Weblog: Archive

We spent the New Year's Eve at our favorite rock star's place having sauna, and welcoming the new year with Pikkuoravat, Verka Serduchka and Sovetskoe Shampanskoe. Globalization was really showing through, with SMS messages arriving in several languages and from several different time zones. Some samples:

• Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
• German: Ein frohes neues Jahr
• Portuguese: Feliz ano novo
• Italian: Felice nuov'anno
• Frech: Bonne annee
• Russian: S Novim Godom

While not as adventuristic as 2004 when I scaled mountains in Africa, rode the motorcycle in Caucasus and saw the Orange Revolution begin in Ukraine. The year 2005 was focused on learning and development.

Winter

The Midgard Site Creation Wizard was launched in early January making it easy to set up new websites from scratch. It also enabled creation of reusable style templates.

I started my flying lessons in late February at BF-lento, had the first solo flight in early May, and passed the check flight in August. After acquiring my Private Pilot's License I've been flying at the Malmi Aviation Club.

In February I also got the first look at the Digital Business Ecosystem, an EU-funded project to developer peer-to-peer systems to help small companies to network and work together. DBE would later feature as a major OpenPsa feature.

Jukka Zitting, the original founder of the Midgard Project returned from hiatus in February and launched his own consultancy, Yukatan. One of his earliest projects was development of a Java Content Repository interface for Midgard. Since then he has also worked on other things like DBE and development of Exorcist, the cross-CMS replication tool.

Spring

In March, Midgard got its integrated content indexer based on Apache Lucene, which ensures all content changes are immediately available to search results.

We started the process of developing OpenPsa2 by visiting a partner company in Rome during early April. In addition to writing specifications, we also spent a lot of time scootering around the city and enjoying the ancient historical sites. Pope John Paul II died while we were in Rome, gathering millions of grievers to the city.

After the trip to Rome we gathered Midgard developers for a Midgard Developer Meeting in Helsinki. We amused the group with a sightseeing flight over the city, sauna and some Georgian food. The meeting resulted in some very nice new technologies, including the Query Builder database abstraction tool.

In end of April I also visited the Russian Open Source Forum to talk about the TownPortal community portal application we originally built for the town of Bælum in Denmark. Maddog told me lots of stories about free software in Brazil.

In May, MidCOM was established as the default PHP API for Midgard development. OpenPsa2 development was happening on top of MidCOM, and the Aegir2 project was started to replace the current Midgard administration interfaces.

Summer

Sometime between May and June, AJAX started to establish itself as a valid programming technique. It and Microformats enabled us to develop some very interesting UIs for the upcoming OpenPsa2 application.

In late June I joined the Shnjaka expedition to sail on a sown Viking ship on lake Onega. The trip took me to the backwoods and small villages of Carelia, and involved many different models of transportation including hitchhiking, several trains and back of a police car.

In early July, our partner Protie acquired the majority of FTC, the biggest Midgard hosting provider in Finland.

Midgard's documentation started to move to wiki format in late July, powered by a new version of the net.nemein.wiki component. The move was completed during the fall, when all old documentation was Exorcised into the wiki.

In August we got Mac OS X packages of Midgard. The packages made installation on Mac systems very easy.

Autumn

In September, Midgard got recognized in two categories of CMS Watch Vendor Kudos of 2005 list: Templating and Page Assembly.

Later in the month I flew to Tbilisi to present Midgard in Georgia. We spoke with several ISPs, the Georgian Parliament and Ministry of Education, and it will be interesting to see what will come out of that.

While in Georgia we also visited the Cave city of Varzia, and scaled the dangerous walls of the Vanis-Kvabebi cave fortress.

In October we got a new event calendar for Midgard, redesigned from ground up to support Microformats and the Pyhä skiing center activity calendar requirements.

In the last weekend of October we had another Midgard Developer Meeting in Linköping. As the AnyKey office is located in the nearby countryside, we were able to avoid the riots in the city.

During November we started fencing with Kerttu. As the only participants in the sabre course at Ylioppilasmiekkailijat, we got very good private instruction.

