Weblog: Archive

I've again gotten quite backlogged with publishing photos from various adventures. Today I fortunately had time to push tree sets on Flickr:

Midgard developer meeting in Komorniki, Poland

GUADEC 2006 in Vilanova i Geltru, Catalonia

Death Monkey 2006 rally from Helsinki to Gibraltar

Enjoy!

This should be obvious to most dealing with open source, but the example of Linux and others outlines three points for creating a successful free software project:

1. First version must already do something useful
2. Licensing must allow people to do whatever they wish with it
3. Maintainer must accept patches, and it must be easy to see how the code is changing

I'm now running Tails, a Firefox extension that recognizes and handles Microformats embedded in web pages. This means that if I browse to a compliant event calendar I can add an event there to my calendar with single click, or add contacts from a web page into my address book.

It seems to like at least the Microformats embedded in various Midgard applications. For example, OpenPsa Calendar:

and OpenPsa Contacts:

The Tails extension is also scriptable, allowing developers to build their own actions to be made available for Microformats. For example, if I wanted my browser to support adding events directly to OpenPsa Calendar instead of the desktop calendar, I could write a Tails Script for it.

I've been a Microformats supporter for a while already. However, tools like this can really increase the adoption rates for the standard as more and more people will find it useful.

Updated: There is a Midgard documentation page about Microformat usage in MidCOM.

OSCOM, the central organization for Open Source Content Management has been having organizational problems for last couple of years. Latest setback was Sandro Groganz setting down today from being the OSCOM chairman.

We founded the organization originally for two purposes:

1. Fostering cooperation and standardization between OS CMS projects
2. Bringing publicity to the whole OS CMS scene, instead of to the hundreds of splintered projects

And the problem clearly has been that the point 2 has simply been too successful. Everybody in the Open Source CMS scene is simply too busy with client projects to participate, much less to organize.

I believe strongly that OSCOM was a good idea, and could still be, if it had a dedicated organizer employed to make the initiatives happen. But lacking that, we should definitely consider disbanding the organization and follow the good ideas Seth Gottlieb gave:

• Get involved with some general content management organizations such as AIIM and CM Professionals.

• Submit standards to existing standards bodies. For example there was a lot of open source input into the JCR standard.

• Attend each others conferences. By attending another project's conference, an open source developer can get new ideas and also build professional relationships with other developers that he can potentially collaborate with on shared components.

• Establish joint projects for share components.

Will be interesting to see what happens. There are lots of promising communities, like Microformats dealing with some parts of CMS-related standardization. A domain-specific cross-project roof organization like OSCOM could also be made to work, as the example of Freedesktop.org has shown us.

In any case, I had a good time with OSCOM. It is a shame to see its demise.

MidCOM, the component framework used in Midgard CMS is rapidly approaching 2.6 stable, and a lot of minor improvements are trickling in. These include a drag-and-drop way to reorganize navigation items and a new view listing MidCOM contributors.

We had a mini Midgard developer meeting over the weekend, with sauna and an archipelago cruise. In addition to lots of talk about multilingual sites and replication, this also resulted in a slightly clarified folder creation screen:

The main point in this change is to make it easier to understand the different components available, and to tell the admin that more components can be installed easily.

Once the Tango icons are properly packaged, we will also include nice descriptive icons on the various components into the view.

Updated: Here is a screenshot of the credits screen. The data there is generated from the manifest files of installed components, so it is the same as used on the PEAR packages:

I've just uploaded Rambo's latest improvement to OpenPsa Contacts: The ability to find and merge duplicate contact persons.

There are several ways you might end up having duplicates in the database, especially if you have been importing contacts from multiple sources like Excel registries and vCards.

The OpenPsa duplicate checker runs an analysis of the database every night and marks possible duplicates as such. You can then decide what to do about them, either merging the duplicates or keeping both. Dependencies like calendar events and buddy list markings are handled automatically.

Grab the package from our PEAR repository to start the autumn cleaning!

Midgard CMS has had an integrated RSS and Atom aggregator for several years. It has been used for both bringing simple news feeds to portal sites, and for Planet-like large-scale blog aggregation.

For MidCOM 2.6 I decided to overhaul the system, and implement some new ideas. Now instead of being cached by Magpie RSS, the news items are stored locally into the Midgard database and displayed by the regular news-handling component. This gives flexibility in presentation and better performance.

Feeds are now refreshed from hourly MidCOM cron, or manually. For Planet usage I'm also planning to add support for refreshing feeds based on weblog pings.

To get started with the aggregator, install both net.nehmer.blog and net.nemein.rss, change the Enable creating news items from remote RSS and Atom feeds setting in net.nehmer.blog configuration screen and start subscribing to feeds.

September 22nd is the OneWebDay. It is a day when users of the World Wide Web are encouraged to show how the Internet affects their lives. The purpose of the event is to globally celebrate online life.

While there are no OneWebDay events in Helsinki, I've noted the day by publishing a bunch of new packages for Midgard CMS, a tool designed to improve the web.

More information about OneWebDay in http://www.onewebday.org/

Continuing with another blog meme, here is the list of top ten Unix shell commands from my MacBook development box

Octant:~ bergie$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -nr |head -n 10
 138 svn
  98 cd
  37 sudo
  35 phing
  34 ls
  20 rm
  19 chmod
  18 vi
  11 php
   8 mv

Midgard development ranks quite high on the list, especially usage of the MidCOM SVN repository, and the Phing build system, used for packaging components.

No idea why the history lists so few runs of them, though. Maybe OS X clears bash history on reboot?

I drove from Turku to Helsinki early in the morning with a Land Rover that didn't have headlights. Since then have been hunting performance issues in latest beta of MidCOM - the component architecture used by Midgard CMS.

MidCOM is a powerful PHP framework providing functionalities like data abstraction, access control lists, templating and revision control. Unfortunately with such power also comes the risk of developers losing track of how much data is getting queried and used in their application.

In this case I was working with a customer that has over two hundred thousand articles in their Midgard installation - the same one Piotras talked about earlier. Midgard generally is considered as a mid-range CMS, and so most sites have a lot less data than this one, but still higher-end performance is also important.

So after turning off caches and turned all the debugging output up to maximum, Piotras and I started going over the logs and finding places where queries were being duplicated needlessly. Attention quickly shifted to the usual suspects, ACL and navigational abstraction, with quite impressive results:

Now, the end result of 640 queries per page view may sound like a lot, but I have to note that the particular page we're viewing includes some 150-200 content objects, each with metadata, ACLs and parameters.

In a regular situation on a site of this scale we would obviously turn down the logging level, deploy memcached for ACL caching, and possibly run a Squid reverse proxy. With those set up, Midgard really flies.

Now memcached is only being used for ACL and parent hierarchy caching, but in near future we may implement also things like NAP caching with it.

In the other news

Polish translation of MidCOM 2.6 is just off the press, courtesy of Solt:

In addition to user interface localization, I've been working on multilingual content in MidCOM. At the moment the situation looks really promising...

Pathway is an OS X desktop client for the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It keeps track of relations between pages you read using a handy network map, and makes them searchable via Spotlight. It is also able to save the researched network of pages for later use.

Via TUAW.

On a related note: While there are all these applications available make the Mac OS X platform cool, I would still wish Apple would become a more responsible company by producing greener products.