Posted on 2005-09-02 13:24:20 UTC to Life Oscom. 0 comments.
Taya pointed me to Software Freedom Day on September 10th:
Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software. Over 200 teams are registered so far, and they have plans to celebrate Free Software at schools, universities, parks, and many other public places.
As it happens, it is also my birthday :-)
There is also an effort to organize the event in Finland.
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Posted on 2005-09-09 08:41:32 UTC to Midgard. 0 comments.
Content Management market analyst CMS Watch has released its Vendor Kudos and Shortcomings of 2005 list. Midgard CMS gets honorable mentions in two categories:
These have both been traditionally Midgard's strong points. However, this completely leaves the advances that have happened with Midgard's integrated search, accessibility features and the localization capabilities that allow publishing in Arabic, not to mention everything else changed through MidCOM.
This is of course understandable considering that CMS Watch is still living in Midgard 1.5 world, but it brings the question of how we should communicate the big changes that have happened in the Midgard 1.7 series, and are happening in the 1.8 space.
Very little of the "classic" Midgard remains, and even that is going away as MidCOM is being rewritten to the new database interfaces and access controls. At the same time both Aegir and MidCOM's own Datamanager editing interface are changing through AJAX and other new UI concepts.
Updated 14:00Z: eWeek has a recent story about Open Source CMS that mentions Midgard:
Don't think, by the way, that Byrne is an open-source Luddite. CMS Watch, the leading Web-based portal on CMSes, was first built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) using the Midgard open-source CMS.
Posted on 2005-09-09 20:34:58 UTC to Business Life. 0 comments.
I booked the tickets today for a Sep 22nd - Oct 3rd visit to Nemein Georgia in Tbilisi. The purpose of the trip is to help Taya with MidCOM site building and hopefully persuade some Georgian ISPs to host Midgard CMS.
In addition to the serious part of the trip, I'm really looking forward for spending some time in the country. We had lots of fun the last time, and this should be good diversion especially after this summer's missed trip.
This should also be a good chance to pick up some more Georgian language and excellent local wine. Thanks to Taya and Lasha for the invitation!
Updated 20:48Z: WikiMedia Commons has some beautiful 19th century photos by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii from Russia and the Caucasus region.
Posted on 2005-09-15 07:51:45 UTC to Midgard. 0 comments.
Torben published a new MidCOM feature called watcher yesterday. It enables Midgard CMS components and libraries to register to receive notifications about changes to Midgard objects of different types.
As this coincided with the launch of Google Blog Search which automatically refreshes its search index by following the Weblogs.Com list of blog changes, I decided to make a new weblog pinger utility based on the watcher feature.
The net.nemein.ping library is built on Rogers Cadenhead's Weblog_Pinger library. It will monitor article changes in components like newsticker and wiki, and ping a set of defined XML-RPC ping services on all updates. This should help make blogs powered by Midgard CMS more visible.
Updated 07:56: This is what the pinger library stores into the MidCOM debug log:
Sep 14 23:52:07 [debug] midcom_services_cache::initialize: Pinging Ping-o-Matic...
Sep 14 23:52:08 [debug] net_nemein_ping_pinger::ping: Successfully pinged rpc.pingomatic.com
Sep 14 23:52:08 [debug] midcom_services_cache::initialize: Pinging Technorati...
Sep 14 23:52:08 [debug] net_nemein_ping_pinger::ping: Successfully pinged rpc.technorati.com
And as can be seen, the response from Google is quite fast (the article was in searches much earlier than 1 hour after posting, but I didn't realise to take a screenshot):
The current implementation of pinger has two limitations. First of all, as the pings are now run during the HTTP request that saves an article, the request can become slow if there is heavy traffic at one of the services. The solution for this would be to store the notifications into a temporary record, and then process them via MidCOM's new cron service.
Secondly, it now supports only the basic Weblogs.Com ping and not the extended ping that would provide URL to the RSS feed in addition to the regular weblog URL.
In the other news, our new mRFC 0020 on date and time handling in Midgard2 is now short of one +1 vote by a Midgard contributor to be passed.
Posted on 2005-09-15 18:45:00 UTC to Openpsa. 0 comments.
