Weblog: Archive

Finally the summer has started here in Finland and it is warm enough to spend time at the summer cottage and swim in the lake. At the same time, my trusty Triumph Legend is again running after its starter problems. Big thanks to Mp-Asennus.com, especially as they installed the Kawasaki starter ahead of schedule and under budget!

I've been too busy to blog about all the stuff happening last month, so here are some quick updates.

Exorcism at work

One major problem with Content Management Systems has been that it has been very difficult to switch between systems as needs change or vendors go out of business. The Portable Site Information project was started to create an XML format for inter-CMS content transfers, but it failed to get traction.

Our concept for solving this problem is the Exorcist migration tool, developed by original Midgard CMS founder and Java Content Repository guru Jukka Zitting. Exorcist provides an XML pipeline system for exporting content from a system, then transforming it to an appropriate format, and finally importing to another system. The XML transformations can be made either point-to-point, or using the PSI format.

Point-to-point transformations have the advantage of being relatively loss-less, as they can map the features of different systems quite accurately. PSI on the other hand provides a generic format that all Exorcist-compatible systems must support as the lowest common denominator.

Some time ago we performed the first Exorcism, successfully transferring three sites from EasySiter to Midgard CMS. All content and users were imported without problems, and only the site layout had to be manually converted. Exorcist uses the Midgard-Java bindings to access the Midgard content structure.

New Nemein team member

Topi Tuominen joined the Nemein team today. He has a long background in content management and has worked with many different new media companies. At Nemein his main responsibility will be tuning the company's project model to be more efficient.

We're also thinking about different solutions for unit testing our Midgard solutions. Recently we've encountered some regression issues with MidCOM upgrades, and an automated test suite would bring some peace of mind there, especially if combined with the planned PEAR packaging.

Midgard indexing

As Topi will inherit my old iBook, I got a new 15" PowerBook G4 today. Tiger seems really sweet, especially with the fast Spotlight search tool. This has reminded me of the plan that MidCOM's indexer system could be plugged in to a native search system if the platform offers one.

Miguel de Icaza wrote that Wikipedia has adopted similar approach and is now using the Lucene.net technology familar from GNOME's Beagle search tool:

As of last Friday, Wikipedia started using Mono for indexing and searching the Wikipedia, it was tested first on one server and it is now being used on all three servers.

Wikipedia's search backend uses Mono and dotLucense, the same search backend that is used by Beagle Desktop Search. Previously, Wikipedia had been using GCJ and Lucene to do the searches but after some tuning, Mono became the new engine.

While Spotlight's file-oriented approach would make developing a Midgard indexer plugin difficult, the benefits would be big. After that documents in the local Midgard database would appear in regular desktop searches, and Midgard wouldn't require a separate indexer to be installed.

OpenPSA synchronization

As noted by Jan Schneider, OpenPSA is now using Horde libraries for providing SyncML support. The current OpenPSA release uses the stable Horde release, and supports syncing only with some Sony-Ericsson phones. However, Horde CVS has changed quite a bit, and upgrading to it would provide benefits like Outlook synchronization.

Jan Schneider writes:

We have DevInf (Device Information) support now, which means that adding support for a SyncML client that is not supported by default, because it "speaks" a variant of the standard implementation, is as easy as writing a small class that extends the default DevInf class. So far we have support for the P800/P900/P910 class of mobile phones and Sync4j. Several people are currently trying to get Nokia phones, Blackberry, and Synthesis clients for PocketPC and Palm working.

In the other news, congratulations, SmallOne! It seems that the Midgard family is indeed growing quickly.

Dave Neary has published a short essay reasoning how investments in Open Source software are five or six times more valuable than investments in US-produced proprietary software:

And this is where all the TCO arguments coming out of Redmond fall flat on their face. Let's say, for arguments sake, that installing and supporting GNOME is 20% more expensive overall for the first 5 years you use it. It's cheaper afterwards, but play along with me for a sec.

So when you spend $100M on Windows, $80M of that leaves the country. You get $20M working for the local economy. When you spend $120M supporting GNOME with local companies, $120M stays in the economy.

I've always thought Open Source is local business, which is why we see franchising as the viable growth option, and others seem to agree.

And it is also why the Russian government is investing into building a strong local Open Source business network.

The first Driver workshop for companies integrating open source business applications to the Digital Business Ecosystem was held this week in Tampere.

Nemein is one of the companies participating in the project. The plan is to integrate the OpenPSA project management system into the framework together with Jukka Zitting from Yukatan. Once this integration has been done, companies can use OpenPSA to distribute tasks and report hours with their business partners.

The workshop tutorial was run by Bob and Pablo from Techideas in Barcelona. Based on it, Jukka blogged a nice DBE summary.

I didn't have much to contribute to the technical discussion, as it dealt with Java and Jini specifics, but at least I coded the DBE example service, and Jukka's laptop was able to query the current date from my powerbook over the Fada P2P network.

In addition to the technical content, Dr Mary Darking from London School of Economics talked about the community structure of the project, and the possible governance models. When we were interviewed for the Drivers project, we gave some complaints about the lack of openness in the project, and it seems that things are improving.

