Weblog: Archive

I had the Nokia 770 web browser device waiting on my desk as I returned from South Africa. 770 is a nice, small, Linux-powered internet appliance that is able to utilize either a WLAN connection, or mobile phone's connection via Bluetooth.

The device is compact and lightweight enough to be basically carried all the time. It also has a screen good enough for reading almost any websites. These two factors serve to make web and RSS feeds ubiquitously available, opening interesting possibilities:

Yesterday I had to go to a store to buy a new WiFi base station, as the previous one in my home had died. In the end the choice was between Airport Express and another one. Apple's minimalist product packaging didn't include enough specifications, so I took out the 770, and browsed to Apple's product page. There I could read the specs and make an informed buying decision.

In addition to this, I've also used it for quick net banking while on the move. Very handy!

Since the device runs Linux, I'm also looking forward to developing some Python applications to make mobile work easier. Especially I'm interested in exploring the use of position information to create the real-world Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galary. Placeopedia RSS feed will be an excellent starting point for finding "information near you".

Useful applications

The main use case for my N770 is quick checking of information using the web browser, and reading news via RSS on the road. However, it may also be handy in situations where I need to send short emails or perform some quick UNIX maintenance. To support these situations, I've installed the following add-on applications:

• GAIM instant messenger
• AbiWord word processor
• Xterm terminal emulator
• SSH client and server
• Vim text editor
• Python programming language

I'm now looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard to enable writing meeting notes on the device instead of a bulky laptop. The aviation use cases also sound interesting.

Gripes

Of course, the current 770 is just a first iteration, and there are several things that could be better. The first issues I ran into were:

• No vi editor installed as default, despite vi being part of the POSIX standard. Of course, VIM package is available
• Web browser doesn't support feed autodiscovery. This is a bit silly especially as the product bundles an RSS reader in the default package
• So far I haven't figured out how to copy content from web pages on the device. The pointer scrolls instead of selects
• There isn't a good default way to kill software that hangs up. I've had the News Reader do this quite a bit. The Load applet will eventually help here
• There is no way to switch the browser to use handheld CSS profile, now it always shows web pages in "desktop screen" mode

There is a new Joel on Software post about calendars. Lets see how the OpenPsa 2 calendar fares with his feature requirements:

Enter flights. Many of these calendars only lets me enter things that start on 15 minute intervals, and flights are just not scheduled that way. Many of these calendars insist I specify the duration, which I don't know -- I know when the flight lands, but not the duration.

In OpenPsa calendar you specifically choose start and end time, not start and duration. By default when you click the Create event button the new event will have a duration of one hour. The times can be entered either by writing, or by clicking the button next to time to open a calendar selection widget:

Understand enough about time zones so I can enter a flight. Flights from New Zealand to Los Angeles arrive before they departed.

Actually this we don't do yet. Now all times are supposed to be in the server's local timezone, meaning that you need to calculate the timezoned times into your local time. Would be a great idea and not very difficult to add optional timezone pulldown to the editor though.

Allow my assistant to enter appointments and see my schedule, although some things may be private.

The calendar events in the editor may be marked Public or Private. With private events, everybody can see the duration of the event, but only participants can see the details. Everybody can see the details of the public events.

Notify me in advance of a meeting using some reliable mechanism. Surprisingly many of the hot new Ajax calendars omitted this basic feature because they're web apps. At the very least, I'd like something to pop up on Windows, which means a downloadable widget, and an SMS message on my cell phone. Different meetings need different advance warnings ... I need to be notified 3 hours before a flight at Kennedy but 3 minutes before a meeting in my office.

OpenPsa calendar doesn't support alerts yet. With the OpenPsa version 1 calendar you could edit the events via webcal or SyncML, and the alerts would be handled by your mobile phone, or a desktop calendar subscribed to the event feed.

We haven't ported this feature to OpenPsa 2 yet.

Print out something reasonable that I can take with me before a trip listing my complete schedule for the trip. Some of my appointments have driving directions or complicated notes attached. I just want a list of where I need to be, when, and it's surprising that very few online calendars can handle this.

Again, this was something OpenPsa 2 did well with its Week list feature. OpenPsa 2 is fully hCalendar and CSS, and so creating a suitable print CSS should be easy.

In any case, these were important points about attention to detail. On the other hand, we also have to decide what is essential for the 2.0 release.

