard community is now starting to refactor the MidCOM framework to work on PHP5, and to utilize new language features like interface classes and exceptions. At the same time we're starting to utilize functionalities moved from MidCOM to Midgard Core. This would be the optimal spot to take the Zend Framework into mind if it was available, making MidCOM even more consistent with the KISS ideology.

As we in Midgard community have quite a bit of experience with PHP component architecture, and with following strict coding standards, we could have some things to contribute to the PHP Collaboration Project, but unfortunately the process is still closed.

Here are the Midgard CMS slides we presented to two major potential Finnish customers on friday:

Midgard presentation in Finnish (256 KB PDF)

While the slides were made half-asleep on an early morning train from the Tampere COSS meeting and are so not very presentation Zen ish, they try to focus on couple of key points with Midgard and Nemein:

• Midgard's standard integration interfaces like Java Content Repository
• Connectivity to Midgard from different client tools; mobile phones, browsers, etc
• Nemein's strong client portfolio

It went across quite well to both organizations. Expect to hear some announcements related to that later on.

DENIM is an interesting, BSD-licensed desktop application from University of Washington. It allows web developers to sketch site and page structures easily with a stylus. Pages can be interlinked, and contain operable components like forms.

DENIM is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. I downloaded the OS X version, and scribbled with it for a while. Obviously the results would be nicer if I had a stylus or an I-pen...

This could be the perfect tool for rapid web prototyping. Once the site sketch has been created it can be exported as a set of HTML imagemaps for easier sharing.

However, to make DENIM a really useful prototyping tool for Midgard CMS, we would need to create a set of custom DENIM components for typical MidCOM components like news lists and event calendars so that users could really grasp how the site is put together by running different components (or their dynamically loaded representations).

Even nicer would be if the resulting DENIM file could be imported into Midgard to generate some of the site automatically. The DENIM file format is an XML file, so it might be possible to extract the page names, relations, and components shown on a page out of it. If so, the DENIM files might be convert-able via Exorcist to something that could be imported as a MidCOM site structure.

This would truly make DENIM a tool that would beat the usefulness of paper prototyping while retaining the ease-of-sketching.

Found DENIM via Maemo.

OpenPsa appears on Best help desk software guide:

We have made our OpenPSA demo server publicly available. Get the address and user accounts from the OpenPSA demo page. OpenPSA is an Open Source Professional Services Automation system built on top of Midgard and PHP. The system provides management tools for software companies and consultancies. The modules include project management, CRM, help desk and group calendaring.

The site seems quite a lot like a splog to me.

The budgetary question for Air New Zealand's Intranet seems to be:

Does it make the planes fly?

Of course it doesn't. Avgas, kerosene, maintenance and the pilot do (ok, aerodynamics have something to do with it too). However, a properly executed and used Intranet can make the operations safer and more efficient by helping staff to find the information they need. But it is important to remember the business focus, as James Robertson reminds:

What I love though, is this the great clarity of business focus. At the end of the day, the fundamental purpose of Air New Zealand is to fly people from A to B. If the intranet can't assist the airline to deliver this service, then is it really providing enough business value?

It is easy to end up doing technology projects for their own gain, making reminders like these valuable.

While Midgard CMS doesn't explicitly make planes fly, it at least assists in the business of keeping some planes in the air through the use of web-based reservation calendars and other tools.

Tigert has been sketching some Tango-styled UIs for the new Aegir admin interface of Midgard CMS:

Now this is all still Inkscape-level stuff, but once we get a bit further we plan to contribute the core parts of the CSS design back to the Tango project.

Tango is a project to develop a common style that could be used across GNOME and KDE desktops. The idea is that using the shared outlook applications between different systems (and third-party applications that don't originate from either desktop environment) would fit together quite seamlessly. With Freedesktop handling much of the technical interoperability, Tango could solve the UI consistency.

The same could be done between the different Open Source CMS systems and web tools. Tango could easily be something for OSCOM to push as an interop project.

I'm traveling next week to the Fórum GNOME conference in Curitiba, Brazil. The actual conference is held together with Latinoware Mercosul on November 26th - 27th.

My two sessions in the event are:

Saturday 26th: 14:00 - 18:45

• Midgard CMS - four hour tutorial for building your first Midgard-powered web site

Sunday 27th: 16:00 - 17:00

• Digital Business Ecosystem - Manage your projects and subcontractors with OpenPsa in a P2P network

This will be my first time in that part of the world, and I really look forward to both the conference and seeing Brazil.

Updated 2005-11-22: It seems we're also going to the OpenBeach open source event in Florianópolis on Dec 3rd - 4th.

Updated 2005-11-25: Updated the schedule from here in Curitiba. The venue will be the Centro Politécnico da Universidade Federal do Paraná.

