Weblog: Archive

Here are some updates while reading the news in the SOLISC speakers' room: Yesterday's session on DBE went well, with Anahuac doing the translation. The session was held in a slot shared with Izabel's GNOME talk. After the days' programs we returned to the Dolphin House for dinner.

Some interesting blog posts found in my NetNewsWire summary while waiting for tonight's beach barbeque and tomorrow's OpenBeach...

Jon Udell is dreaming about Peer-to-Peer air travel:

Fallows invites us to imagine a fleet of air taxis -- essentially winged SUVs, safe, ultra-reliable, highly-automated, super-efficient -- that redistribute some of the traffic away from our failing hubs to a network of smaller airports. If this is going to work, the air taxi itself, which companies like Eclipse Aviation are busily inventing, is only half the technological challenge. The other half lies in the information systems. You'd need to be able to aggregate demand in real-time, so that if two passengers in Keene, NH, two in Rutland, VT, and two in Albany NY are headed to LA (say, to Pomona's Ontario airport) on a given day, you can allocate an air taxi to make those three pickups and then fly direct to the destination. These air taxis would need to be able to steer clear of conventional air traffic, as well as each other.

Could make a very interesting DBE business case.

Joe Suicide wants to route next summer's Death Monkey tour through the Pamplona bull run:

...Just by moving our starting date by four days, we will be able to run with the bulls at Pamplona. Some of us, including all current full members, have already done it at least once, but since the adrenaline rush you get by running is incredible and we happen to be there at the right time, we will do it again.

Last time at San Fermin all my dirty underwear were stolen by spanish while our group slept in a park. 2006 I will be prepared. I won't take any underwear with me. That should solve the problem.

Tommi Rissanen from DBE is talking about Christopher Columbus -style management:

In short, SME Business Management is sadly similar to Christopher Columbus deeds:

• He left but didn't know where he was going
• He got there, but didn't know where he was
• He came back but didn't know where he had been
• And he did it 3 times in 7 years.

Pekka Pekkala from Helsingin Sanomat is analyzing some blog reader statistics (in Finnish, sorry):

Uskollisia lukijoita löytyy esimerkiksi yhtiöistä Andritz-Ahlstrom, Suomalainen Kirjakauppa, Raha-automaattiyhdistys, Suomen Lakimiesliitto, Amnesty International, Alliance Capital Limited, Patentti- ja rekisterihallitus, Smartner Information Systems Oy, Hantro Products Oy, Sampo, VVO-Yhtyma Oy ja Verohallitus (hui!). Eli ainakin joku on onneksi löytänyt säännöllisesti seuraamisen arvoista sisältöä täältä.

Obviously, the Google Analytics stats are not very accurate for blogs, as they do not carry information on RSS subscribers.

Edd Dumbill is thinking about opinionated software:

Desktop environments -- GNOME 2.0: The move from GNOME 1.0 to version 2.0 was highly opinionated (Mac users, think OS 9 to OS X). Complexity of user interface was thrown out in favour of sensible defaults.

Web standards -- CSS, RDF, XHTML: not only is there a right way to do things, but it turns out to be better too! I don't automatically fall in love with everything that emerges from the W3C, but some things are so obviously the right way it's impossible not to love them -- warts and all.

Good stuff to think about as we prepare for Midgard 2.

Codey from Indian Express is wondering about aesthetics and sensibilities of CMS:

If I remember right, way back in the dotcom boom era, someone had tried convincing Zdnet India to shift to Zope/Plone, since it was meant to be absolutely rocking from a geek point of view. That experiment did not go down well with the end users and it ended pretty much there. Being sexy from a geek’s point of view is very different from what it looks like from the end-user’s point of view. Case in point: there are a lot more of users on Blogger than Freeflux, though the latter is better for a geek any given day.

In the past four months, I have been pretty much doing the reinventing business at the new jig. I had evaluated most of the free/open source options and found none of them, other than the exception of Midgard, to be good enough to fit our needs. Most were either too complex or were too simple and I would rather have my team work with a set of known problems than have them dig around nested directories of endless libraries which might or might not break every time I want to customize the site or add a new feature, which would require hacking the existing code.

He also mentions the classic Open Source support question:

Eventually, when you take your product proposal to the management and tell them the best avenue for technical support for your solution is an IRC channel, don’t be surprised if they totally freak out on you, which is why a lot of media organizations sign up for outrageously priced Microsoft-based solutions.

We are currently deploying Midgard for a major Finnish media agency. It would be interesting to compare notes. Oh, and there actually is commercial support available for Midgard CMS.