Since completing MidCOM's PEAR 1.4 packaging the main remaining issue of making MidCOM installation user-friendly has been setting up a channel. This is now done, and MidCOM 2.5 can be installed in the following way:

• Upgrade PEAR to 1.4

  # pear -f upgrade PEAR
  

• Discover the PEAR channel

  # pear channel-discover pear.midcom-project.org
  

• Install the MgdSchema handler role

  # pear install midcom/Role_Mgdschema
  

• Install MidCOM core (you need to specify version as there is no
  stable 2.6 release yet)

  # pear install midcom/midcom-2.5.1cvs
  

After these you have MidCOM installed into your PEAR path. Next you will want to install some components. Here you can see how dependency handling works: I'm installing de.linkm.taviewer that requires the datamanager library.

# pear install midcom/de_linkm_taviewer
Starting to download de_linkm_taviewer-2.tgz (23,016 bytes)
........done: 23,016 bytes
downloading midcom_helper_datamanager-1.tgz ...
Starting to download midcom_helper_datamanager-1.tgz (85,651 bytes)
...done: 85,651 bytes
install ok: channel://pear.midcom-project.org/midcom_helper_datamanager-1
install ok: channel://pear.midcom-project.org/de_linkm_taviewer-2

Please let me know if you want component upload access.

With these two recent conference invitations, it looks like the spring will be extremely busy.

EclipseCon 2006

March 20th - 23rd, Santa Clara, California

In EclipseCon Midgard CMS will join the Open Source Pavilion.

7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre

April 19th - 22nd, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I will be presenting OpenPsa and the Digital Business Ecosystem

Web Design from Scratch has a pretty good analysis of the current style in web design:

Today's web designs are so fresh, they feel like they've taken a deep breath.

Sometimes I imagine taking a page design that's too crowded and sticking it on a balloon, then blowing air in until everything on the page pulls apart to leave healthy gaps.

Your eye needs space (guttering in typo language) round stuff to help you clearly and cleanly identify things.

In general, the more white space the better. It's very rare that I look at a page and think: "Gosh, they really need to cram that page up a bit!"

Via Boing Boing.

Chris Shiflett has a list of Mac OS X Annoyances:

Maximizing Is Broken.

How hard can this be? Seriously. If you want to be different, that's cool, but not when it means being broken. When I maximize something, it should take up the whole screen. Get it? Leaving little gaps everywhere just means that I'll bring another app to the foreground when I accidentally click on it.

Alt-Tab to a Minimized App, and It Stays Minimized.

(Yes, I know it's really command-tab, but who says that?) There are lots of reasons why alt-tab on the Mac sucks, and this is one of them. Combine this with the fact that apps don't really close when you close them, and the result is alt-tab pollution. You switch apps, but nothing happens. Is the app closed? Is it minimized? It is just the damn Finder again?

Too Many Option Keys.

Function, control, alt, option, and command (which used to be called open apple and is sometimes referred to by its symbol). Which one do I use to right-click again? Which one makes the delete button delete? Surely we can get rid of one or two of these.

In the other news, I wanted to share this photo of Karoo sunset week ago with you. The photo is taken somewhere near Oudtshoorn on Route 62.

It seems Apple's iSync and Sony-Ericsson phones are having a severe synchronization problem this month. Rambo had an alarming story:

This morning I decided to sync my phone with my Mac again since a long time, for some reason iSync decided that it wants to delete all but 3 contacts (the ones I had most recently added to my phone) from both phone and the Contacts software.

Not being awake I allowed this to proceed...

Since both of have Sony-Ericsson phones (Rambo has a P800, and I have a K700) I wasn't particularly surprised to see this:

The only way to fix synchronization was to allow this operation, so I as a precaution exported my Address Book contacts as vCards. As suspected, the synchronization run wiped out my whole calendar, and modified the contacts to unrecognizable shape.

With iCal this wasn't a big deal as my calendar events were any way subscribed from OpenPsa. And with contacts I just imported to vCards again.

However, this makes me a bit scared on what will happen when we start synchronizing our phones with OpenPsa over SyncML...

Donald Smith writes:

As I previously noted, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Business Objects and the Eclipse Foundation, there will be an Open Source Pavilion at EclipseCon this year. Ten pods have been set aside to celebrate projects that exeplify the F/OSS community that represents the spirit of EclipseCon. It's a great example of an ecosystem in action.

Midgard is one of these. My session proposal can be found from EclipseZilla, the conference's Bugzilla-based program manager.

While I will be focusing on regular Midgard and MidCOM in the session, we have been talking with Jukka about trying to get Day's Eclipse plugin to work with Midgard-Java before the event.

