Weblog: Archive

Our support and maintenance partner, Protie Ltd has just acquired 60% majority in Finnish Teleservice Center.

This deal happens hot on the heels of Protie buying a minority stake in Nemein, and cements Protie's presence in the Finnish Open Source applications and hosting (ASP) market.

FTC has been a major Midgard CMS and OpenPsa hosting company since 2003. Coupled with Protie's popular support and training services this will create a powerful player.

Protie's announcement on the deal.

In a smashing victory for European software business, the EU parliament has voted 648-14 against the controversial software patent directive. Thanks to everybody involved!

As I said in last month's Tietokone interview on Open Source business (subscription required), software patents would have been a great threat to the Open Source movement, and European business in general. The only ones benefiting from the absurdity would have been big American software companies.

Not only would such directive been destructive to European economy, but in addition it was being driven using very dubious and undemocratic methods. It is great to see common sense reign after all the dirty play.

In April 2004 I wrote:

FFII is reporting that the whole concept of web shops is patented under the proposed European Patent Directive. This would make building any kinds of web stores or shopping carts require a patent license.

I guess European Union has decided to move Internet back to stone age, then. Competitiveness with American software business, indeed.

In June 2004:

This is all clearly stuff that Midgard CMS and other CMSs have been doing for a long time before the patent was filed. There was even an Oracle port of Midgard available at almost the same time the Oracle guys applied for their patent.

Normally ludicrous American software patents like this wouldn't worry me, but now that they will also start to apply in European Union, it is a bit scarier.

And in March 2005:

Against the decision of European Parliament, the EU Council has approved the software patent directive against its own rules.

This was a clear example of how big business lobbies can thwart the democratic process, in this case threatening local IT innovation and opening the door to ridiculous US-style intellectual property lawsuits.

This has been a major victory, but we still need to be careful. Boing Boing adds:

Software patents have been staked through the heart before, but they keep rising from the grave. There's too much monopoly rent waiting to be extracted by anti-competitive companies for them to simply give up and go home. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

(the accompanying EU flag is from the European Union symbols site and follows their copyright clause)

John Robb explains what happened:

Al Qaeda ("The Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe" -- via their Web site that has been shut down) has purportedly claimed an attack on London's transportation system. 4 coordinated attacks -- 3 on the Underground subway's Circle line and 1 on a double decker bus -- has incapacitated the metropolis during the morning rush hour.

Ben Saunders is shocked:

An hour later, at the recovery yard, I sat with a cup of tea in my hands, mesmerised by the dusty TV in the corner of the portakabin office. I never realised how much I loved London until I saw the red bus, blown apart. The kind of bus I catch all the time. I’ve been shaking all day.

Richard Rutter feels defiant:

So thanks then, terrorists. You’ve just succeeded in bringing the families of millions of Londoners that bit closer together, giving them an increased love of their city and an enhanced appreciation of their way of life. You might have destroyed the lives of several hundred people, but – and this is stating the bloody obvious you fuckwits – you’ve achieved nothing.

And finally, Dom Lachowicz digs at the reasons:

I don't condone attacks against civilian targets, be they done by terrorists or the US military. I don't necessarily think that all of the things we've done above were "wrong" decisions. And I don't think that non-involvement in the region will be a panacea either. But I won't pretend that those actions weren't controversial. Try walking a mile in their shoes. If I were in a Saudi's shoes, I might want to blow shit up. I'd imagine that most people would feel the same.

Luckily everything seems to be OK with my kin living in the city.

There are several places in OpenPsa where persons are displayed in some list: Search results, campaigns, buddy lists, project participants, etc. To make them more informative, I've now implemented a contact widget library that can be used anywhere in MidCOM.

With this library the listings provide all the basic contact information in a nicely formatted manner:

The nice part about this is that the output is in the hCard microformat, enabling it to be machine-readable, and easily converted into vCards.

In addition to hCard support, the widget has also integrated support for photos from Gravatar and Jabber instant messaging presence from Edgar. The Edgar server can also be installed and used locally. Other ideas I've had include blog RSS integration.

To use the org.openpsa.contactwidget library, add it to the _autoload_libraries array of your component interface class. Then to display a person object, do the following:

// Fetch the person
$person = new MidgardPerson($id);

// Display the contact
$contact = new org_openpsa_contactwidget($person);
$contact->show();

Updated 2005-08-02: This is now documented and maintained in the Midgard Wiki.

I've today integrated John Coggeshall's Tidy PECL extension into Midgard CMS. This means that all WYSIWYG-edited content should now be stored in proper, cleaned and indented XHTML.

The way this works is that widget_html, the Datamanager widget for the HTMLAREA editor checks if the Tidy PHP functions are available, and if they can be found runs the HTML through the cleaner.

The commit didn't quite make it to the MidCOM 2.4.3 release so get it from CVS or patch manually if you want to try it out.

There are still some things I would like to do using the Tidy extension, including displaying possible content accessibility warnings, and making the Tidy options configurable. Now the Tidy options used are:

• show-body-only
• output-xhtml
• enclose-block-text
• drop-empty-paras
• indent
• break-before-br
• drop-font-tags
• drop-proprietary-attributes
• bare

I had planned to do this integration much earlier, but always had issues getting the tidy extension to compile. The reason for this was that the binaries distributed on the tidy site don't include the shared libraries and compiling tidy was needed. Some Linux distributions apparently provide packages for the tidy libraries.

Focus of the Midgard developer community is swiftly moving to the Midgard2 architecture, and this means that changes will be coming to the rest of the framework.

