Weblog: Archive

Last night I got SMS spam from Moto-Seinäjoki, a motorcycle dealer in the bothnia region of Finland, quite far from here. The message was advertising the possibility of test driving some of their new Honda range.

Having been in the team building a direct marketing application, org.openpsa.directmarketing, I wanted to note the couple of mistakes in this particular message:

• Targeting: Seinäjoki is hundreds of kilometers away from where I live. This makes it quite unlikely that I would go there for a test drive, especially as there are several Honda dealerships in Helsinki

• Targeting: I ride a Triumph Legend, a British motorcycle. Therefore it is unlikely that I would be interested in a "rice burner"

• Timing: The message arrived during the night. If I hadn't had my mobile phone on silent I might've woken up to it, which would have made me very annoyed

• Permission: I'm quite sure I haven't given the company permission to send me SMS messages. It is always a good idea to ask permission, as otherwise you can easily get judged to be a spammer

The targeting questions are dependent on how good information about me the company has in their CRM system. The company had gotten my number during negotiations about switching my bike to a newer Triumph year ago, and so they should have information on both the city I live in, and the bike I ride.

However, the two other points are more inexcusable. People are very skeptical about direct marketing and if you want to get through you need to:

• Send messages that are really relevant
• Send them to only people that have asked for them

As Joe writes:

Shoot your letters, e-mails and other crap you feel like delivering to whomever might get your message. Problems with this approach are almost so obvious it is questionable, if they should even be listed here. Messages might reach the right audience, but without any meaning to them. Those messages also get lost in masses of others attempts to get attention of the customers.

To make direct marketing work, you need a combination of good tools and good ideas about what to send and to who. Otherwise you will only manage to annoy potential customers.

I met the Free Software Foundation Europe president Georg Greve in the FISL 7.0 conference two weeks ago. Seems like the organization is doing lots of good fighting software patents and other threats here in Europe.

I've been considering it for a while, and now decided to join the organization as a fellow to support its valuable work and thus help to maintain the business environment I work in.

Sandro said it well:

Without free software, I would not have the job I have and the life I live. Long live free software!

VR Makasiinit, the old railway transfer terminal from late 19th century burned down on friday. We were on the way home from opera when the main street of Helsinki was closed and a dark plume of smoke towered above the city.

The Makasiinit area was in any case destined to be demolished in a few days from the way of a new "music house". However, now it had to burn in the aftermath of a small-scale riot there during the May Day celebrations. Molotov coctails had been thrown, and so it is a little surprise somebody decided to set the buildings on fire.

I liked the Makasiinit area. It was a nice, even if quite run-down example of late 19th century industrial "red brick" architecture in the center of Helsinki. It had housed several events that I'd been to, like the Medieval Fair in 1998.

Makasiinit had been the subject of a long and typical political struggle. As Maud puts it, maybe it was better for the buildings "to burn out than fade away".

Quite often it is the cool buildings that must perish.

Arttu and others at the office are now tuning the Midgard UI with these goals

• Support the new features of MidCOM 2.5
• Be more visible to the users
• Add support for contextual help

Some examples of the first, Firefox-only toolbar are now available. I tested them on a Nokia 770, and they seem to be working just fine:

This is promising as I definitely want to be able to manage my websites using the small internet tablet.

We're in process of making a new beta release of OpenPsa 2. While there are new major features like sales project management and phone interview support, I wanted to also mention some of the small things that are happening.

Skype integration. If your contacts are using the Skype VoIP service their presence is automatically displayed in contact listings. You can start a call by clicking the Skype name.

We will later roll the Skype integration into Projects and Calendar to enable easy conference calling with the participants.

Task status history. Ever wondered when a project was started, or when a client approved it? Now Projects displays the full status history including task acceptance by resources in easy format:

If resources are remote DBE users they will be identified by a separate icon in the status history lists.

Automatic relations. If you archive email messages or other documents into OpenPsa's Wiki notes manager, they will automatically be connected to the potentially related projects, tasks and sales projects. You can confirm or remove the relation with a single click:

The idea is to make the maintenance of a comprehensive CRM record in the system easy, but still not clutter the projects and tasks with unconnected information.

Buddy list integration. Since OpenPsa2 supports synchronizing events and contacts to mobile devices through the Funambol system we needed some way to limit which contacts to synchronize. There can be thousands of contact records in a company's CRM database and synchronizing all of those would completely overwhelm a mobile phone.

So we instead synchronize only those contacts that are in user's buddy list. The buddies can be added or removed manually, and the system also automatically adds new project participants and sales contacts to the list.