Noise has reviewed Surma's second demo:

Ehdottomuuden ja perinteen syrjästä kiinni pitävä Surma on melko tuore tapaus Suomen mustemman metallin bändikatalogissa. Nyt ilmestynyt Veren tytär on toinen demo, josta voidaan käyttää demo-nimitystä vain sen mitättömän seikan takia, ettei Surma ole vielä onnistunut saamaan levy-yhtiötä taakseen. Veren tyttären toteutus on nimittäin niin julmaa tasoa, että monen jo levyttävänkin yhtyeen soisi ottavan oppia tästä paketista.

Surma is the Finnish metal band that Skoll and Jay Surfer play in.

Edi ran into some issues with link prefetching and MidCOM administrative interface:

The whole idea is to prefetch links. Well what if we have som ajax stuff there, and forms etc. It of course tries to prefetch them also. When this is done, they trigger functions, and this ends up to (at least) these nice situations like:

• article control in Midcom
  • approve / unapprove => when sent several times, it messes up the system. try reloading the page and see what happens, it's like russian roulette
  • hide / unhide: the same as with approvals

This is the classic idempotent GET issue that surfaced last spring with Google Web Accelerator. We've tried to take this into account with OpenPsa and use only POST requests for things that actually change something.

Luckily Edi reported this quickly, and we were able to identify and fix the problem. The initial way to fix this was to block prefetching entirely in AIS so that we can take the time and fix the couple of places affected by this so that they will use POST.

Another major discussion in the community has been the style engine unification proposal. The idea has simply been to merge Midgard's style engine and MidCOM's style engine to provide better consistency and performance.

However, the style engine in Midgard has traditionally been considered one of the best in the industry, and any changes to it obviously make tensions run high in the mailing list.

At the moment the path forward seems to get Midgard's grand old guru Jukka to arbitrate and provide a new neutral spec to work on. After that we must work swiftly to implement the spec across core, MidCOM and the new Style Editor so that there will be actually something concrete for people to experiment with.

It is December now, and my RSS reader is filling up with predictions for the year 2006. Here are snippets from some good ones:

37signals challenges webmasters to make their sites smaller:

See what you can say in 3 pages instead of 6. Do you really need that extra page? Do you really need to add one more paragraph? Can’t you explain that in 2 sentences instead of 4? Be wiser, not a know-it-all. Be the one who choses their words carefully, not the one who never shuts up.

Cameron Moll makes guesses at what is in and what is out in web design. Two on the "ins":

The fluid layout - I actually anticipated more wide-scale adoption of fluid layouts in 2005, but they didn’t take hold as firmly as expected. Though I’ve got hopes for 2006. So much so, in fact, that my case study site for CSS Mastery is a fluid one.

JavaScript & DOM scripting - I’ve been able to get by the last few years with my measly JavaScript skills, you know where you just copy and paste existing scripts? Yeah, those skills. That’ll change in 2006. The traditional role of “web designer/developer” will add JS/DOM to the existing XHTML/CSS mix. Those of us with sorry skills will expect to see a copy of Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting under the tree this Christmas.

Andy Budd talks about the visual design trends:

Designs will soften, with more rounded corners, pastel colours and hinted boxes. Drop shadows and gradients will remain, but in a much subtler form to avoid visual clutter. 2006 will also be a year of transparency, with a profusion of fade effects and the PNG becoming the rightful heir to the image crown.

I find myself agreeing with many of these. In the latter half of 2005 I've noticed myself starting to pay a lot more attention, and actually use things like AJAX, Javascript, fluid layouts, CSS versions for handhelds, and obviously, rounded corners.

The main complaint for the AJAX hype has been that the technology has been around for a long time already. But just like with CSS and RSS, it took a while before there was enough knowledge and compelling case examples of AJAX around for people to actually trust in the technology. Javascript incompatibilities bit web developers badly in the old days, and it takes a while to get over it.

As for Midgard predictions for 2006, it is actually a bit difficult to pick the right trends. So huge amount of stuff happened in 2005 that we never could anticipate. What I'd like to happen though would be:

• Simplification - Removing all the unnecessary UIs and other legacy cruft as we near the 2.0 release

• Clarification - Making the strong points of Midgard like the templating system, editable content schemas and the plethora of components more clearly visible for end users

• Connectivity - Starting to really use tools like RSS, microformats and DBE for connecting sites and servers with each other

• Performance - The metadata system in MidCOM 2.4 hurt Midgard's performance quite badly, and we really need to get it back

These, together with all the application development projects into the OpenPsa suite we've been contracted to do will make 2006 quite a busy year.