One obvious victim is the Repligard database replication and packaging tool. While Repligard works acceptably for its intended purpose, stretching it to situations like filtered staging/live and database structure conversions has caused issues with both reliability and performance. And in addition to this, Repligard is not yet able to work with MgdSchema objects.

Clearly something needs to be done about the situation. What could be the viable replacement is Exorcist, the cross-CMS replication tool created by Midgard Project co-founder and JCR contributor Jukka Zitting. Not only is Exorcist built on much more robust model, it also communicates with Midgard using the Midgard-Java bindings that are built directly on top of the MgdSchema and Query Builder.

Pros for making Exorcist the Repligard replacement:

• Possibility to create workflow and content filters using XSLT
• Cross-CMS capabilities, replicate between Midgard and other CMSs using either one-to-one bindings or Portable Site Information
• Real possibility for multidirectional replication
• P2P replication using the Digital Business Ecosystem network
• Project could be shared between different CMSs
• No need to separately port it to support new Midgard features

And cons:

• Existing scripts and working habits based on Repligard will cease to work
• More Java dependency (although we recommend it already now)

Andy Smith has noticed he doesn't like frameworks:

Frameworks suck because they are an avatar of enterprise, frameworks suck because they take away your freedom, frameworks suck because they build walls between coders, frameworks suck because they make you fit your project to the toolset rather than the toolset to the project, and frameworks suck because they take the fun out of programming, long live the library.

Being actively involved with some frameworks, I can both agree with his interoperability concerns, and disagree about the usefulness of having a consistent framework dozens of applications run seamlessly in.

The nice thing about MidCOM is that nowadays building cool applications from scratch requires only writing the business logic layer, and telling the framework how to handle the rest. And when the component is done, it can be used together with other components in a consistent and integrated fashion.

Updated 2005-07-21: Seems that having frameworks around Planet PHP is also chafing some people.

The documentation on the Midgard Content Management System is now moving to wiki format. This will make it much easier for people to contribute documentation into the Midgard site instead of posting it in their own blogs or documentation and tutorial sites.

To get started with contributing to the Midgard wiki, contact me to get an account on the site.

Useful reading:

• Midgard Documentation authoring HOWTO
• Midgard Wiki linking HOWTO
• Introduction to editing WikiPedia

To make things nicer, I've added some linking features from the WordPress SimpleLink plugin to the Midgard Wiki software. However, some work still remains.

Updated 18:10: There is now RSS 2.0 feed of latest updates to the wiki.

I added Kai Blankenhorn's FeedCreator PHP Class into the MidCOM CVS yesterday as purecode component de.bitfolge.feedcreator. The library is already being used by the Midgard Wiki for its RSS output of latest modifications.

With this LGPLd library it is very easy to add RSS, Atom and other feeds into MidCOM components.

See documentation in Midgard wiki.

Updated 07:46: Other nice new tutorials in the wiki are:

• Enabling user commenting on a page by Arttu Manninen
• Using SSL with MidCOM template by Marcelo N. Halpern

The makers of the Basecamp project communication software, 37signals have made an interesting post on targeting software at microcorporations:

When you think small business, think 1-10 people not 50-100. There’s an endless supply of 1-10 person companies. Who cares about the Fortune 500? It’s time to care about the Fortune 5,000,000. Forget the enterprise market. Forget the mid-sized company market. Build for the smallest of small companies and you’ll find a thirsty, neglected market waiting for you.

Of course, this is exactly the market OpenPsa and the Digital Business Ecosystem are designed for. The post adds:

The big office suites aren’t for them. The big project management apps aren’t for them. The big heavy spreadsheets aren’t for them. The bloated accounting and payroll apps aren’t for them. What they crave are low/no-learning curve, simple focused tools that let them get their work done quickly and then get out of their way. And I believe they’ll increasingly prefer that these apps will be hosted by someone else — who has time for IT, or installs, or update patches, or…?

Updated 09:17: Several of the comments deal with the problems of sales and revenue models of products targeted at the small business. As 'half empty' writes,

if you charge $50/month for an app, you have to get 200 users to pay your bills and pay yourself. In order to get modestly rich you need 2000 users. Are there even 2000 users in your niche? Are you financially prepared to wait around for 2000 people to sign up? Are you financially prepared to wait around for 200 people to sign up? It doesn’t happen overnight… or even in the next 6 months.

Midgard 1.7, the first release sporting Midgard2 features like MgdSchema and Query Builder was released today. To celebrate this, I made a new design for the website, following the "Prepare for the New Day" slogan:

The photo in the bottom right corner is from our climb to Drakensberg with the Ungana-Afrika people.

While posting the layout to the site, I was reminded about the xplanet maps the GNOME and Debian communities have. After thinking about this for a moment, I decided it would be easy to generate the same information from the Midgard Who's Who.

Here's a small example, with also bigger ones available:

If you're interested in doing something similar, I've posted a quick tutorial.

Midgard 1.7 and the development release of MidCOM, version 2.5.0 are now available. Using these, it should be much easier to test OpenPsa 2.x.

To do this, get the latest CVS version of OpenPsa. The particularly interesting thing to test are the access controls.

I've plugged this before, but taivasalla.net continues to chronicle the life in Helsinki with the beautiful photos of Niklas Sjöblom.

Not only are the pictures amazing, but they're also available under a Creative Commons license.

Some examples:

In similar vein, Adam Douglas pointed out the photos of Poland by Maciej Pokora, Piotras's brother. And MIK's photos are moving to a Midgard-powered gallery.