While DBE has lots of challenges ahead of it, including the fact that the funded part of the project is ending quite soon, the possibilities are also very interesting.

Look for more updates in Planet DBE.

OpenPSA rewrite to the MgdSchema database back-end and MidCOM component architecture is progressing well. The current goal is to release a feature-limited alpha next week to get more feedback. Before that, here are some quick screenshots:

Calendar week view. No tables, reservations scaled based on their real duration:

Calendar month view. No images, past days are grayed out

Calendar reservation editor with date widget. Participants chosen using AJAX live search, whole editor customizable using datamanager schemas:

Contacts person view. New features include belonging to multiple organizations, easier account editing and datamanager-handled features like the photo:

Contacts chooser. This is the new datamanager widget used everywhere in OpenPSA 2 for connecting persons to documents, projects and calendar reservations. Type a search into the field, and it will query the Contacts database FOAF interface using AJAX and list results below. Select a contact and she will be added to the list above. As can be seen from the Georgian name, this is fully internationalized:

The user interface concept is still somewhat unfinished, and is being worked on by Arttu. But even at this stage there seem to be several benefits:

• Much more natural usage style, especially with the AJAX features
• Scaling to different window sizes easily
• The floating toolbar keeps all form controls handy
• The web-oriented (as opposed to desktop-oriented) design allows us to show data and help texts in more friendly way

In addition to these, the new OpenPSA will be orders of magnitude faster than the current releases because of the MidgardQueryBuilder.

ESPOO, Jun 23rd 2005 -- The first Preview release of the OpenPSA management suite is now available. This release showcases the new user interface concept and completely rewritten technology architecture.

This release depends on bleeding-edge tools, and so there is still some way to go before it will be Perfect Software. Breakage and misfeatures can occur on all levels of the stack: Midgard Core, MidCOM, OpenPSA components and the AJAX-powered user interfaces. Once you encounter them, please use the issue tracker.

Major features

The main things to try out in this release are:

• Access Control Lists
• Document searching
• AJAX-based hour reporting (note problem with bug #246)
• Calendar user interface
• The person-organization-suborganization connection
• Workgroup filtering

Limitations

As a complete rewrite the OpenPSA 2 preview does not yet provide all the features that were available in the OpenPSA 1.x series. Some major features missing are:

• OpenPSA Projects reporting engine
• Sales project handling
• Sales campaign handling (mass mailing)
• Support and help desk ticket management
• Expense and mileage reporting
• Calendar WebCAL support
• Documents WebDAV repository

There also isn't yet a tool for migrating data between OpenPSA 1.x and OpenPSA 2 installations. This will be provided later based on the Exorcist data migration tool.

In addition to these, the idea is to modify the markup of the application's display widgets to utilize microformats like hCard as widely as possible.

The default OpenPSA 2 layout has not yet been tested on other browsers than Mozilla Firefox. It will be tuned to support MS Internet Explorer and Safari later in July.

The development server is x86 Debian Sarge with Apache 1.3.33, development browser Mozilla Firefox on MacOS X, some AJAX based widgets are known to act up in Internet Explorer.

Installation

Database and Core setup

• Install latest CVS version of Midgard and set up a fresh database with datagard
• Import the SQL files (though not the _delete ones, they're for backtracking) from org.openpsa.core to your Midgard database
• Configure your midgard-apache to use the MgdSchema from org.openpsa.core
  • Note: the schema file must be copied to MIDGARD_PREFIX/share/midgard/schema and must be referred via full path.

MidCOM setup

• Install latest CVS version of MidCOM
• Install the MidCOM indexer

OpenPSA setup

• Install the layout-openpsa.xml style file using datagard
• Install the OpenPSA components, best way to keep up to date is to make a CVS export of the OpenPSA source tree and symlink MIDCOM_ROOT/lib/org/openpsa to src/fs-midcom/openpsa directory of OpenPSA.
• Using Spider Admin or similar create root level group '__org_openpsa'
• Again in Spider create under group '__org_openpsa' group '__contacts'
• Still in Spider create root level event '__org_openpsa_calendar' set owner as '__org_openpsa'
• Create a new MidCOM site with the Midgard Site Wizard
  • Select the OpenPSA v2 layout from the list (or set manually later if it doesn't appear)
• Set parameter midcom, require_valid_user, 1 to the root topic of the site
• Set up subtopics for the OpenPSA components you're going to use
  • You can also use regular MidCOM components side-by-side with OpenPSA
  • The root topic should run the org.openpsa.mypage component

Download

OpenPSA 2 preview releases are available in:

• http://www.openpsa.org/download/2_preview1.html

If you want to use the stable OpenPSA 1.x release instead, it is available in:

• http://www.openpsa.org/download/

To keep up with the development, subscribe to the OpenPSA news feed at http://www.openpsa.org/news/

Credits

OpenPSA version 2 is a complete rewrite of the OpenPSA professional services automation suite. The work has been mainly done by Eero af Heurlin and Henri Bergius from Nemein.

The project has been kindly sponsored by Ware.it.

We would like to thank Torben Nehmer, Piotr Pokora and Jukka Zitting for their efforts on Midgard 2 that have made this project possible. We are also grateful to Arttu Manninen his work on user interface design.