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is talking about the environmental impact of the Internet:

On the negative, remember California's power crisis? Who was partly to blame? The computing industry. We create computers that draw enormous amounts of power, throw off huge amounts of heat, which requires the world to build power plants and install power hungry air conditioners. Here's a little known fact for you: Google's and Yahoo!'s second largest operating expense - after the people they employ is... electricity. That's why they're building datacenters next to smelting plants. Seriously. Read this.

Three MILLION people a week are joining the internet. If each gets a Dell PC, consuming 200 watts, that's 10-20 GIGAwatts of new power draw and a massive impact on the planet. If we're serious about creating technologies developing companies and economies can afford, something has to change.

...

And both bet on a simple premise. Over my lifetime, I will consume roughly three times the power my parents consumed - and they, roughly three times their parents. As that trend continues, energy efficiency will become a competitive advantage for Sun (alongside Toyota, Boeing and GE) - and an environmental imperative for governments and voters. You may not care about it in your den, but multiply your den by three million, and I guarantee you, there's a lot to care about. Whether you're in rural Minnesota, or rural India.

This is exactly why Nemein is involved in making the web infrastructure for Energy Saving Projects, Motiva and Green Net Finland. These organizations are doing important work in promoting energy efficiency and building a more environment-friendly industry.

I know at the moment our organization has a quite heavy ecological footprint and I wonder if we should pursue a Green Office Certification to become more aware of it.

As a way to resolve the style engine dispute in the Midgard community, I asked Jukka to arbitrate. He posted his proposal for the Midgard Style Engine V2.0 yesterday, and after a bit of discussion it entered mRFC process. The proposal was accepted today with 7 +1 votes from the developers.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this happen. What I want from the new style engine, is that it would mainly work like the old one, but with two new features:

• MidCOM folders must be able to override elements of site style
• Site style must be able to override elements of MidCOM components (so you can easily make a "global" show-article for your style template for example

In the other news, it is a beautiful early winter day here in Helsinki. Sun is shining through a thin veil of clouds. There is no snow to mention yet, but the streets, buildings and trees are all covered with a thin layer of frost. When riding the bus to work across the Lauttasaari bridge half of the bay already had ice.

When trying to PEAR-package MidCOM components with our new pear-package.php utility I ran into this error message:

Error: PHP5 packages must be packaged by php 5 PEAR

Now, it seems that the PEAR 1.x packager tries to be a bit too smart and sniff if files contain PHP5 OOP features like abstract or interface classes. That is all good and well, except that the packager doesn't really parse the PHP code, it just looks for words like abstract in the file.

This taken into account, guess what happens with code like this (coming from Midgard's MetaWebLog API interface):

if ($key == "mt_excerpt") {
    $article->abstract = $value->scalarval();
}

A quick fix for this is to edit the PEAR/Common.php file of your installation and comment out the following:

if (version_compare(zend_version(), '2.0', '<')) {
    if (in_array(strtolower($data),
        array('public', 'private', 'protected', 'abstract',
              'interface', 'implements', 'clone', 'throw')
             )) {
        PEAR::raiseError('Error: PHP5 packages must be packaged by php 5 PEAR');
        return false;
    } 
}

This should be quite safe to do, as MidCOM doesn't run on PHP5 yet, and so can't contain any PHP5 files.

No idea if PEAR 1.4 fixes this.

Updated 14:58: The MidCOM packages themselves work now. Pretty cool! See my posting to dev.

Updated 2005-12-27: The decision has been made to package using PEAR 1.4 only. Read the mRFC 0021 for details.

The feared and invasive Data Retention directive passed yesterday in the European Parliament. So What's wrong with data retention?

The proposal to retain traffic data will reveal who has been calling and e-mailing whom, what websites people have visited and even where they were with their mobile phones. Telephone companies and internet services providers would be ordered to store all traffic data of their customers. Police and intelligence agencies in Europe would be granted access the traffic data. Various, competing proposals in Brussels mention retention periods from 6 months up to four years.

Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of all 450 million people in the European Union. Data retention is a policy that expands powers of surveillance in an unprecedented manner. It simultaneously revokes many of the safeguards in European human rights instruments, such as the Data Protection Directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.

It will be interesting to watch how ISPs foot the costs on this one.

This and the super-DMCA we got here in Finland are starting to make digital life in Europe quite scary. For years we've been able to laugh at the silly legislation the Americans have to live with, but now EU is starting to get to the same level.