Tuomas Kuosmanen introduced us to the Tango Desktop Project by designing new user interfaces for both Aegir2 and OpenPsa2. Tango will play an important part in the visual identity of Midgard 2.

In late November I flew to Brazil to present Midgard and the DBE project at several conferences.

While in Brazil, I also attended the Nivea Sun Regata in Porto Alegre in the beginning of December. After brief run aground we finished fifth in the Ocean class.

In December we got the Pear packaging of MidCOM finally going. While the old PEAR versions gave us some problems, the PEAR 1.4 packager worked very well.

Conclusion of the year

During the year 2005 my blog readership rose steadily from about 500 visitors per day to over a thousand. In December I had 33,600 visitors reading the site from 10,300 IPs. Pretty satisfying growth, though I guess it will plateau now.

As for new year's resolutions, I'd like to learn sabrage, and become better at customer service.

Harpers.org has a quite different kind of summary of 2005:

It was revealed that the CIA had set up a secret system of prisons, called “black sites,” around the world; it was also revealed that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans without first obtaining warrants. Journalist Judith Miller was released from jail and said she wanted to hug her dog. U.S. Congressman Tom DeLay was arrested; U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was indicted. The Pentagon admitted to using white phosphorus during the 2004 attack on Fallujah, Iraq, and allocated $127 billion to build a robot army. The total number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq war rose to 2,174, while the total number of Iraqi civilians killed rose to 27,636. “We are all waiting for death,” said an Iraqi soldier, “like the moon waiting for sunset.” The U.S. Defense Department, in violation of the federal Privacy Act, was building a database of 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds. The Department of Homeland Security announced that it had wasted a great deal of money and needed much more. Starbucks came to Guantanamo Bay. Scientists began work on a complete, molecule-level computer simulation of the human brain. The project will take at least ten years.

RSS syndication is a very useful technology that helps keeping track of hundreds of changing websites. With enclosure support it also enables fetching podcasts directly into your music player or software updates into the desktop.

Lately the way applications present available RSS feeds has started to unify, and companies like Microsoft have started to support RSS in their tools.

However, not everybody loves RSS. Only 4% of web uses it at the moment, and there are detractors too.

François Joseph de Kermadec says RSS stands for Really Stressful Syndication:

To me, the root of the issue is not to be found in how the technology is presented but in the technology itself. What does RSS allow us to do? It allows us to keep current, up to the second, on many matters, ranging from the state of our firewall to world news. This, however means RSS puts constant pressure on us. If I know Mac Minute has published a news item, I have to go and read it because it is my job but if I can forget about Mac Minute for an hour so, I can entertain the obviously false notion that I am on top of my material and comfortable in my own work. As long as my router does not warn me of a DoS attack going on, I do not have to worry about my network and can go downstairs grab that doughnut I have been thinking about.

And Paul Kedrosky complains about lack of synchronization and RSS being pull, not push:

Synchronization sucks. Despite using Feeddemon, which has a built-in synch across multiple PCs via Newsgator, my machines are not in synch. There are various feeds that the synched Feeddemon insists never contain items, despite there being items visible in the raw feed every day. The items are apparently being synched right out of existence.

However, I learned about these opinions through RSS. Without NetNewsWire it is unlikely I would've ever run into them.

The Cyberpunk future predicted seems to be here now:

The Treasury Department says that cyber crime has now outgrown illegal drug sales in annual proceeds, netting an estimated $105 billion in 2004, the report said.

Via Bruce Schneier.

Helsingin Sanomat, which originally had a very aggressive stance against the airport, has now published its gallup results saying majority of Greater Helsinki inhabitants want to keep Malmi Airport as-is:

Malmin lentoasemasta kysyttiin, pitäisikö lentokenttä ottaa asuntorakentamiseen edellyttäen, että lentoasemarakennukset säilytetään. Vaihtoehtona oli alueen säilyminen lentokenttänä kuten nyt. Kaikissa kaupungeissa selvä enemmistö oli lentokentän säilyttämisen puolella. Helsingin, Espoon ja Vantaan asukkaiden välillä ei ollut juuri eroja.

Another victory for the The Friends of Malmi Airport Society!

