Weblog: Archive

Today Finland is celebrating 90th birthday of the Republic, and so it is appropriate to write about how things are better in Sweden, where I'm visiting the first Scandinavian Free Software Conference.

The example this time is computer usage in trains. While VR has only grudgingly added some power outlets to long distance trains, SJ's X2000 trains have them for every seat.

And even better, there is onboard internet with an updating map of the train's position:

Unfortunately the train position is embedded in the map image and can't be read programmatically. It would make for a nice, specialized GeoClue position provider...

Technorati Tags: finland, public transport, wifi, railway, sweden

Simon Josefsson was giving a talk on OpenID in the Scandinavian Free Software Conference. OpenID is a lightweight single sign-on and auto-registration system for web applications. In concept it is quite similar to Shibboleth but easier to deploy.

Since OpenID can solve a lot of issues with registration to social web services, Midgard has been supporting it since last August. However, OpenID has one major security problem: as the cross-site redirections are controlled by the site user is visiting, OpenID has quite a high potential for phishing attacks. One way to reduce that risk is to use one-time passwords with OpenID instead of the usual username/passphrase combination.

Enter Yubikey

The problem with OTP is that disposable password lists are a lot of hassle. RSA's SecurID device has been one approach to solve that by having a simple device to generate the one-time passwords that user can then enter on their computer. But SecurIDs are expensive and manually typing the number sets is tedious.

Simon's company Yubico has approached the problem from a bit different direction: their Yubikey is a small, cheap USB dongle that the computer sees as a "keyboard". Insert the key, press the button, and the one-time password will be entered.

I was given a key and have been testing it a bit today to authenticate via my OpenID identity to various websites, and it really was as easy as advertised. Now my OpenID is secure.

In addition to OpenID, Yubikey authentication is supported via RADIUS and PAM, and libraries are available for integrating it with other authentication systems.

Yubikey is not without problems, unfortunately. While authentication client libraries are open source, the actual authentication server is proprietary and operated by Yubico, a small start-up. If Yubico's network goes down, the whole authentication system becomes unusable.

I'd love to use Yubikeys for my company and several of my customers. Therefore, I really hope Yubico will be able to either release the server sources directly, or at least make a pledge to release them in case of going out of business. Only these options would make Yubikey a really viable secure authentication option.

Technorati Tags: authentication, openid, securid, yubikey

WriteMaps.com is a handy web-based tool for planning website structures in a mind map -like format. The tool allows for storage and working on the designs in collaborative fashion.

I have been toying for quite a while with the idea that mind maps could be automatically converted to Midgard -compatible site structures, and the JSON format provided by WriteMaps seemed to support the idea.

So, to get your WriteMaps site structure to Midgard do the following:

• Save your sitemap on the site
• Click File -> Export local backup
• Copy the JSON to a local file
• Run php json_to_structure.php /path/to/my/sitemap.json > sitemap.inc
• Copy the new structure under the config/templates directory of midgard.admin.wizards component
• Create a new site using your WriteMaps-based structure

I'd love to make this a bit easier, but that would essentially require WriteMaps to provide an API we could hook to.

Get the json_to_structure.php file from Midgard SVN.

Via Ajaxian.

Technorati Tags: midcom, midgard, writemaps, sitemap

Ajatus, our new distributed CRM app is evolving very quickly. For example, this week we got form validation and auto-saving support, and there has been talk of supporting binary file attachments.

As we're nearing first release, the plan is to start dogfooding Ajatus quite soon. For me personally this has been cause of some concern, as Ajatus is quite browser-intensive and my Firefox 3 beta has proven to be crashy. So, a Web Worker Daily story on site-specific browsers came at a very good time: in a couple of minutes I had Fluid installed and was having a separate Ajatus window launchable straight from the OS X Dock.

Fast, nice, and separate from whatever I may be doing in my actual browsing sessions. I like it.

Setting up Ajatus in Fluid

Ajatus as a Mac desktop app!

Note: Mozilla Lab's Prism does the same with a more cross-platform, but I like Fluid for the WebKit speed and simplicity.

Technorati Tags: ajatus, crm, fluid, osx, prism

Quite a lot has been said about the Knol project announced recently by Google. While many see it as a direct Wikipedia competitor, there are quite significant differences:

• Instead of collaborating on articles every author makes their own
• Google promises to display article authorship prominently and to share profits from ads in an article
• Articles written by individual authors compete with articles of others on the same subject

In software terms this all makes Knol sound like a shareware project in comparison to Wikipedia's open source model where many people collaborate to make good and neutral articles on a subject.

After a bit of thought I'm not sure if there is really need for something like Knol. Anybody can already start a blog or website specializing on a subject and monetize it with ads. And hosting in many situations is already free, so why place it in Google's Knol?

