Weblog: Archive

I'm really sorry for the state my site has been in for the last month or so. The server I'm hosted on is really starting to decay.

As good news, I will be testing a new virtual server from Kotisivut.com next week, and will hopefully be able to move there soon. I'll be sharing the new Midgard server with at least kaktus.cc

We helped to launch two interesting new Midgard-powered sites yesterday.

Maemo is the Linux software platform for Nokia's Internet Tablets. The new site includes many interesting functionalities like an application catalog, blog aggregator and a wiki. User accounts are integrated with Maemo's Gforge installation.

Mupe is a platform for building games and other connected applications for mobile phones. The site includes a wiki, discussion forum, application catalog with ratings and user account registrations.

Both sites will hopefully serve as good resources for their user and developer communities.

Technorati Tags: cms, maemo, midgard, mupe

We had a 19-hour hacking session last Friday with Arttu, Rambo and Jerry to build new "general Midgard admin UI" targeted at replacing Aegir and Spider Admin with something that follows both MgdSchema and MidCOM DBA rules and APIs, and so is compatible with Midgard 2.

Now it can:

• Browse trees of any (properly configured) MgdSchema objects
• View and edit any MgdSchema object with an autogenerated "semi-smart" DM2 schema
• Manage linked fields between various types using Universal Chooser (search-based selection)
• Delete objects (without tree awareness so far)
• Create new objects under existing objects (not yet root-level objects)
• Manage metadata and parameters

You could see this as a continuation with Tarjei's Aegir2 ideas, but with three significant differences:

• Now Midgard provides much better information via the reflector APIs for building trees and schemas
• Asgard is a single component instead of bunch of components to keep installation easy
• The user interface has been designed to degrade gracefully for text-based browsers

There is still much work to do, but I think generally it can already be used to replace Spider to some degree. To try it out you need to install 1.8.4 from the developer tarballs, install MidCOM from SVN and then go to http://www.example.net/__mfa/asgard/object/edit/GUID/

If our plans succeed, Asgard will be the default administrative interface in Midgard 1.9 series.

Technorati Tags: asgard, mgdschema, midgard, cms

• Asgard reborn. Work has started to build a new administrative interface for Midgard. Asgard is completely powered by Midgard's new reflection APIs and automatically supports managing all MgdSchema objects installed on a server

• Midgard on Maemo. Piotr Pokora has successfully ported Midgard 2 to the Maemo platform used for Nokia's Internet Tablets. This will open way for building mobile and replicated Midgard applications

• Midgard Python bindings on their way. Python bindings will eventually help making easy desktop applications that use Midgard as their data store

• Midgard developer meeting on June 1st - 3rd. The next Midgard developer meeting will be held in Otaniemi, Finland. There is still room for some interested Midgard users and developers

About Midgard

Midgard CMS is an Open Source Content Management System built on top of the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform. It provides a reliable, powerful and internationalized set of tools for building web sites and networked applications.

Midgard utilizes PHP as the web scripting language and provides integration interfaces on Java and C layers. Midgard's unique architecture enables it to provide services like single sign-on and replication. With these capabilities and the integrated full-text search system, Midgard is an excellent match for information-rich web sites and intranets.

Places to see Midgard in Action:

• http://www.midgard-project.org/
• http://maemo.org/
• http://www.mupe.net/
• http://www.cmswatch.com/
• http://www.vti.fi/en/
• http://protoblogr.net/

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

My blog is now running on a Kotisivut.com virtual Debian box. It should provide much faster response times and better stability for my blog than the older solution. I will be sharing the server with Arttu from kaktus.cc.

Switching to a new server environment also brings the possibility to run PHP5 instead of PHP4, and use a Squid cache front-end. Squid is useful as the virtual server itself is quite slow.

Old setup:

Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) Midgard/1.8.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.4-8 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8c

New setup:

Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) PHP/5.2.0-8+etch4 Midgard/1.8.3

Thanks to Torben for hosting me for the past couple of years!

It is time to move and I'm packing my things. I loved the "little family" we ran for a while, the view we had over the roofs of Helsinki, and living in close proximity of some of my friends that enabled shared sauna evenings.

However, the Five Corners apartment was part of a relationship, and together with it, it must go. I really wonder where all the stuff has come from, though.

The new apartment seems very promising: a spacious bachelor pad in the Töölö district near some nice cafés and sushi bars, and of course the beach.

I'm renting the apartment furnished, so this part of the move will be reasonably easy. More difficult will be consolidating Kerttu's stuff from Five Corners and her Turku place to Malminkartano.

Technorati Tags: apartment, decluttering, move, relationship

I recently logged in to the Diners Club extranet to check the credit card balance after our trip to Provence, and noticed a new feature there. They had picked some restaurant bills from my credit card statement and asked for me to rate them in a very typical Web 2.0 fashion:

It will be interesting to see what they will start doing with the ratings. Netflix-style recommendations of restaurants people with similar tastes like would actually be quite useful.

A question however is whether just silently providing this rating feature on their site is enough for getting people to rate restaurants. Maybe they could query for ratings in their newsletter a bit like Netflix also does.

In any case, making a mashup of the ratings from Diners Club and location and opening times information from eat.fi would make a perfect "where to go for lunch?" solution.

Technorati Tags: dinersclub, dining, recommendations, rating, restaurant