Flash designer Joonas Kallioinen of Itse Valtiaat fame contributed a minor refresh to the OpenPsa 2 style:
Compare with the OpenPsa 1 Calendar and the previous OpenPsa 2 design. The new design is also much more IE-friendly.
This is just the default style. OpenPsa 2 can be run with any Site Wizard template.
Posted on 2005-09-21 13:39:43 UTC to Business Midgard. 0 comments.
WebProNews has a story on how the future of web design is content management:
This is somewhat of a call out to all web design companies. If you cannot offer content management to your clients, you may be left in the dust within a few years. The more affordable content management becomes, the more in demand it will be. Without giving your prospects this crucial option, you may lose a great chunk of your potential clients to the next web design company that has a fully automated system that states: "all the consumer has to do is login and get started."
The New Media agencies at least here in Finland seem to have noticed this, and are actively dumping their in-house systems in favor of more established players. While no data is available, at least the feeling I get when touring them is that the big winners are Midgard CMS as the Open Source option, and Ch5 Navigo as the proprietary one.
This is obviously good news to us, and means that the Midgard Site Wizard automatic site creation tool and Exorcist, the cross-CMS content migration tool are getting good use.
Story via Column Two.
In the other news, Centri Regionali di Competenza and Kotikissa.info are first two live sites powered by OpenPsa 2, and by extension Midgard2. CRC Italia is a project collaboration extranet, and Kotikissa.info is a webzine for a real estate agent chain utilizing the direct marketing tools for targeted newsletters.
Posted on 2005-09-25 11:16:57 UTC to Life Midgard. 0 comments.
I left for the Amsterdam flight after hacking on a cottage database for the Pyhä-Luosto website and a sushidonburi lunch at Len's with Kerttu. The WiFi at Helsinki-Vantaa worked and I was able to chat over some recruitment issues with Topi prior to leaving.
Flying weather was excellent, and I was able to follow our route easily. The views over familiar places from motorcycle trips like Puttgarden and the Kiel canal were clear and easily recognizable. The short stopover in Amsterdam didn't unfortunately allow for any touring there, but that will be redeemed on the return trip.
The KLM flight for Georgia left at sunset and we flew over Europe illuminated by the star-like clusters of city lights. The Tbilisi approach goes over the whole city following the Mtkvari river, which gave a nice view. Compared to the torturously hot 6 hour wait in Poti harbour on the previous trip, the border was easy and efficient. I was practically the only one going for the "International passports" queue, as everybody else was either Georgian or US military. The only question asked was if this was my first visit, and then I was stamped in.
Lasha was waiting for me, and we drove to his and Taya's place where I am sleeping in the "computer room".
Having arrived at 4am, I slept quite late, waking up to the sounds of Tiko watching the Soviet classic cartoon Nu, pogodi!. We drove Tiko to Taya's parents and continued to the Open Society Institute office where Taya and the other eRiders are headquartered.
We quickly fixed the local Midgard installation issues and prepared to go on a tour, as a group of demonstrators closed the office driveway. They were supporters of the late Zviad Gamsakhurdia who were demonstrating against us "Imperialist swine". They gave way to our car, however, and we were able to drive to the first meeting of the day.
The eRiders were setting up Kubuntu to the "First School" of Georgia where most of the national leaders have graduated. While waiting for the installations to complete we were given a tour of the premises, which were still being renovated after the Georgian civil war. While short of its former glory, the school included several computer rooms, museum, and even a chapel.
After the school installations we went to meet the IT people of Georgian parliament and Georgian Computer Society. We demoed Ubuntu installation for them, and talked about Midgard CMS. Especially the possibilities of Midgard in eLearning sector would be very promising. The tools in Midgard have already been partially localized to Georgian, leaving availability of hosting as the main issue for success.
For dinner we went to a khinkali place Kolkheti on the Mtkvari river with Ia and Zviad.
Saturday was a day off from regular Midgard work, and we started the day by driving to Hypermarket Goodwill to buy supplies for a basturma barbeque later in the weekend. The market also supplied a staggering number of different wines, and even the local rarity: dark beer. We chopped the meat, onions and peppers and left them to stew together, and drove to a special bean restaurant near the ancient capital of Mtskheta.