Yet, I have to admit there is something Snow Crashy in Knol that I like:

Stephenson's vision of the Library of Congress or simply the 'Library' bears a striking resemblance to Wikipedia. In the story, millions of users are constantly uploading fragments of information to a searchable database. Stephenson's concept of the Library differs notably from Wikipedia however, in that users must pay to download most information. Indeed the novel refers to several people, including Hiro Protagonist, who pursue a career in uploading information in the hopes that it will one day be of value.

Technorati Tags: knol, wikipedia

MidCOM, the PHP framework for Midgard CMS has over hundred components for various purposes ranging from blogging to waste management statistics. But even with all of them it is sometimes useful to embed some custom PHP scripts to a site. The old method of doing this was using a custom style for a folder and including PHP files there, which was a bit awkward.

As Arttu mentioned, Asgard, Midgard's new administrative interface has been receiving a lot of love recently. This has mostly focused on centralizing features strewn across the MidCOM environment to a single interface: attachment handling, version control, component configuration, ...

Another change made yesterday was making the "nullcomponent", the fallback component used by MidCOM in case a folder doesn't have a component assigned more useful.

Now you can configure it to execute code stored in the folder:

Then just edit the code:

And it will be executed in the folder:

Technorati Tags: asgard, midcom, midgard

Information overload is becoming a major issue, and more sophisticated solutions will be needed to tackle it. With Midgard we've already taken some steps into this space by creating tools for calculating newsworthiness of stories in order to present only relevant ones to a user.

After being able to calculate objective interestingness of various data items, the next phase is to make the filters more subjective, more personal. Attention profiling is a tool for this. There are already some attention-based services on the web that work quite well. For example, Amazon is able to make quite accurate book recommendations to me, and the concerts suggested by Last.fm have mostly been interesting. But so far this all has happened in closed silos.

APML is an emerging standard for syndicating attention profiling information between web services and applications. While not many services support it directly, there are some third-party tools for gathering the data from various sites.

There are many places in Midgard where attention profiling could be used to provide better service to users. My plan for APML support is following:

Generating attention data:

• net.nemein.favorites: faving items generates positive attention for item's tags and categories, burying items generates negative attention for item's tags and categories
• net.nehmer.blog: tags of blog entries created by user generate positive attention
• net.nemein.bookmarks: tags of bookmarks generate positive attention

Using attention data:

• org.maemo.socialnews: use attention as additional modifier when calculating what to show
• org.routamc.photostream: create a new "most interesting" view of photos based on photo tags and user's attention

In order to make this all possible there should be an attention handling library that would provide easy APIs for attention calculations.

Technorati Tags: apml, attention, infoglut

Nokia's Linux-based internet tablet was Amazon's best selling computer in 2007, and top 3 personal computer in holiday sales. Congratulations to the maemo team!

There was some discussion on Amazon's listings on Slashdot. As I've noted every year has recently been predicted as the one when Linux desktop takes over I thought this comment particularly insightful:

Now, the "Linux Desktop" fantasists can finally let it go. There will be no "year of the Linux desktop", just as there will be no "year of the Linux mainframe".

...

Pushing for a change in the desktop from Windows to Mac or Linux is, in 10 years, going to seem like striving to continue the VMS vs Unix wars on the VAX platform.

What 2008, 2009, and 2010 are going to be are the "years where appliances took over half the desktop functions" - you still want a big monitor and ergo keyboard to Photoshop, do development of web pages and code, and so on. But people sitting right at their desktop will whip out their paperback-sized appliance to do E-mail and chat, because that's where their communication apps live.

And, yes, those new appliances will mostly run Linux. What else?

As I've seen the nice, new N810 internet tablet take over more and more roles from my MacBook I can only agree.

Technorati Tags: maemo, linux

Barely made it in December, but first beta of Ajatus, the distributed CRM is now available. Enjoy!

Read the installation instructions to get started. Once CouchDb 0.7+ has proper installers available things will be much easier.

Now for champagne... Happy new year from the Nemein team!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb

Last week I was pondering how to add attention profiling support to the Midgard framework, and now it is there. Midgard is able to gather user's interests and attention from multiple sources:

• del.icio.us bookmarks
• last.fm listened tracks
• social news favoriting
• ...and other imported APML sources

What remains to be seen is how this will be used to make websites smarter and more useful to people. In any case, for the developer using attention profile information is now trivial:

// Load the attention profiling library
$_MIDCOM->load_library('net.nemein.attention');

// Instantiate attention calculator for current user's default attention profile
$calculator = new net_nemein_attention_calculator();

// Get attention score for an article
$score = $calculator->rate_object($article);

Attention score is a decimal number between 1 and -1, where 0 is "neutral attention".

Coming up: APML profiles for active maemo.org users.

Technorati Tags: apml, attention, midgard, php