Pyhä and Luosto, two skiing centers in Lapland are now powered by Midgard CMS. Their websites are portals containing both general travel information and the sub-sites of hundreds of local hotels, restaurants and other businesses.

The portals were designed by advertisement agency Linnunrata and mainly built by Arttu Manninen from Protie. The Midgardization was supervised by Nemein. Hosting for the portals is provided by Nebula's Midgard Webhotel service.

Updated 2005-11-21: Arttu has posted his viewpoint on the project, particularly dealing with the delays, compromises and learning curve associated with such a major project. As always, setting priorities is difficult:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, "are you sure?" and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, "is this what you want?" and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you're really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

Luckily the situation wasn't quite that bad in this project, and the portal is actually up and running. Some performance optimization still remains to be done, including an upgrade to MySQL 4 with its query cache.

A year ago, I spent a Weekend in Ukraine and saw the Orange Revolution begin:

We caught the first signs of the unrest in sunday evening. All ATMs had been emptied of cash and marked squares were filled with muttering groups in their fur hats. In the opera an old woman asked from us with tears in her eyes why we had come there in such sad times.

Next morning I escorted the girls to the railway station and airport at 6 am, early enough to avoid most of the demonstrations. When I returned to the center they had already started. The hotel keeper pointed out to the Rynok square and commented laconically: "Revoluzija". I decided to take a closer look, and spent next hours in an old Austrian-style cafe overlooking the Svoboda street where most of the supporters of the opposition candidate, Yushchenko were gathered.

Ukraine marks the anniversary of the revolution today.

Arttu was exploring the advantages and disadvantages of the different ways of serving images and other remote files connected to a Midgard CMS layout. At first he switched from the legacy Aegir attachment server to the MidCOM attachment server:

After learning this I have been adapting the knowledge to multiple sites and they run a bit faster. It is not only that pictures are loaded, but MidCOM attachement services use also MidCOM cache engine. So, no more excessive loading of every picture and no more pictures left into binary space.

For even higher performance, the obvious solution would be to get the whole image serving out of Midgard and PHP space, and into regular Apache Document Root:

This of course makes it more diffucult - in a sense - to update CSS. But when a site is in production, there usually shouldn't be need to update these elements constantly.

The main advantages are

• doesn't instantiate MidCOM every time an image or CSS file is loaded

  • can be over 20 times per hit to a single page, depending on the amount of pictures and CSS files

• is browser cacheable

  • of course MidCOM cache also works nicely, but it still needed to be instantiated.

Piotras replied to this with the idea of using Midgard's built-in feature of serving files attached to pages very efficiently:

And I wonder what is faster ( I mean someone's work and page request time ) and easier?

1. Upload image (myfavourite.png) attaching it to some object. Find its GUID. Write path: /attachment/[sitegroup GUID]/[attachment GUID]/myfavourite.png
2. Upload image (myfavourite.png) attaching it to page and write path: /page/myfavourite.png

Second case requires only 1 (say: one) select from database.

The latter solution of using pages as the attachment server certainly sounds appealing for all style-related file serving needs. Now it is obviously quite difficult, but the upcoming page-based MidCOM will make it easier. Still, to make it work, the following would need to happen:

• The new Style Editor Tarjei is working on should provide pages (site root page?) as the default storage location for style's attachments
• We must ensure the page-based attachment server sends all the correct caching headers

I had my Midgard tutorial in Fórum GNOME today, and it turned out to be a near disaster. English is not very widely spoken in Brazil, and my audience couldn't really follow my talk.

Luckily GIMP developer João Bueno came to the rescue and acted as an excellent Portuguese translator. This saved the session and enabled me to have meaningful interaction with the attendees. It will be interesting to see how Midgard turns out in here. Anyway, thanks again, João!

Midgard slides in English (432KB PDF)

Here are also some quick snapshots from the event:

My DBE tutorial in Fórum GNOME went quite well. Learning from the translation issues in Saturday's Midgard tutorial, this time the presentation was held in the main auditorium of LatinoWare Mercosul with simultaneous translation.

The presentation generated lots of interest in the Digital Business Ecosystem, and I was asked to give a short briefing on the subject for students of the ESEEI university together with Nathan Wilson from DreamWorks.

Digital Business Ecosystem slides in English (392KB PDF)

DBE was also being presented in the World Summit on the Information Society, and the Brazilian delegation including Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil got interested in bringing the concept to their country. The Free Software movement is very strong in the area, and it will be interesting to watch where they will be able to take DBE.

Some local developers are already waiting for a stable OpenPsa 2 release to become available so that they can start experimenting the the DBE connectivity. One Brazilian blog has a photo of me discussing DBE with Nathan and Jon "Maddog" Hall after my speech.

Updated 2005-11-30: I will be presenting DBE also in SOLISC tomorrow.

Also there are two photos of my talk on the LatinoWare site.