We're currently struggling over contract terms related to a large outsourced Open Source development project. As the intellectual property terms seem to be difficult to many I thought to summarize the terms I feel comfortable with:

1. The ownership of the intellectual property can remain at contractor or customer, depending on the situation
2. The project must be made available under an OSI-approved Open Source license
3. The code and documentation must be managed in a publicly available version control repository

The first and second term should be quite obvious. Usually the IP rights are best kept in ownership of the contractor, or given to a common governing body like Apache Software Foundation or Free Software Foundation Europe.

But what is very important for sustainability of the project is the availability of the version control repository. Third parties must be able to see what is going on with the development and be able to participate. Good options for such repositories include SourceForge and Tigris.

I've written before how Nokia 770 is the real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The device already gives an ubiquitous access to the web, and now with the upcoming new OS release, to Jabber chat and VoIP calls.

However, what has been severely missing from a mobile device earlier has been information about the place the user is in. For that, the Maemo Mapper is an important first piece - maps and position.

The application is still new, and as it doesn't have any formal agreement with Google Maps requires a bit of manual setup, but it still is able to provide a nicer user experience than some commercial navigation packages I've seen.

Now the next obvious thing would be to enable it to use other sources for the position information besides a GPS receiver. Plazes integration would enable users to gain their position from WiFi access points without need for additional hardware.

And while we're at it, it would be very cool to be able to retrieve nearby Placeopedia spots and populate those to the calendar. And there it would be, a device that would automatically show your position on a map and show interesting things nearby (with Wikipedia links for more info), whether or not a GPS device is available. Like Nokia says:

It's where you're at.

What is remarkable about this process is that Maemo Mapper happened without any knowledge or interference from Nokia (or Google I guess). This shows the power of a free development ecosystem. I mentioned this also earlier:

Now what is especially cool about the N770 and WikiPedia combination is that there is no central authority to convince to be able to build this. WikiPedia is open content, and Nokia 770's platform is fully open, meaning that anybody can just sit down and implement this.

It remains to be seen is whether Nokia and their newfound partner Google will embrace the Hitchhiker's Guide idea and start supporting apps like Maemo Mapper.

Updated 18:07Z: On a second thought, we might be willing to sponsor Plazes integration to Nokia 770 (and Maemo Mapper) a bit. If somebody is interested in working on that, please contact me.

Piotras remarked that the process started in East European Midgard Developer Meeting three years ago to build a Midgard 2 on top of the glib library is now a reality.

While the Ruby bindings didn't get maintained, the PHP and Java bindings are doing well, and the soon-to-be-released OpenPsa 2 is the first really legacy-free Midgard2 application.

May 19th is the Open Discussion Day. The idea is to promote open instant messaging protocols over the proprietary and closed ones:

Have you ever imagined what would Internet be without an open email protocol? This is exactly the instant messaging world we are living in. This Friday, May 19, help promote open standards for IM. Don't use proprietary IM such as AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo. For one day, use only IM with an open protocol such as Google Talk, which uses Jabber.

I strongly believe in Free Software and Open Standards as the building blocks of the information society, and as such embraced the Jabber network when it became relevant and secure enough for me.

Jabber works really well as an instant messaging platform. It can be used openly or in encrypted format, depending on the need. I really recommend getting rid of the proprietary networks and switching to Jabber.

Updated 19:56Z: Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, I have to admit that I'm a Skype user even though it is a proprietary and closed network. For now there are unfortunately no adequate open alternatives, although some might be coming.

Updated 2006-05-23: Gizmo Project's VoIP client follows the open SIP standard and still allows calling in and out with regular landline numbers. Once they have CallIn numbers to Finland it could become a real Skype contender. And Nokia 770 support is definitely a bonus:

The upgraded Internet Tablet software platform can also support SIP based VoIP solutions for broadband business benefit. Standalone software applications, like the popular Gizmo Project by SIPPhone Inc, is planned to be available for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. The Gizmo Project has a rich feature set including the capability to make and receive calls from public telephony networks.

Updated 2006-05-28: IM federation is a site promoting interconnected IM networks and open standards.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Open Tuesday's Nokia 770 Application Development Competition on Planet Maemo yet.

The competition's goal is to find new applications targeted to Nokia 770 Open Source Internet tablet. There are three categories in the competition:

1. Entertainment Applications
2. Business Applications
3. Vertical Solutions

The winners will receive a Nokia 770 device.

Application development competition sounds like actual app would need to be developed, but reading the rules it seems just an idea is enough.

While I already have a 770, this could still be a good opportunity to hash out my ideas for Nokia 770 as the real hitchhiker's guide.

Via Finnish Centre for Open Source Software.

Montenegro (Crna Gora in the slavic languages) voted for independence yesterday. Hopefully the split from Serbia happens peacefully.

I rode through the country on the way home from my Black Sea motorcycle trip in 2004, and it is a complete motorcyclists' paradise. Empty, curvy roads through breathtakingly beautiful mountains, gorges and passes. And all of it a short ferry trip away from Italy.