I'm joining the Shnjaka expedition in east Carelia this weekend. Shnjaka is a viking ship built without a single nail using the old sowing techniques.

At the moment the expedition team is somewhere near the town of Pudoszh on the east side of lake Onega, preparing for the ship launch, scheduled monday. I'm traveling with some friends to St. Petersburg and plan to catch a train to Petrozavodsk during the weekend, and then a boat from there to carry me across the lake.

Most of the Shnjaka crew is Russian, but participating in the expedition is also Fredrik Koivusalo, the captain of the Finnish viking ship replica Heimlösa Rus. I participated to the 2001 expedition of the ship from Vyborg, Russia to Loviisa, Finland. The accompanying photo is from that trip.

After the hard work leading to the OpenPSA 2 preview, I'm really happy to get to do something not at all related to computers. While there are still challenges facing me joining the expedition, it should turn out to be a fine adventure.

2005-06-24 05:56Z: We're leaving for the border soon. Unfortunately the SMS gateway seems to be unable to receive messages so I won't be able to update this log until it is fixed.

I'll try to instruct Topi to fix the GW as soon as I get some ideas from Rambo on what is wrong.

2005-06-24 11:35Z: Again the border crossing was a challenge. My friends had visa problems and had to turn back. I'm hitch hiking to Vyborg

2005-06-24 12:50Z: Lunch in Vyborg amid decaying old Finnish art nouveau buildings. Then to the gentle care of Russian state railways

2005-06-24 20:25Z: The Russian nu metal club was steamy enough to warm a beer pint in ten minutes to boiling point. After that, cooling off on Malyi Sadovaya feels pleasant

2005-06-25 08:40Z: The day ended with beer in a park and midsummer fireworks over Neva. Now we're sitting in Sveta's bike shop, waiting for my train.

2005-06-25 16:55Z: Syväri. The Murmansk train brings the luxuries of trains like Repin into a new light. Sweating in my small cot I watch Carelia swoop by.

2005-06-25 20:12Z: Saturday night on the beach bulevard of Petrozavodsk looks like Finnish vappu. Air is filled with mosquitoes and smoke from shashlik stalls.

2005-06-26 03:50Z: Sun peeks behind the clouds. I got tickets for KOMETA-11 to Shala. I hope I can buy breakfast from there as here everything is closed.

2005-06-26 04:30Z: This will be the last message in a while, as apparently there is no cell coverage in east of Ääninen. I'll try to post updates later.

2005-06-26 07:25Z: Arrived to town of Pudozh after bumpy ferry trip and even bumpier bus ride. I've now hired a lada to take me to Kuganovolok and the ship.

2005-06-27 10:25Z: We fetched the ship from Lake Vodla National Park in police convoy. It'll be launched in Kashino and then we'll set out to Lake Onega.

Continue to the sailing report

2005-06-27 17:45Z: Anchored for the night at N61.49,45 E36.06,73. We have made a tent out of the sail and wait on river Vodla for the forecasted SE wind.

2005-06-28 06:25Z: As forecasted, the wind turned in the morning. After a few miles of rowing, we're finally under sail in a small rain.

2005-06-28 10:45Z: When the headwind died we were able to row out of the river. Now we'll head slowly into north towards Povenets

2005-06-28 16:55Z: We've covered 32km during the evening sailing and plan to continue overnight before wind turns against us. Pos N62,03 S35,38

2005-06-29 06:50Z: The night's sailing has been succesful, and now when the wind died we float near the north end of Onega.

2005-06-29 12:05Z: During the day the wind died and we've been floating and cooking food on Povenets bay 29km from city. Disturbing thunder in the south.

2005-06-29 14:30Z: After rowing out of the rain we caught a brisk north wind carrying us towards the mouth of Stalin's channel. Position N62.42' E35.05'

2005-06-29 15:05Z: When a boat of locals came to check us out, our old believer (Staroverts) Feodosi told them we're tatars sailing north from Astrakhan.

2005-06-29 16:45Z: Povenets in sight. An impregnable wall of dragon-shaped rainclouds speed at us from south and a big fishing boat came to check us out.

2005-06-29 20:00Z: We're now anchored in Povenets right next to the mouth of the White Sea - Baltic channel (Belomorkanal). Fredrik will camp on the shore. Pos N62.50,10' E 34.50,07'

2005-06-30 10:10Z: We need to be towed through the Stalin's channel and arranging that will take some days, so I'll leave the ship here and head home.

2005-06-30 10:30Z: Before departure we need to get Fredrik's moped out and the strong north wind prevents us from rowing ashore.

2005-06-30 10:30Z: The trip on Shnjaka has been a very rewarding one. I doubt if similar ships have sailed here since Viking raids a thousand years ago.

2005-06-30 14:25Z: Povenets was the east frontier of the WW2 Great Finland. I'm looking for a ride to Medvezhegorsk, thus ending the Viking adventure.

2005-06-30 21:40Z: The lady at the railway station was most helpful, arranging me tickets in the sold out St. Petersburg train and allowing me to recharge.

See photos from the trip.