I guess it is time to set up a Tor Internet Anonymizer server at the office and start using it. Just like encryption, anonymity works best if used as a general policy instead of just in the occasions where it really is needed.

We have recently been contracted to develop a new workflow engine on top of OpenPsa to support different pharmacovigilance and drug regulatory processes from the viewpoint of a drug manufacturer.

The specification process is still ongoing, but for now the main requirements seem to be:

• Definition of workflows through an UI (or possibly via an XML import)
• Handling roles through Midgard Groups
• Connecting alarms and escalations to schedules of some processes ("this step must be completed in 10 days")
• Making the actual activity handling easy and GTD-ish (complete with filtering based on contexts)
• Supporting deliverables that may be objects or actions in other MidCOM components ("Write a new Word document with this template")

Since workflow is a big topic, it would be great to be able to share some of the development efforts with other PHP-based applications. Galaxia is a PHP workflow system that is shared between projects like TikiWiki and Xaraya.

The problem with Galaxia is however that it uses direct SQL for its data storage, whereas we would like to use MgdSchema and Query Builder. We'll have to see whether it will be easier to write our own, or adapt the Galaxia system to our framework. Also, the UI would probably require quite much tuning to fit our concept.

Another issue of consideration is how to fit the workflows into our Social Network of Projects model of using OpenPsa within a network of contractors connected via DBE.

Kai Puolamäki from Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI) has a very good blog post in Finnish summarizing the recent developments in digital rights:

Ensiksikin, nyt ollaan säätämässä uuden tietoyhteiskunnan perustuslakeja. Onkohan koskaan aikaisemmin niin suurista asioista päätetty näin vähällä ymmärryksellä?

Toiseksi, perusoikeudet voivat huonosti. Ne tuntuvat unohtuvat heti, kun tarpeeksi suuri ja vakuuttava taloudellinen eturyhmä sitä pyytää. Tai kun viranomainen ilmoittaa haluavansa lisää valtuuksia todellisen tai kuvitellun uhan torjumiseen. Ketään ei tunnu kiinnostavan, onko lisävaltuudella mitään merkitystä väitetyn ongelman ratkaisussa.

Eurooppalainen demokratia on lamaantunut. Maailma on muuttunut niin nopeasti, että monet poliitikot ja kansalaiset ovat pudonneet totaalisesti kärryiltä. Valta on siirtynyt viranomaisille, asiantuntijoille ja kaupallisille etujärjestöille. Tilannetta pahentaa, että monet tärkeät päätökset tehdään käytännössä julkisuudelta piilossa erilaisissa ministerineuvostoissa ja kansainvälisissä järjestöissä.

I've written about the same things before. Digital rights issues are understood by only very few Finnish politicians, enabling the powerful media business lobby to push whatever legislation they want.

ITviikko has another good column on the subject:

Toisen esimerkin kaupallisesta sensuurista tarjoaa tuore tekijänoikeuslaki. Se kieltää sellaisten teosten maahantuonnin, joita ei ole julkaistu Euroopan talousalueella. Maahantuojat siis päättävät, mitä suomalaiset saavat lukea, katsoa ja kuunnella. Jos viranomaisille annettaisiin vastaavat valtaoikeudet, siitä nousisi valtava kohu.

Valtaoikeuksien lisäksi yrityksille siirretään myös viranomaistehtäviä. Esimerkiksi Euroopan unioniin suunnitellusta teletunnistetietojen tallentamisesta vastaisivat viranomaisten asemesta operaattorit. Kumpaan te luotatte enemmän, Soneraan vai rikospoliisiin?

Now, personally I'm strongly against piracy, as erosion of copyright protection also erodes the advantage free software has against proprietary products. If Office can be obtained for free, why would you use OpenOffice.org?

But still, the fight against piracy shouldn't be fought by removing civil rights from all. All this makes me want to switch to Happy News instead.

Updated 2005-12-22: There is now an action plan for a civil disobedience campaign against the crazy copyright law. At least here things are not as bad as in UK.

Wired's The Transparent Society is a very interesting mid-nineties story on the eroding privacy in the society. Via Slashdot

Slashdot has an interesting editorial by OSDL's Dave Rosenberg on why Open Source business must own its Intellectual Property:

It's easy to dismiss LinuxCare as "ahead of their time", which is definitely true. But the fundamental and fatal flaw was that they based their products on someone else's IP, with no IP of their own. When the market tanked abruptly, LinuxCare didn't have the money to weather the storm and didn't have consistent alternative revenue streams to combat the lack of services income.