Updated 2006-02-18: The proposal was accepted:

We are happy to accept your Demos proposal - "Midgard CMS" - for EclipseCon 2006. Within a month or so, you will receive a Speaker Agreement from us outlining all the deadlines, audio-visual, permission forms, etc. Until then, your only task is to celebrate this acceptance with your favorite beverage.

Tarjei was experiencing problems with MidCOM's cache system:

[12:17] tarjei: I'm stuck with IE not letting users log out (seemingly) because IE doesn't refresh the pages
[12:17] tarjei: any tips ?
[12:18] bergie: use $GLOBALS['midcom']->cache->content->no_cache();
[12:19] tarjei: Hmm, I tried setting caching to NO in the settings page without any effect, but you think this will help?
[12:21] bergie: yeah, no_cache() forces browser to not cache as well
[12:21] bergie: call it before any output in style
[12:22] tarjei: bergie you are my hero.

Another good moment in community involvement...

I sent some notes to the Placeopedia team. Placeopedia is a service connecting Wikipedia pages with their locations on the map.

I would be a good idea to switch Placeopedia to use Google Maps hybrid mode, as there are no maps for places outside US and UK.

Try this for example http://www.placeopedia.com/?9356

Doesn't make much sense before you click "Hybrid".

It is easy to make the Google Map Hybrid Mode by default. Simply call map.setMapType(G_HYBRID_TYPE);

Anyway, thanks for making this great service! Position data really adds to the Wikipedia experience.

Since you provide nice "things near this coordinate" RSS feed I've been thinking about building a tool based on Plazes and that.

BTW, are there any plans to synchronize the Placeopedia data with Wikipedia itself?

I noticed the map mode issue when trying to place Petja's question.

Camino is the Mozilla family browser tailored for Mac desktop. Version 1.0 was released on Feb 14th, and I'm now trying it as a new default browser to replace Firefox:

On a quick look, Camino looks better and seems a bit faster. It also fixes a critical problem I had with Firefox 1.5, the time the software was frozen to open new windows. With Camino, pop-ups and download windows open briskly.

All the regular web features I use work with Camino: Bookmarklets, AJAX, Google Maps, HtmlArea etc. However, missing RSS auto-discovery is a bit of an issue.

I noticed the state of Camino via Mezzoblue.

Arttu from Protie is analyzing his car habit. Up comes the environmental aspect:

Since last summer I have been sliding more and more back to my old self. I became much less concerned of this world; started consuming more since I earned much more, bought a car and instead of using my feet, a bike or public transportation (which in capital area of Finland works extremely well), I started - again - to let myself be away of this moment in a dreamy state.

And the stress aspect:

When I am in a bus, I can meditate if I wish. I can wander in my thoughts or just be. I can fully concentrate on the moment and watch out my mind from drifting.

One more reason for me not to drive to work is that my stress level goes down this way. First of all, driving is still stressing while there is other traffic - and there always is. Second, when sitting in the bus, when waiting for the bus or when walking in between bus stops I am usually just relaxing and enjoying the moment.

I notice those beautiful icicles, I stop to enjoy the spring sun. I see the beauty of a single snow-flake, I enjoy the cold wind on my face. This is heavily connected to me being here, and me noticing all the beauty in even very unexpected places.

These reasons are quite close to why I'm also happy commuting using public transport. Of course, schedules being tight this often means a taxi but still at least the latter point is valid.

In summers I commute by motorbike, but that has nothing to do with ecology and everything to do with fun. In heavy traffic it can save much time too.

We have just contracted Yukatan to work on integrating SyncML support into OpenPsa 2. The idea is to enable users to synchronize their web-based calendar and contact registry with cell phones, PDAs and Outlook.

The SyncML implementation will be utilizing the Funambol open source SyncML server that will talk with OpenPsa through the Java Content Repository API.

Astute readers will remember that OpenPsa 1 had a PHP-based SyncML 1.0 implementation. However, this didn't work with many typical devices including Nokia handsets and so we had to look for another and more easily maintainable solution.

We should have first beta of the Funambol OpenPsa Connector in March.

Internet community specialist Petja Jäppinen is blogging about his new business venture on Bisnes.fi:

Eräs maailman menestyksekkäimmistä yrittäjistä Piero di Medici hoiti liiketoimintansa juuri verkostoitumalla. Hän oli harvoin suoraan tekemisissä loppuasiakkaansa kanssa. Hän toimi verkostonsa keskellä tiedon ja suhteiden solmuna. Hänen toiminnalleen oli tyypillistä myös se, että mikäli joku petti hänen verkostonsa luottamuksen, hän sulki tämän verkostostaan Itämereltä Aleksandriaan, eikä kukaan verkostossa enää tehnyt kauppaa luottamuksen menettäneen kanssa.