I've written about the issue, and the shady tactics City of Helsinki has been employing before:

Helsinki-Malmi was rented to the Civil Aviation Administration for 99 years back in the 30s. Now the City of Helsinki wants to evict them on the clause that the airport must be used for civil aviation. For some reason City of Helsinki chooses not to recognize that private aviation and flight training are also counted as civil aviation. This is a very dubious legal standpoint.

The democratic commitment of the city must also be questioned. The decision and talks about the future of Malmi were pointedly scheduled after the recent city council elections, and all major parties declined to comment the issue. This is understandable as the city wants to close the airfield against the will of a vast majority of residents of Helsinki. This is not how democracy is supposed to work, but then again we live in another system called "representational democracy".

I've spent some time yesterday and today rewriting the Midgard Wiki software to the new MidCOM architecture. Major changes include:

• Switch to base classes and DBA for Access Control Lists support
• Switch to Query Builder and migration away from NAP for better performance
• Integration with the no.bergfald.rcs library to provide easy on-site revision control
• Cleaner page creation to make unnecessary stubs more unlikely
• Helper for making it easy to enable using the wiki as memo storage by other components. Already used for org.openpsa.calendar meeting notes
• Switch to PHP Markdown Extra for added definition list and table support
• Switch to the standard midcom_helper_toolbars toolbar system

There is still stuff I would like to do, given time:

• Implement Javascript toolbar for making Markdown editing easier
• Cache wiki linking information for better performing What links here? views
• Implement an Orphaned pages listing
• Switch from MidgardArticles into more specific wikipage objects
• Create a MediaWiki-like template system to replace the current tip, note and other special tags
• Add automatic Table of Contents custom formatter

I was again amazed how quick it was to implement features using the new development framework. With this work we have a quite full-featured wiki that integrates nicely with the rest of the Midgard CMS environment for templating, user permissions and other features.

The new wiki is now only available in CVS pending MidCOM's PEAR 1.4 packaging.

I'm writing this in the DBE Project Review in chilly Tampere. Looking at lot of the presentations, it seems to be a common view that actual end-user businesses would be using tools like the DBE Studio to model their business and services.

However, we feel that this is quite a bit too difficult, and that the Digital Business Ecosystem should be something happening in the background instead.

The OpenPsa approach

With the DBE implementation in OpenPsa, the only point where user becomes aware of DBE being used is when they add new contacts to the registry. One of the contact editable fields is Digital Business Ecosystem ServiceID:

The ServiceID in this case is the identifier of the Sitegroup entry in the Midgard database, which means it is essentially the identifier of an OpenPsa installation. The identifiers follow the UUID spec and so should be unique across the scale-free network.

If the ServiceID has not been provided, the user is treated as a local user and there will not be a further thought about DBE. If it is inputted on the other hand, the OpenPsa DBE Service will start looking for a matching company in the DBE P2P network. If the company is found, the OpenPsa service will then replicate all tasks and hour reports related to the remote user to the other company's installation.

Remote users and local users are identified in person listings by different icons: satellite dish for remote user, and a person image for local user.

System architecture

Since OpenPsa has been implemented as set of MidCOM components written in PHP, it can't connect with DBE directly. To make the connection, Exorcist is being run as the DBE Service. It watches for changes in the Midgard database, and replicates them across the DBE network as required. Here's roughly how it works:

Security model

When the OpenPsa DBE service was developed there was no Identity System for DBE, and so at the moment the service must be run over VPN to be secure. We will look at utilizing the new DBE security module in the next project.

For us the challenge obviously is that with OpenPsa users authenticate with their Midgard accounts, and so DBE identity can only be established on per-company level. We'll have to see how well this works with the DBE security module.

In related news, Joel Spolsky talks about Micro-ISVs, one of the target markets for the networked Openpsa.