Entry to the country from UN-administered Kosovo was interesting. No entry stamps or such, as those might make further travel in Serbia difficult. In any case, Montenegro is definitely a place worth a visit.

More Montenegro pictures can be found in my To the Black Sea gallery

Another minor feature worth mentioning about: We today added a notification manager into the OpenPsa 2 system.

With the notification manager users and groups can control what things they want to be notified of and how.

The first OpenPsa component to implement notifications is OpenPsa Calendar, allowing users to choose whether they get emailed about new events or not:

For now the notification manager supports only emailing or disabling notices, but other transports are being planned. For some things SMS, Jabber or even Growl could make more sense. For example, it would be nice to get a Growl notice when a client approves a completed project.

The inspiration for creating a sane way to manage notices was the silly amount of informational popups provided by the Hearts of Iron strategy game we played yesterday after sauna.

I've been totally swamped by the number of photos taken during the last eight months of travel, and am lagging badly behind on publishing the photos. To help sort things out, I've now registered a Flickr account.

The FlickrExport tool makes it very easy to publish the pictures from iPhoto, the application which I use to manage the pictures on my laptop:

Using Flickr for photo publishing fits well with my "IT strategy". I can have the photos available for three usage areas:

1. Offline and desktop access: iPhoto and the Nokia 770 image viewer
2. Sharing: Flickr
3. Archival: Synchronizing the photos from Flickr to Midgard using PhpFlickr

I still need to implement the Flickr synchronization support into Midgard, but I trust this will be easy, especially as I already have similar thing going with bookmarks synchronization from del.icio.us and news subscription sync from Bloglines.

In any case, the first trips to end up on Flickr are:

• Cape Town and Karoo desert, 2006
• Dallas through Las Vegas to San Francisco and back, 2006
• Porto Alegre, Curitiba and Sao Paulo, 2006

There are also three ancient photo sets I thought to have lost posted by Henri Hovi:

• Atlanta, 2000
• San Francisco, 2000
• Linux Expo Madrid, 2001

If you have an RSS reader or iPhoto, you can subscribe to my picture feed as a PhotoCast.

MidCOM has had a comprehensive Access Control Lists system since last summer, but its usage has been hindered by lack of an easy management tool. That is now fixed with the first stable release of the Midgard ACL editor.

The editor supports both regular group assignees and the "magic" assignees like EVERYONE. All assignees that have a privilege to the current object are shown in the management tool, and new assignees can be added from the pulldown:

For now adding persons or virtual groups as assignees is not supported by the UI, but that will be fixed soon.

The ACL editor is already hooked into several of the main MidCOM components, and into the folder management. To add it to other components the component must use the MidCOM toolbar service, and call the following during handle phase of execution:

// Add the permission setting link for the current object
$this->_view_toolbar->bind_to($current_object);

Updated 2006-08-17: Or, even more preferably with MidCOM 2.6.0beta2 or newer:

// Register the page with metadata service and toolbars
$_MIDCOM->bind_view_to_object($current_object);

Amnesty International is campaigning against Internet censorship:

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

You can sign the pledge that will be presented in an UN conference this November. You can also join to the effort by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site.

Via Slashdot.

We have now been using Jabber and Psi for secure instant messaging with client and partners for some months. However, I haven't been completely happy with this setup for several reasons:

• Psi's user interface feels quite clunky and "non-Mac-like"
• If GPG encryption is configured Psi refuses to start if key isn't present
• If you remove the USB drive containing the GPG keys Psi crashes

Jabber itself has been working just great, and as it is a federated network we've been able to talk with people on multiple IM providers. Gmail's Google Talk integration has proven to be a convenient way to chat when at a client's computer. However, I haven't been entirely happy with the client itself.

While looking for better alternatives I decided to test Adium, the native Mac instant messaging application built on top of GAIM's multi-protocol libraries. Adium uses Off-the-Record encryption for securing the conversations. OTR has several advantages over GPG for IM purposes and supports several clients including Adium, GAIM and Trillian. We'll have to see how well OTR works over some weeks of testing.

Other nice things about Adium include Plazes integration, Growl notifications and support for the Gizmo VoIP network.

We haven't yet made decisions about Gizmo vs. Skype. While Skype has a much larger user base, Gizmo follows open standards and so would fit better into our open source strategy. Zfone security and the possible upcoming Nokia 770 integration would also be big bonuses.

Tony Byrne of CMS Watch notes that there is nothing special about the web any more:

Forthwith, the following terms, "web, website, webcast, internet, intranet, the net" shall merit only lower-case treatment. So be it. The web has become part of the fabric of business and, increasingly, personal information exchange. It's become less of a place and more of an approach -- or put another way, more of an adjective than a noun.

About time, I think.