Tällä tavoin mies, joka ei koskaan allekirjoittanut sopimuksia, vaikutti suhteittensa ja verkostonsa kautta koko Eurooppaan, jopa valtionpäämiesten asemaan. Kenenkään etu ei ollut ruhtinas, jolla ei ollut luottoa Piero di Medicin verkostossa.

Updated 2006-02-27: I'm mentioned in Petja's posts:

Toinen softaongelma ratkennee vanhan tuttavani ja opettamani pojan avulla.

Olen tuntenut Henri Bergiuksen siitä asti kun hän oli 17-vuotias ja muistin, että Straturan (http://www.stratura.net/) Mikko Honkakorpi oli tyytyväinen, kun aikanaan vinkkasin että Bergius ja Nemein (http://nemein.com/fi/) voisi ratkaista heidän ongelmansa.

Nyt näyttää siltä, että vanhat suhteet pystyvät taas kerran ratkomaan uusia ongelmia.

Boing Boing has a story about a car crash:

Yesterday, someone crashed a $1 million Ferrari crashed into a utility pole on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. Bel-air resident Stefan Eriksson claims that he was just a passenger in the car and that the driver, who he knew only as "Dietrich," ran away from the scene. Apparently, investigators haven't yet determined who owns the car either.

Eriksson "had a .09 blood-alcohol level, but if he's a passenger, that's OK," Brooks said. "But he had a bloody lip, and only the air bag on the driver's side had blood on it. The passenger-side air bag did not. My Scooby-Doo detectives are looking closely into that.

This reminds me of the crash we encountered while driving to Murmansk couple years ago. There was a crashed car on the side of the road about 8km east of Utsjoki.

We of course stopped to see what was wrong. The driver's seat was empty, and there was a quite drunken and a bit bloody old guy sitting in the passenger side. We woke him up and asked if he needed any help, to which he said yes. Then we asked about calling the police and he said that no, he didn't need any help.

He told us that he had asked some "unknown man" to drive the car for him, and that the man had disappeared right after the crash. Maybe the same "Dietrich" is to blame?

We checked that there didn't seem to be any immediate risk of anything, set out the warning triangle, and drove a bit further on the road to get cell coverage and called 112. The Utsjoki police took charge of the situation, and apparently everything ended well. I was called a bit later by the police for some questions.

Updated 2006-03-09: The story gets more interesting:

According to today's Los Angeles Times, Eriksson flashed a card to deputies identifying himself as a "deputy police commissioner of the San Gabriel Transit Authority Police's anti-terrorism division."

OSCOM's general meeting was held last night. The main issue in the stormy discussion was the question whether the association should be dissolved or not.

The OSCOM association was founded in 2002 to further collaboration and standardization between Open Source Content Management System projects.

What OSCOM did well

OSCOM was unique that in a very competitive and split field it was able to bring people together from many different projects and companies to work together. As Sandro summarized:

well, what's the reason for OSCOM? it's that we don't want to play the stupid we-are-competitors-and-we-dont-talk-but-fight- each-other game

we at least want to talk with each other, because we respect our expertise and we can learn from each other

This worked quite well, especially in the first two years. I went to OSCOM 1 expecting to only pitch Midgard against competitors, but actually ended up learning quite a bit and having lots of fun.

Things started becoming even more promising when several cross-CMS development projects were started. It was an especially nice moment when we were able to demo the Twingle offline editor editing content in three different systems at the end of the first Sprint.

But during 2004 things started to decline, and since OSCOM 4 the association has been existing mostly in an "undead" state.

And what went wrong

OSCOM's biggest problem was that it failed to recruit new active people into the association. When the CMS market started doing better most of the formerly active members became simply too busy to participate.

Several cross-CMS projects were started by people outside the OSCOM community that could've been OSCOM activities with a bit of effort. Especially the Open Source CMS Summit in Vancouver this month and the Open Source CMS site come to mind.

Discussion in the meeting was on whether the association should be dissolved or not. Sandro Groganz took the task of producing a new plan for making OSCOM work, and the discussion was suspended until March 2nd so that this plan can be presented.

I wish the best for Sandro's efforts. OSCOM has been a great initiative and it has been sad to see it decline.

