Weblog: Archive

Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

The whole N series of devices seems dedicated for allowing you to take that active part: decent cameras, video recording capability, reasonably good keyboards. Not so with the iPhone.

With Apple, you're given the role of a consumer: browser the web, watch videos, buy music from huge corporations. Just don't think different.

Comparing my current iPhone and previous N95, on the Nokia I uploaded a bit more data than I downloaded, on the iPhone, I've downloaded ten times more than uploaded. With difficult text input and no background applications, the device simply seems to push users into the consumer mindset.

Two years ago we handled the whole Death Monkey Rally experience using three Nseries phones. They took our pictures and video, all blog entries were written and published with them, and they recorded our stories to the YleX radio show. Try doing that on an iPhone!

As a product, N97 looks very promising. It has pretty much all features I want from my universal communicator, except one little detail: it doesn't run Maemo.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, nokia, n97

Lex Nokia, the controversial snooping law is about to pass in the Finnish Parliament pretty soon, the latest of a series of clueless, unconstitutional laws passed because our MPs are just hopelessly out of touch with the modern world (well, except one).

This means that soon in addition to the Swedish, any organization providing you an internet connection can listen to anything you do online. Electronic Frontier Finland is trying to fight the law, but it is unlikely that anything good will happen.

And why are our constitutional rights being taken away from us this time? Because Nokia is concerned that their employees perform corporate espionage using their nokia.com email accounts. Come on! How difficult is it to take the data out on a USB stick and mail it from home? At best, this law may help to catch a few idiots, while eroding the rights of all.

I urge everybody owning a business or running a community internet provider to get one of these and wear it to demonstrate people around you what the law means:

Technorati Tags: lex nokia, politics, privacy

Since Midgard does now Python nicely alongside PHP, some Midgardians have recently been looking at Django as an optional web framework to use with Midgard's replicated storage system.

Looking at other systems than yours every now and then is great, as you can get some ideas. First such idea to come to Midgard from the Django world is error interceptors, a set of configurable actions to perform on given types of errors. For a long time, Midgard has been mapping various types of system errors (and in MidCOM3, Exceptions) to various HTTP status codes, and has made it possible to create customized templates for displaying them.

Error interceptors, on the other hand, allow other actions to take place. Some examples:

• Log all 404 Not Found page URLs into a special log file alongside their referrers
• Send all 500 Internal Errors with debug stacktrace to the site developer

This feature just landed into Midgard SVN and will be available in the 8.09.3 release due out next week. To enable those mentioned features, tweak your MidCOM config in the following way:

$GLOBALS['midcom_config_local']['error_actions'] = array
(
    500 => array
    (
        'action' => 'email',
        'email' => 'webmaster@example.net',
    ),
    404 => array
    (
        'action' => 'log',
        'filename' => '/var/log/broken_links.log',
    ),
);

Technorati Tags: django, midcom, midgard

Frustrated with how some Midgard-powered community sites were being spammed (their fault, not using CAPTCHA or registrations, I know), I decided to add a little feature to MidCOM's forum and page commenting tools: automated spam filtering.

To make this happen, I hooked Midgard with the Mollom anti-spam service. When enabled, all posts sent to Midgard either on-site or using the email import tools will be passed to Mollom for assessment. If Mollom finds them spam or ham, they will be moderated accordingly. This should save a lot of time policing the site.

Expect the feature to be available for all Midgard installs in the soon-to-be-released Midgard 8.09.3.

Technorati Tags: forum, midcom, midgard, moderation, mollom, spam