I agree that to be successful on the long term, an Open Source company must definitely be a leader or major contributor in the project their business is built on. Leeching can work for a while, but it makes it easy for competitors to establish them as the better provider in the market.

This is a major reason why Nemein invests heavily in the communities its solutions are based on. We employ several Midgard and OpenPsa developers, and actively contract work to other members of the community.

Even though anybody can start offering competing services in the Midgard space, our level of commitment and expertise guarantees that we still get a fair share of the projects.

Of course, this might be better to call presence or merit instead of Intellectual Property, as the term can be argued to be a bit murky.

Karoliina Salminen talks about WikiPedia and Nokia 770 being the real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

However, Douglas Adams didn’t probably have in mind what would be really possible today, a joke that was written back then is now reality. What is 770 + Internet + Wikipedia? Quite much same as Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy. An electronic device that can answer to all your questions anywhere anytime. It is not Sci-Fi anylonger, but Nokia 770 Internet Tablet…

I fully agree that there is the potential. I've been long thinking about something like this, but I still feel that an offline version would be important. You might need information about places when traveling, or answers to some question that popped in a conversation. And Internet connection might just not be available.

If the full WikiPedia would take too much storage space, the device could possibly use a text-only version. And even then the contents downloaded for offline usage could be optimized based on some smart categorization and for example based on the user's current location that could be gotten through sources like a Bluetooth GPS receiver, or a network's Plazes information.

Maybe something like the FBReader e-book reader, as suggested by Internet Tablet Users could work together with an RSS-like system to update content from WikiPedia to the tablet.

The user interface would be quite obvious: text saying Don't Panic in big, friendly letters, a search box, and list of probable pages of interest based on location.

Now what is especially cool about the N770 and WikiPedia combination is that there is no central authority to convince to be able to build this. WikiPedia is open content, and Nokia 770's platform is fully open, meaning that anybody can just sit down and implement this.

Of course, in projects like this is important to remember that WikiPedia is an encyclopedia, not the full sum of human knowledge:

But Jimmy Wales reminded me that Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a library replacement. It should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts.

Maybe this "Hitchhiker's Guide" could be the killer app 770 needs?

Updated 2005-12-20: Some other posts on the same subject:

• Slate: Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise.
• Slashdot: The Real Hitchhiker's Guide?
• Telegraph: It knows where you are...
• NFHQ: Real Life Portable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

We are now doing some reorganization in cooperation with the support provider Protie. Part of the change is to split our team more clearly between OpenPsa development and CMS deployments. To make things easier and support the community documentation efforts, we're planning to implement a new policy: RTFM.

RTFM is an initialism for the statement "Read The Fucking Manual". This instruction is usually given in response to a question which the responder knows or believes can be answered easily by reading relevant documentation, and suggests that the inquirer may be wasting people's time.

The idea with RTFM is that when the guys from the deployment team need to ask something, we have to be able to reply by giving them an URL in Midgard Wiki or OpenPsa Documentation.

As lots of stuff is not available in the online docs, this means that we will have to add it to be able to send a link. Will be interesting to see how well this works.

We had the traditional Xmas party last night, and despite Joe's earlier angst almost the whole family attended, including Joe Suicide, Johnnie-Boy and our favorite rock star, Skoll of Surma fame. Jay Surfer was planning to come, but got lost somewhere in the way between Vallila and Ullanlinna.

We made a turkey filled with onions, minced meat and peppers, and had the fridge stocked with Punikki (red guard) beer. After the dinner Kerttu treated us with a tandoori apple pie.

It was very nice to see the "family" come together after last year's bourgeois period.

Happy holidays to everybody! Today the plan is to take things easy and go watch King Kong in the evening...

Updated 2005-12-27: Joe Suicide has blogged his version of the story.

Seems like the RSS/Atom syndication world is finally uniting around a common feed icon, the Mozilla one.

This should help to make the "World Live Web" less confusing to users. Some One Click Subscription magic will still be needed, but things are at least moving to a better direction.

I like the way Safari handles the default feed reader selection, too.

Spread the word!

We wanted to make the beta release of OpenPsa2 this week. However, there are two issues preventing this for now:

• OpenPsa2 under Midgard 1.7.3 causes strange SIGABORTs in Apache when saving data
• Installation is currently quite involved process

As to the installation part of this, you all can help by commenting the new packaging proposal in mRFC 0021.

And if you want to install it anyway, read the OpenPsa 2 installation instructions.