During this week we've hauled about one and half Land Rover loads of furniture and old stuff to recycling.

I have to say decluttering feels really good. Living in the western society you end up accumulating incredible amounts of unnecessary things.

Kerttu was skiing in the Harmaasudet team, and so I went to watch the Hiidenhirven hiihto ancient biathlon contest. The tradition has been bringing together Living History groups from all over Finland every winter since 1999.

This year the leading teams were:

1. Viikinkiajan Laiva team 1
2. Viikinkiajan Laiva team 2
3. Ango
4. Harmaasudet

The costume prize went to Hollola.

Sproutit's Charles Jolley talks about how Web 2.0 applications make things easy for small businesses:

Here is the simple fact: business software costs too much for small business. And there is nothing the big software companies can do to fix it. They can’t drop the enough features, they can’t reduce the price enough. That’s because it’s not so much the cost of the software that is the problem—its the cost of maintenance.

And Joe Suicide talks about fixing the problem of direct marketing:

In targeting your campaign you need tools. Probably the most important is the register. In register you have all the information you can get. Problem with a register is the fast corruption of information. People move, change e-mail addresses, change jobs, retire or die. With current tools in most of the offices doing direct marketing this leads to endless loop of sending mail to places and addresses not in existence anymore. This is inevitable.

What is not inevitable is the handwork of fixing those registers one by one switching between one's e-mail and spreadsheet. This is an area where it is easy to change lives in offices little bit more bearable.

We're working on OpenPsa 2 to solve the simple, common business problems with open source software. Instead of building complex information architectures we want to make it easier to collect meeting notes, track tasks with subcontractors, keep customers up-to-date and handle incoming questions.

Ben Hammersley has gone to the iWeb side, making his blog image-only. Some commentation is available:

Why not publish in PDF if you’re going to go against the web’s grain anyway? That gets you frictionless publishing tools.

iWeb is Apple's new "every man's publishing tool" that seems to lean back to the web of the late nineties. Text is images, URLs are horrible and the HTML is messy.

The way I noticed Ben's change was that his feed became almost impossible to read in NetNewsWire, causing me to unsubscribe:

Come on, Apple! First the iCal .Mac synchronization lock-in, then the PhotoCast mess, and now this. It makes me wonder if anybody at Apple gets the web at all...

At least there is a Greasemonkey plugin for making iWeb pages readable in case you ever need that.

It seems the MidCOM PEAR channel is incompatible with the PEAR 1.4.7 release. When you try to discover the PEAR channel you get:

# pear channel-discover pear.midcom-project.org
Discovery of channel "pear.midcom-project.org" failed

Until this issue is resolved you can use the MidCOM channel by downgrading PEAR:

# pear upgrade -f PEAR-1.4.6

If somebody wants to help debug this, the channel server was installed using these instructions. The channel.xml is also available.

Updated 15:00: Seems we ran into a bug in PEAR 1.4.7. Bug #6960 contains a patch. Thanks to Greg Beaver for the fix!

Updated 2006-03-04: PEAR 1.4.8 is coming soon containing a probable fix to this problem.

Mika Naimark has posted his trip report of the Shnjaka sown ship expedition last summer:

At the same time, the expedition was a good test for our newly built boat in her natural conditions and habitat. If not for this trial, our archaeological experiment would remain inconclusive, leaving the consistency of reconstructed withy-sewing technique under some doubt. So we did not take shortest rout for our voyage, on the contrary, we strived to use all available time up for more sailing. The resulting route was following: Koskosalma - Kuganavolok - [land transport] - Kashino - Povenets - Kizhi - Olen Isles - Petrozavodsk - Povenets - [towed trough Belomor canal] - Belomorsk - Solovki - Sonostrov - Krasnaya bay - Solovki.

Along Onego lake and White sea shnjaka covered some 900 km, under her own sail, moreover, part of this way (200 km) she towed another 8 meter boat. Total sailing time, with anchor hoisted, amounted to ~220 hours, which puts average travelling speed at ~ 4 km/h. Not very impressing, but this result can be stated in more optimistic fashion -- our daily average progress was 100 km (4.1km/h * 24h = 100km). Highest speed in this expedition, sustained for some 10 hours, was 6-7 knots, or 11-13km/h.

The trip was definitely an interesting one, and I'm happy to hear they were able to reach the White Sea even after the bureaucratic issues at Stalin's Channel. Time constraints forced me to leave the ship after the Onega leg.