IT Redux has a story about managing GTD with Salesforce.com:

If the item is not actionable, I trash it, store it as a long-term goal or attach a note to an object, both using Salesforce.com as data repository. Salesforce.com does not have any standard object for goals, therefore I created a custom one. A goal has a long-range timeframe attached to it, which can either be the current year, next year, within five years, within ten years, or within one’s lifetime. A goal with a five years timeframe could be the buying of a house for example. The decision to use a note rather than a goal is based on the fact that a note does not have a timeframe. It’s a simple piece of information that I want to make sure I will be able to retrieve when looking up the object it is attached to. Using Salesforce.com’s relational model, a note can be attached to any object, such as an account, a contact, or whatever custom object you might have built to store some specific piece of information.

These kinds of ideas are important as we work towards implementing a Getting Things Done system in OpenPsa 2.

Via David Allen.

There have been some interesting posts lately about switching to use hosted "Web 2.0" applications as the main IT infrastructure. Jukka Zitting writes:

I am sick and tired of doing backups, synchronizing settings, and having trouble accessing information. These are all symptoms of keeping your data locally on multiple computers. As a new year’s resolution I have decided to get rid of all these problem[s].

And IT Redux continues about what they call Office 2.0:

No painful software upgrade. When your applications are served by online service providers, someone else is doing software upgrades for you, and if you carefully select your providers, such upgrade can be totally painless, as was related in this post.

Of course, all these benefits disappear if you cannot get access to a decent Internet connection, which is a requirement for Office 2.0, much like a desktop computer was a requirement for Office 1.0. If you need to work offline, Office 2.0 might not be the best option for you, and you should not believe people who advertise online services that can work offline as well. They do not, because they should not, so make up your mind and go with what works best for you, based on your own set of requirements.

The great thing about using Open Source applications like OpenPsa is that you can choose between having it hosted for you, and running it yourself. At first you can get the hosted version, and get all the benefits of not having to hassle with backups, installations and other things. And if you later in your company's growth path decide it is better to run the software yourself, you can easily switch to that model.

Actually you could even run a local OpenPsa installation on your Mac or Linux laptop and replicate using Exorcist to achieve Notes-like replication.

In related news, Seth Gottlieb pointed to an interesting article about the death of enterprise software by Joe Lamantia:

For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences -- and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy -- as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.

I posted yesterday about switching to Web 2.0 business applications. However, when organizations do this they should be aware of the other side of it: privacy. Boing Boing notes:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

Again, this is where using Open Source applications is good, as if the service provider becomes abusive you can simply switch to another provider or install the application for yourself. And with DBE you can still keep in sync with your colleagues and partners.

Updated 17:15: In addition to privacy, another major concern with using Web 2.0 services is the possibility of downtimes:

The Dec. 20, 2005, outage cut many companies off from critical data for hours on a busy, pre-holiday business day. It also called into question how well Salesforce, which stores customer and sales records for thousands of businesses, is holding up under rapid growth.

"We don't want outages and we're doing everything we can not to have them, but we'll occasionally have them," he said. "That's part of computing...nothing runs at 100 percent availability."

Via Ditherati.

After a bit of discussion and goading from the PEAR community, we decided to package MidCOM for the package.xml 2.0 format and only support PEAR 1.4 or newer.

This decision meant a bit of extra work for me as I had to rewrite the supporting utilities that handle component packaging. However, now that work is done, and I made my first PEAR-powered MidCOM installation today. The result was a working but a bit limited MidCOM environment, as can be seen from this AIS screenshot:

Nice points

PEAR packaging of MidCOM brings lots of benefits, including:

• Components can have other PEAR packages, components, or even PHP extensions as dependencies that PEAR installer will handle
• Users can install only the components that they actually need
• MgdSchema file installation in components is much easier than it used to be
• We can start shipping static files inside the component package and install using Role_Web

Trying it out

Since packaging is not 100% complete yet, you need an existing Midgard 1.7.x and MidCOM installation to try it out. Here are the steps to follow:

• Upgrade PEAR to 1.4

  # pear clear-cache
  # pear upgrade PEAR
  

• Download MidCOM PEAR packages from http://www.nehmer.net/~bergie/pear/

• Create a new empty MidCOM site using Midgard Site Wizard

• Log into the site as administrator and go to midcom-admin/settings

• Set Path to Filesystem MidCOM to point to midcom/lib your PEAR directory

  • In my case the path is /usr/share/php/midcom/lib
  • You can find the directory out by running pear config-get php_dir

