Weblog: Archive

One thing I've been thinking about quite a bit is adding location awareness to web content. On my site this is currently being done on city level, and the info is attached to all items: blog posts, photos, moblogs etc.

However, this level of accuracy doesn't yet allow us to do the really interesting things. For that, we'd need an easy way to input coordinates together with the data.

Rich Bowen writes:

I was talking about Geocaching, as well as other applications of GPS technology, including integration with blogging. Henri is talking with the GeoURL people about creating standards for encoding coordinate information in other data. For example, there are apparently cameras now that will encode the coordinates into the image, in the meta-data headers. So then, imagine if you could have a search engine where you could search for all photos taken within 1 mile of a certain location, between certain dates. Or, if people have location information in the blog entries, you could search for blog entries about a particular location on a particular day, and build a composite picture of a particular event from multiple individuals. I think it’s an idea with a ton of potential, if there was an easy way for people to obtain location information. It’s a bit painful right now, and even someone as fascinated with the idea as myself tends not to go through the pain every time.

Besides the question of obtaining accurate coordinate information, and how to easily input it to the system, another big question is privacy. Content creators should be able to state what level of accuracy they're comfortable with:

• Full coordinates
• Coordinates with last few digits removed
• City information
• Country information

This level of privacy could also be connected to time. For example, I might be uncomfortable about announcing my location in real-time, but would have no problems in revealing the coordinates after a week or two.

I need to think about this a bit and try to hack a proof of concept using the MidCOM metadata system.

If content is revealed only on city level, it could be converted back to coordinates using the open source cities of the world database. Geo Tags seem to have all the actual HTML meta tags we'd need for these different levels:

<meta name="geo.position" content="49.2;-123.4" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="London, Ontario" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="CA-ON" />

This would probably work better in this concept than the GeoURL-style ICBM tag that is limited to only coordinate information.

I flew my first solo flight today as part of PPL(A) pilot training. The morning was sunny with calm wind.

The flight was in traffic circuit of RWY 36 of the Helsinki-Malmi airport with Cessna 152 OH-COF. As the weather was smooth the 6 landings were quite easy.

This was an important step in the training program. I have now 21h35 in my log book. More solo flights are planned for the weekend...

Updated 2005-05-07: I did two more solo flights today, on OH-KLS and OH-CTH respectively. There was quite heavy traffic including gliders and a DC-3 on EFHF, and so both flights were to the practice area on Sipoo bay. Very nice weather with about 6 knots of wind from east and the runway 09 in use.

I got to practice some VOR navigation using to PORVOO beacon to circle the Kilpilahti oil refinery and HEL beacon to pinpoint correct angle to the NOKKA reporting point. The photo above is from the first flight and was taken above Kalkkiranta.

In what is becoming a regular spring ritual, the Triumph Legend is again having electric problems, this time with the starter engine.

A bike shop had already promised to fix the bike, but then they screwed up. So, if you know a bike maintenance shop in Helsinki region that could help with the Triumph, please drop me a line.

Updated 2005-05-24: I finally found a mechanic and after a bit of wait, the bike was towed away today. The verdict: the starter engine had melted.

So now began the wait for a new starter...

How long this will take is anybody's guess. So far the delivery times for parts from Triumph have been anything between week and over a month.

Updated 2005-05-31: In a surprising turn of events, Mp-Asennus got the bike fixed in a day using a spare Kawasaki starter. Great work, thanks! Now the bike is running without problems.

Thanks to everybody for their good ideas and suggestions!

Following Kaukola's Support ticker viewer and kindly financed by our friends at Protie, we now have a Midgard CMS component that allows customers to view and approve OpenPSA Projects hour reports.

The web user interface is fairly simplistic at the moment, simply listing unapproved hour reports for all projects where the user's company has been marked as the customer (screenshot without any CSS):

When the user approves some hours, or simply submits the form, an email will be sent to the project manager listing the user's comments and which hours were approved or not approved:

Another nice addition to the Professional Service Automation cycle...

The net.nemein.hourview component requires latest CVS MidCOM and OpenPSA to work.

Looking at the recent developments in Midgard CMS space, it looks like the MidCOM, the Midgard Component Framework developed by Torben Nehmer has finally established itself as the default Midgard development framework for PHP.

While I already forecasted this in my April 2003 article Why MidCOM rocks, it is still not a surprise that this has taken so long. MidCOM requires very different and much stricter development style than "pure Midgard" applications have used to follow. However, the advantages are substantial:

• MidCOM provides standardized services like authentication, localization, debugger, templating, caching and configurable object editors (via datamanager)

• MidCOM's filesystem oriented approach for code makes version control and distribution easy

• MidCOM is a standardized way to build applications with midgard-php, meaning that it is much easier to get contributions to the code

• MidCOM mandates using a strict coding and code documentation standard (although all code has not yet been ported to it)

• MidCOM provides the indexing service that allows building interesting views to data

• ...and finally, MidCOM is always available with Midgard

In the most recent developments, OpenPSA 2.0 is being written using MidCOM, and similar plans are also around for a Aegir rewrite.

