Weblog: Archive

Summer holiday is now over, and as Tigert put it, we made it to Gibraltar.

In addition to showing the beautiful European countryside from a worm's eye perspective of a slow-moving and small vehicle, the trip was also an excellent field test for Midgard's new positioning services, and for mobile blogging using the new Nokia N and E series phones.

All in all, a very interesting trip.

Now that I'm back on duty, the things I will focus on next are:

• Getting MultiLingual Midgard forward
• Rewriting Midgard's replication system
• Developing an order management system into OpenPsa 2
• Adding the missing pieces into Midgard's new AJAX UI with Jerry
• ...and finally, helping Tarjei along in his role as the new MidCOM maintainer

In addition, Kerttu just bought me a bicycle which I will be able to test on the monday commute. Will be interesting as the last time I've had a bike was some fifteen years ago...

The GNOME desktop project from which Midgard also gets a bunch of libraries is now choosing a CMS for its website.

You can help out by filling a requirements list for your CMS in the wiki. For example, here is the one for Midgard. Feel free to add comments!

Late July sees a lot of changes in the Midgard Components Framework project. Since its appearance in March 2003, MidCOM has established itself as the standard way of building and managing Midgard CMS sites.

There has been lots of evolution during the way, but the current set of changes is a quite major one:

• Torben Nehmer, the father of the project stepped down as the maintainer in favor of Tarjei Huse
• The project has migrated from CVS to a new Subversion repository
• New build system powered by Phing is under work to replace the custom PEAR packaging scripts

• Phing can also be used now for generating components from a template:

  $ phing scaffold -Dmodule=some.component.name
  

In addition to actual project management and maintenance changes, there is discussion of two interesting points on the developer forum:

• I've posted a plan for integrating MultiLang into MidCOM
• It seems MidCOM should soon run on PHP5

BTW, is there anybody from Pearified reading this? I'm wondering if we could get Icons_Tango repackaged using Role_Web so that the images would automatically go under DocumentRoot for easier serving. I could do this easily myself, but I'd rather keep the package on Pearified.

While I appreciate the fact that Gizmo uses open standards for internet telephony, and that it is available for my Nokia 770, it still has to be mentioned that its user interface has a lot to learn from the latest Skype beta. You just have to love the simple, purpose-driven UI:

Hopefully an updated Adium plugin would bring similar simplicity for Gizmo.

In the meanwhile, I could wonder why the VoIP vendors want to stick instant messaging into their applications. Most people already have an IM client they use, and while the one in Gizmo at least is standard Jabber client, I would still prefer to use my own servers and Jabber IDs instead.

Updated 2006-07-26: ThoughtFix has a quite favorable Gizmo-on-770 review. Sounds promising.

Last saturday we participated in the Kaljakellunta - beer floating event. The day was spent in perfect weather floating with hundreds of dinghies and other improvised rafts down the Keravanjoki river from Heureka science center.

Faulty oars ensured only 50% of the Death Monkey team reached the goal, but it was a really nice event in any case. Everybody was in surprisingly good mood and helpful, which is totally unheard of in typical Finnish booze-oriented events. Next year again!

Lots of nice Kaljakellunta photos here.