• Install the packages you need. Probably at least these:

  # pear install Role_MgdSchema-1.0.0.tgz
  # pear install midcom-2.5.1cvs.tgz
  # pear install midcom_helper_datamanager-1.tgz
  # pear install de_linkm_taviewer-2.tgz
  # pear install midcom_admin_content-1.tgz
  

• Invalidate the MidCOM cache by calling http://www.example.net/midcom-cache-invalidate

• Enjoy! You should now have a working but limited MidCOM 2.5 installation

Note: You might have to create the database tables used by MidCOM core by importing the /usr/share/php/midcom/lib/midcom/config/mgdschema/sql/midcom_dbobjects_full.sql file

Caveats

PEAR packaging of MidCOM is still a bit unfinished. The main missing points are:

• Most components don't have the necessary package.xml and status keys in their manifest files yet
• Actual database tables are not generated for installed MgdSchema XML files. This should be done by calling the midgard-schema utility
• Package installation and dependency handling is not yet as easy as it will be when we set up a PEAR channel
• Static files are not packaged yet pending their reorganization in CVS

These missing pieces should be resolves quickly after the mRFC 0021 gets approved.

I'm going to Cape Town next week to work on a project coordinated by the City of Tampere. The trip will be a welcome diversion from the current -22°C weather here in Finland.

The last time I was in Africa we witnessed a real miracle, or at least a very uncommon situation:

We had been climbing to the Thabana Ntlenyana mountain and were driving with Rudi's 4x4 in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. The day was very sunny and hot in the South African summer, and we were very thirsty. The trunk was filled with beer, but all of it was hot enough to be undrinkable.

We had stopped in every village and gas station to try and buy ice, but it was not available anywhere. Finally, beaten, we stopped at the Katse Dam to take some pictures. And then it happened: the sky turned dark, and a very strong hailstorm started. The hail was the size of golf balls, and as we were driving the shepherds on the side of the roads were donning construction-style helmets.

But still, the hail melted almost as quickly as it hit the ground, and so we continued with our trunk of warm beer. Driving around another bend, we suddenly saw a pile of hail balls lying in the middle of a clearing. There was no reasonable explanation how it had ended there, as there were no cliffs nearby, and all other hail on the ground had melted. But there it was, and soon our cooler was operational:

We decided: This is ice from heavens.

A miracle that gets you cold beer is not a bad miracle at all.

I'm using Apple's iPhoto on my PowerBook to manage the thousands of travel pictures. Lately the application has become very slow and unstable, and I was already preparing mentally to switch to F-Spot. Because of this, I was happy to hear that the new iPhoto 6 supports managing over 250k photos in the archive.

The new Photocasting features also sounded interesting, but I was wondering why Apple invented their own photo-sharing features instead of implementing the Pheed syntax.

Here's what I wrote to Apple iPhoto feedback:

First of all, it is great news that the new iPhoto can manage large photo archives. My older installation croaked to halt everytime when using my 10k travel photos accumulated over the last year.

For that reason alone I'm eagerly waiting for the new iLife to hit the stores here in Finland.

However, the Photocasting features sound also very interesting. I'm publishing my pictures to my own website instead of .Mac using the Photon plugin, and obviously publishing Photocast feeds from there would be a nice way to help my friends and family watch the pictures.

My gallery already implemented a Photocasting standard: Pheed (http://www.pheed.com/pheed/) and so I was happy to hear of iPhoto's Photocasting support.

However, it seems that instead of following the RSS standard and its already available extensions you've created your own pseudo-standard for these things.

I wonder if this is just due to early development status of the project, or of it will be a permanent state of "embrace and extend".

We'll have to see what happens with this one. Apple already fixed the iTunes privacy issue, and as this RSS problem is also gathering attention, they might fix it too.

Updated 18:24: Seems that Photon still works with iPhoto 6.

I'm giving over for the latest blog meme while waiting for a connection to the local Midgard server here. For some reason the firewall blocks pretty much everything...

So here are the Four Things:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

I could summarize it like Nathan Pitman to Web developer, Web developer, Web developer, ... I'm into IT in the third generation and so somehow avoided the standard entry-level McJobs.

