Weblog: Archive

GigaOM has a very interesting article on the new N810 internet tablet, and how it will be relevant for the developing world:

Infonetics estimates that 47 percent of all mobile subscribers come from the Asia Pacific region, 36 percent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and only 9 percent from North America. Nokia alone will ship 400 million handsets this year, and most of those devices can surf the web. Geography, power consumption, and lack of wired infrastructure mean that much of the planet will see its first web page on a portable handset. Not only will Internet handsets be everywhere, they’ll be open.

Via Internet Tablet Talk. Probably would be a good time to brush up my WURFL skills...

Technorati Tags: maemo

Karma: The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his next incarnation. (wiktionary)

Many communities struggle with the question of how to recognize their most valuable members. This is true also for Nokia's maemo.org, the community for open source development on internet tablets. With the two latest device releases, Nokia has given hefty discounts to some members of the community, raising obvious questions on who should be entitled to such a developer device.

One part of answering that question (and managing the developer device program in general) was developing a CRM system for maemo.org including karma calculations based on community activity.

Karma is a complex concept which we decided to simplify a bit following the model we implemented for evaluating newsworthiness of incoming blog items in the Social News project:

• count different contributions user has made
• run those through a rating system (forum moderation, app catalog stars, social news favs, ...)
• apply a contribution type modifier
• add them up

...and we have karma:

Technically the Karma system was implemented as a feature of Midgard's net.nehmer.account profile management component. Out-of-the-box it is able to calculate Karma from various items like forum posts and blog comments inside the Midgard database. To complement that it has a quite simple plug-in architecture for Karma calculations from other systems like GForge, SVN or Bugzilla.

It will be interesting to see how Karma builds up when we start pulling it from different pieces of the open source community infrastructure and external services like Ohloh.

Technorati Tags: maemo, midgard, karma

While there is no public release yet, I though to give a heads-up on a project we're working on with Jerry: Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we're taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

• Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
• Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
• Simple base data types (note, event, contact, ...) that users can customize and extend
• Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb's restful JSON interface)
• Speed

To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.

Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb, openpsa

Version 0.7.0 of CouchDb was released yesterday. CouchDb is a very interesting object database that powers our Ajatus CRM.

Main changes in 0.7.0 were:

• JSON instead of XML
• Javascript view engine
• Easier build system
• ...and a nice administrative UI

With the new release Ajatus is a lot easier to set up as CouchDb can be installed straight from release packages.

Technorati Tags: couchdb

Amazon's e-book reader Kindle was launched today, and it looks quite interesting:

• eInk display, so it is easy on the eyes and can be read even in sunlight
• Long battery life
• Amazon stores backups of books user has bought
• Storage expandable with SD cards
• Ability to send in your own files
• Newspapers, magazines and blogs
• Automatic updates and downloads via cell network, no need to tether to computer
• Shame about the closed format, though

While the device is ugly it seems usable enough. Now the question remains whether the device will be feasible for use outside the US, as Amazon's Whispernet system is apparently tied to Sprint, a local operator there.

When I moved away from the Five Corners apartment I decided to de-clutter to support a more working nomadistic lifestyle. I digitized all my music so I was able to get rid of the CDs and gave my old furniture away and replaced it with rented ones.

But books are still an analog product. As no good e-book reader has emerged I've been stuck with a collection of big and heavy books that I have to move around. Only when I've run out of shelf space I've been reluctantly forced to give away or sell them. If the Kindle approach works, it could help me get rid of the dead tree editions and paper magazine subscriptions. But time will tell.

Of course, Kindle is not the only device in the market. My Nokia N800 tablet with FBReader could do much of the same stuff, but the screen isn't as nicely readable and the book and magazine collection supplied by Amazon just isn't available.

Updated 2007-11-20: Dive into Mark has very good points about the problems with Kindle's proprietary approach to e-books.

Technorati Tags: amazon, eink, kindle, rss, travel, workingnomad

Midgard is quite a huge framework, and so caching is needed to keep things efficient. To that effect, MidCOM 2.4 in 2005 added a major feature of caching generated pages until they needed reconstructing.

However, with the 2005 technology the caching system proved to be troublesome: Berkeley DB corruption, faulty invalidation mechanisms and other problems. When we started working on MidCOM 2.5 we decided to remove MidCOM's own content caching infrastructure in favor of using a Squid reverse proxy.

Squid is quite a nice piece of software, but it also mean adding quite a big dependency on top of our software stack, and so lots of smaller sites ran without it.

To remedy that problem we have now revived the content cache with more reliable storage back-ends and invalidation mechanisms. The new system follows some ESI conventions and produces quite nice performance gains.

It is already available in both MidCOM trunk and in latest 2.8 beta packages. To start using it, simply make the following configuration change:

$GLOBALS['midcom_config_local']['cache_module_content_uncached'] = false;

Thanks to Tero Heikkinen for pushing this through!

Technorati Tags: midcom, midgard, cache

VectorMagic from Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a pretty interesting tool. You upload a bitmap image, give a few parameters about it, and you get a vectorized version back.

Here is how it dealt with the Midgard 1.x logo (with a small set of colors):

Via Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: image, conversion, vector

Like probably everybody else, I've been quite lazy taking backups. Through the Linus backup philosophy this hasn't been so bad: my code is in various repositories and my photos are on Flickr. But when a hard drive died on me last year, a bunch of small things were still lost.

Because of this I thought the Time Machine feature of OS X Leopard was quite cool. Until I found out that it would work only with external USB or FireWire disks, that is. I know that if I need to plug something in, I wouldn't do it.

So, my home OpenLink-powered NAS box to rescue! Making Time Machine talk to it required some tweaks, including enabling "unsupported volumes" in TIme Machine and installing Howl on the LinkStation.

The result is quite cool: while backups take a long time to make, they start automatically when I open the laptop at home. And the Howl setup also makes my N800 Media Player automatically find music from the LinkStation.

Technorati Tags: backup, osx, openlink

It seems that with the rising oil prices the Age of Sail is returning, even if in a modified format. SkySails is a system that enables freighters to tap into high-altitude winds with a power kite to reduce fuel consumption.

Watch the video presentation for more information. Everything old is new again! Via Slashdot.

In sailing-related news, I posted some photos of the 2001 Heimlösa Rus reconstructed viking ship trip from Russia to Finland to Flickr.

Technorati Tags: ecology, kite, oil, sailing