After stuffing ourselves with beans and khachapuri we went to the 11th century Sveticxoveli church. The church was being renovated after decades of neglect during the Soviet times, and was bustling with activity. In addition to a mass there was a constant procession of weddings going on. Some of the old murals were interesting, showing monsters, alleged UFOs and Christ surrounded by signs of the Zodiac.
The next location for the tour was the old monastery nearby. There we were unable to enter the church because of my shorts, but we saw the graveyard and the garden where holy oil comes from the ground. Everywhere old beggars were selling bottles of this oil of claimed miraculous properties.
We also climbed to the ruins of a fortress guarding the Georgian Military Highway leading up to Kazbegi and Ossetia in the north. The view over the valley was very pleasant and there was a group of children playing and climbing all over the old walls.
As it was getting late we drove to the shore of the Tbilisi Sea reservoir and watched the sun fall behind the hills covered by old Soviet beach-side resorts now occupied by Abkhazian refugees.
On sunday we decided to take it easy with the touristic thing, and leave for the Kharitonashvilis' under-construction datscha in the hills surrounding Tbilisi. The concrete structure of the house was in a small village behind about twelve kilometers of very bumpy road, with very beautiful views down to the forested hills and Tbilisi below.
Cows and stray dogs were touring the grounds while we prepared the fire and roasted some basturma meat we'd made earlier on skewers. This proved to be delicious when eaten together with Georgian bread, fried aubergines and fresh vegetables.
In the evening we drove back over the potholes, enjoying the view at the lights of Tbilisi as we descended towards it.
In the morning we met some people from Deer Leap, the Georgian school computerization project named after the local name of the Milky Way and modeled after Estonia's Tiger Leap. They were interested in possibilities of building a learning portal for teachers of public schools. Since we've done some similar tools for Finnish educational organizations we were able to offer some advice on how to do it with a proper CMS.
Taya needed to handle some paperwork related to obtaining a passport for Tiko. Ever curious, I wanted to see how the Georgian bureaucratic machine worked. First we drove to an office to get a driver's license with changed surname for Taya. Then we had to pay some registration fees at a bank, and after that visit another office to get Tiko's paperwork running.
There however the lady running the office went through the papers and noticed that in one of them, Taya's birth-date had a typo in it. With this information we had to drive fifteen kilometers to another office to request it to be fixed. However, they declined to make the fix, as we did not have a written request for fixing by the previous office.
At this point most of the day had already been spent, and so we had to return to the Soros building to set up the first public Midgard server there. We met the GRENA system administrator, and he helped us set the server's network settings. We also fixed some booting issues by properly setting up apmd on the system.
For dinner we went to Stelze, a German biergarten -style place. There we enjoyed some beers from Munich together with roasted pork leg and some Drupal versus Midgard talk. We also met our host-to-be for the coming weekend's trip to the cave city of Vardzia.
Tuesday was a quick dash of short meetings. eLearning possibilities, conversion of the eRiders website to Midgard, some khatchapuri for lunch, and finally a dinner in an Irish bar.
We laid out a plan about a Midgard-powered portal for the Deer Leap people. How the portal project would be organized, how it should work, and finally, how to make its community and management as self-sufficient as possible.
To be continued...
Posted on 2005-09-28 11:29:51 UTC to Midgard. 0 comments.
We've gotten several problems of memory leaking with MidCOM used with PHP4 and Apache2 on both Fedora and Debian platforms. At first memory leaks on Midgard 1.7 were suspected, but after extensive testing this theory was discarded.
Then we received reports of similar problems on Moodle running on Apache 2, which seems to point at some specific PHP function utilized by both leaking.
Good ideas about which function this is would be appreciated, but before that it is possible to work around the issue by setting MaxRequestsPerChild in <IfModule prefork.c> to about RAM/10. For example:
MaxRequestsPerChild 67
Thanks to Jarkko for seeking out the issue on non-Midgard systems! I'll be sure to post details as soon as we find out what function causes this.
Written in the pleasant WiFI-equipped Cafe Sans Souci in Tbilisi Old Town.
Updated 2005-10-12: Some additional memory leaks were found and fixed in Midgard 1.7.2. This should improve the situation.