• IT class administrator at Nimad, my father's company
• Web designer at HyperHouse, a new media company
• Project manager at Stonesoft, a security software company
• Entrepreneur at Nemein, a content management vendor

Four movies I can watch over and over

I don't tend to watch movies more than once or twice, but these four stand out of the group:

• Porco Rosso
• Blade Runner
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• I've also seen Braveheart at least a gazillion times in the Viking period

Four places I have lived

I've actually lived in only three different cities, but I guess the summer cottage can be counted as fourth, as I spent lots of time there when I was a kid:

• Helsinki, Finland
• Kirkkonummi, Finland
• Espoo, Finland
• Sulkava, in the lake region of Finland

Four TV shows I love to watch

I don't watch TV anymore, but back in late 90's when I was living in a commune apartment, we used to watch:

• Babylon 5
• Dawson's Creek
• Earthworm Jim

Four places I have been on vacation

My holiday trips tend to take me on the road to quite different kinds of places. Usually I travel by my motorbike or, in near future, a Honda Monkey

• Tbilisi, Georgia
• Murmansk, Russia
• Pristina, Kosovo
• Sani Pass, Lesotho

Four of my favourite dishes

I'm really into oriental dishes, and also food made out of basic ingredients like dried meat:

• Sushi, especially salmon and roe
• Khinkali
• Thai noodles
• Biltong

Four websites I visit daily

I guess this means the sites I really visit, instead of just reading them with my RSS reader:

• Google
• Midgard Project
• Sinfest
• Viivi & Wagner

Four places I would rather be right now

Hey, I'm in South Africa and it is 24°C outside, so why complain?

Via Drew McLellan and Visa Kopu.

In the other news, I'm now in Cape Town, South Africa. I'll spend the next two weeks here working on IDASA's new Word on the Street Portal for journalists covering local government. The project is funded by Finnish Foreign Ministry and coordinated by the City of Tampere.

Connectivity here in the office is quite slow, and allows only proxied HTTP, so I won't be able to be on IRC or access my mail too often. I'll have to see if the Townhouse hotel connection is less restricted.

Updated 2006-01-25: The four things meme is quite popular. According to Google Blog Search there are over 19,000 blog postings about it already.

And the connection problems are clear now: we have hear a 128 Mb DSL line that is shared with 100 users.

Dave Johnson seems concerned that Web 2.0 and Open Source seem mutually exclusive:

Web 2.0 is not about having cool software to install on your own personal web server, it's about getting locked into services provided by and trusting your data to Web sites that you do not control. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit just for fun (and hits). But maybe we need a list of "the best open source Web 2.0 software" -- and it would include things like open source blog servers, wiki servers, photo galleries, content management systems, social bookmarking clones and etc.

I was talking about the benefit of Open Source in Web 2.0 earlier in "Working over the web":

The great thing about using Open Source applications like OpenPsa is that you can choose between having it hosted for you, and running it yourself. At first you can get the hosted version, and get all the benefits of not having to hassle with backups, installations and other things. And if you later in your company's growth path decide it is better to run the software yourself, you can easily switch to that model.

Actually you could even run a local OpenPsa installation on your Mac or Linux laptop and synchronize using Exorcist to achieve Notes-like replication.

Via Sam Ruby.

Slopes of the Table Mountain and Signal Hill bordering the city of Cape Town have been on fire since yesterday afternoon. Yesterday the smoke cloud covered the whole city centre, making the sun appear only as a thin red disc in the sky.

Water bombing helicopters have been flying over the city in a constant chain, but the 60 knot winds fan the flames, making fire fighting much more difficult.

BBC News adds:

The Table Mountain cable car has been closed and people living nearby have been fleeing their homes as the flames advance. A number of houses are reported to have caught fire.

Apparently the fires were started from a cigarette butt of a British tourist.

Today the fires seem to be mostly under control and the sky can be seen again. The hotel smelled quite strongly of smoke, but there's hope of still making the planned hike to the top of the mountain tomorrow.

At least this fire has been up on a mountain, and not inside a wall like Piotras had.