Of course, even if most application development has moved to MidCOM, this doesn't yet force site maintainers to convert. But even for that, there are some attractive benefits:

Another point to consider here is that after "MidCOMizing", your sites will no longer be custom-made, but instead using a shared and commonly maintained platform.

This means that ideally it will be the last conversion hassle you have to face as from then on you can live easily with future MidCOM versions, or even convert to other CMS using Exorcist if required. MidCOM's content model is the defacto standard, so there will definitely be conversion tools for it, no matter how much Midgard's structure will change.

The number of components and libraries in MidCOM is raising rapidly, especially as both Aegir and OpenPSA are being rewritten on it. As now all MidCOM packages ship in the distribution, this causes lots of unnecessary clutter on systems.

New packaging policy

I'm now proposing to improve the situation by packaging MidCOM using the PEAR package format. This would enable us to change the distribution strategy so that

• MidCOM framework ships as its own package
• Each component has its own package
• MidCOM distribution includes a meta package that depends on a set of core components
• The core components would be chosen from the best quality and most general MidCOM components, and would include things like de.linkm.taviewer
• Rest of the components could then be installed one-by-one using the PEAR installer

Besides removing clutter, PEAR packaging would also enable components and libraries to clearly state their dependencies from both MidCOM world and PEAR packages. This would promote code reuse and closer cooperation with the PEAR community.

Proof of concept

To test this approach, I created a package definition for the net.nemein.personnel component. It seemed quite easy to define the component in PEAR's format, although the package name had to use underscores instead of dots as class path separator, making it net_nemein_personnel.

The package seemed to work quite well:

$ pear package-validate package.xml
Validation: 0 error(s), 0 warning(s)

$ pear package package.xml

$ sudo pear install net_nemein_personnel-1.0.tgz
install ok: net_nemein_personnel 1.0

$ ls /usr/lib/php/midcom/lib/net/nemein/personnel/
admin.php       locale          navigation.php  viewer.php
config          midcom          style
$ ls /usr/lib/php/docs/net_nemein_personnel/documentation/
CHANGES

$ sudo pear uninstall net_nemein_personnel
uninstall ok: net_nemein_personnel

With this experience, it looks like we should be able to quite easily create the package definitions for MidCOM files, and possibly also automate part of this work using the PEAR PackageFileManager tool or some custom script.

The only real change required in MidCOM to make the PEAR packaging work would be to change midcom-template to load MidCOM by default from the PEAR installation directory.

Distribution mechanisms

Once the packages have been done we have several options for distributing them:

1. Just providing them as downloads on the Midgard site
2. Setting up our own PEAR 1.4 channel
3. Contributing the packages to the actual PEAR repository, and midgard-php to PECL

The first of these options would be the easiest, and is probably the right way to start. We can consider the others with better time.

In the other news: congratulations, Torben!

The Finnish Broadcasting Company launched today the website for Itse Valtiaat, a popular political satire cartoon series. The site user interface has been built with Flash to provide an interactive and animated world familiar from the series.

The Flash site has been built by Joonas Kallioinen from Piippunaakka, and it uses Midgard CMS as the back-end. Different site areas are introduced by familiar characters from the series.

Midgard CMS provides all content used on the site, and allows users to interact by voting their favorite episodes for reruns.

The Flash front-end communicates with Midgard using XML requests to unique URLs of different content resources. The XML communications have been developed following the Ajax model.

Midgard CMS provides a web-based content authoring interface used for all updates on the site, including video and image uploads.

The Flash interface retrieves some parts of site content using RSS, and the feeds may be opened to public at a later date.

Site's hosting is provided by Nebula's Midgard Web Hotel service.

The development of version 2.0 of OpenPSA, an open source management system for consultancies is now moving rapidly forward. Contrary to original plans, the system is being written using the MidCOM component architecture.

The component architecture will provide several benefits, including easily customizable data entry forms for things like companies and tasks. It will also mean that the whole OpenPSA system will be developed following strict coding standards that will make the code much more readable and easier to contribute to.

PEAR packaging of OpenPSA and support for initializing new installations using the Midgard Site Wizard are also part of the plan.

Here's the first running OpenPSA 2.0 screen, a datamanager schema driven company editor.

Iframes have been removed, and the whole UI uses standards-based XHTML and CSS layout. The toolbar floats on the top, and will contain all action buttons, including the Save button for current view.

Ajax will be used for user interaction where it pays off, including the hour reporting view.