Weblog: Archive

Since today is Epiphany, the last of Christmas holidays, I thought to post a screenshot of our xmas-themed staff page before it goes the way of the Christmas tree:

Technorati Tags: nemein

I have criticized the remote-readable EU passports before, but today I got to try their benefits: the automated border controls at Helsinki-Vantaa airport.

I was returning back from Switzerland, and although they've recently joined the Schengen treaty, air passengers are still checked for passports until March. This means that the Finnair flight still ended up in the non-Schengen terminal of Helsinki-Vantaa, forcing me to go through the border checks.

I'd seen the machines there before, and as I now wasn't in a hurry, I decided to try them. The experience is quite cool, but somehow it also feels a bit scary to validate your entry to your home country to a machine.

To enter the country you insert the passport into a reader, which then opens the first gate. Inside that gate is another machine in front of which you need to stand. It takes a picture, and apparently compares that to the one stored on the chip in the passport. If the pictures match, a second gate opens and you're in the country.

I considered keeping my hat on to see what happens if the identification fails, but then decided not to bother.

In any case, as with electronic check-in machines, people generally are too afraid of technology to use the automated border check, meaning that this is a great way to skip queues.

Of course, none of this would require the passports to be remotely readable, not to mention the other security issues with them.

Technorati Tags: passport, travel, rfid, security

As it was for the Zend folks, 2008 was quite a busy year also in the Midgard-land. I think the last time there was so much activity and energy in the project must've been sometime in the early days. Here are some highlights from it:

Midgard 2: finally a reality

The big news of 2008 was that Midgard 2, the long-time holy grail of the project finally became a reality: something you could actually install and run. In addition for all C code having been rewritten from scratch, the Midgard 2 stack also includes language bindings to PHP, Python and Mono, and a completely new MVC framework, the MidCOM 3. Inter-process communications are facilitated by D-Bus and XMPP.

A stable release targeted for mobile and web application developers will be released in March 2009, codenamed Vinland. This will make Midgard an interesting storage framework, regardless of whether you're working on GNOME, Maemo or PHP.

New communications, new release process

How to communicate Midgard's uniqueness was a big discussion during the summer, and as a result we settled on a new, more fitting positioning:

Midgard is an Open Source persistent storage framework. It provides an object-oriented and replicated environment for building data-intensive applications.

The theme was expanded further in FSCONS when we started describing our vision of enabling users to have their data with them, at any time, and on any device.

In addition to the new communications, we also clarified the release process by joining the larger free software release synchronicity movement. From autumn 2008 onwards, there will be a stable Midgard release happening every six months, followed with smaller bug fix or feature enhancement releases.

The first release to follow this new pattern was Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek, a long-term supported release that will be the last generation to include the old Midgard 1.x codebase.

To make Midgard installation easier, we also started using the openSUSE Build Service, which enables us to provide binary packages to many popular Linux platforms.

Leaner and meaner Midgard

A lot of focus was also put into making Midgard run faster and on less resources. The whole Midgard 2 architecture has been designed to be faster right from the beginning, but many improvements have happened also in the old, stable Midgard branch:

• Caching full page contents
• Serving file attachments via X-Sendfile or a separate Lighttpd installation
• Switching from Prototype javascript framework to jQuery, which can then be served via Google
• Lots of performance improvements via autoloading and other features enabled by dropping support for PHP4

Rebirth of the OpenPSA project

OpenPSA, the management software package for consultancies originally developed by Nemein had fallen out of maintenance during 2007. Proving the resilience of free software projects, the project was reborn in 2008, thanks to efforts of Andreas Flack from Content Control.

During autumn the software was largely refactored to fit the Ragnaroek architecture, and a new major release will be coming soon out as part of other Ragnaroek releases. After this OpenPSA should be more visually appealing, significantly faster, and generally more usable.

And a personal view

For me personally 2008 was also quite hectic... I spent a lot of time traveling between conferences and almost moved to Istanbul and then didn't. The new year we welcomed in Rome in a quite random company, of which there will be another post later.

FOSDEM, held in Brussels on Feb 7th and 8th, is the most important free software event of the year in Europe. While I'm going to Poland instead of there this time, the event is an excellent opportunity to learn more about two projects I'm involved with:

Midgard and a replicated P2P filesystem

Sun Feb 8th 2009 at 16:20, Room Ferrer

Tero Heikkinen, who spoke about Midgard already in OpenMind and FSCONS will be giving a lighting talk about building a peer-to-peer replicated filesystem with Midgard and FUSE. If you thought Midgard was just a CMS, this is an excellent opportunity to learn how things have changed.

You may want to have your data available and editable everywhere, even you are not connected. You may also want to share data with your friends as you meet them or just make some copies of you most important files. Keeping files sync or sharing them without any extra work is challenging.

...Storage backend is done with Midgard 2 that uses libgda for database connection. Midgard 2 provides GObjects that are available for Midgard's python bindings. Python has also bindings for FUSE so now there's a working stack for creating userlevel filesystem that is very versatile...

Bringing geolocation into GNOME

Sat Feb 7th 2009 at 16:15, Room H.1302 (GNOME developer room)

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, the developer of libchamplain, a GTK map rendering widget, will be giving a talk about the potential GNOME (and GNOME Mobile) geostack that includes GeoClue for getting user position and handling conversions between civic location and coordinates, and libchamplain for visualizing location in various applications.

libchamplain is already on its way into various GNOME applications like the EOG image viewer and the Empathy instant messaging tool. GeoClue is in incubation into the GNOME Mobile stack, and has already been featured in the Garmin Nüvi 880 navigator.

Technorati Tags: fosdem, fuse, geoclue, gnome, midgard, p2p, libchamplain

Technorati Tags: fosdem, fuse, geoclue, gnome, libchamplain, midgard, p2p

Ars Technica has a nice introductory article about GeoClue:

A multitude of factors are contributing to a mobile computing renaissance. Some of these factors include the growing availability of ubiquitous mobile Internet connectivity and the rising popularity of netbooks and other Internet-enabled small form-factor devices. These changes are inspiring a renewed interest in location-aware software and web services.

A framework called GeoClue aims to enable integration of location-aware technologies in Linux desktop applications. It is an abstraction layer that makes geolocation functionality accessible through a standardized desktop-neutral API that is easy for applications to consume. It will provide a C library and also expose its functionality through D-Bus, an interprocess communication system that is widely used on Linux.

Gtk+ map rendering widget libchamplain and the recent Empathy-GeoClue XEP-0080 integration announcement are also mentioned. In the KDE/Qt end, Marble would provide similar visualization features.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, gnome, kde, libchamplain, marble

I spent this week at Salzburg Research in Austria attending the kick-off meeting of the Interactive Knowledge Consortium, a €6,5m EU-funded project to introduce semantic capabilities into open source content management systems.

Nemein is participating in the project as one of the six industrial partners. For the next four years we will be working together with cool CMS companies like Day and Nuxeo, as well as with some of the leading European researchers in the field of Semantic Web.

The plan is reasonably simple: we will try to figure out what kind of semantic features would make sense to CMS end-users, and then based on that develop the user interface conventions and tools that various participating CMSs can apply. Once the case has been proven with the initial participating systems, we will then help other CMS projects to implement the same stack in order to set off a wave of semantically-enhanced websites across the Europe.

For us in the Midgard community this is well-timed, as we're anyway concentrating much effort on the new "Vinland" series in order to build a set of content management tools that can carry us through the next ten years of web evolution, as the old Midgard series did since 1999.

The project will be a good chance to leverage our experiences with Microformats and apply them to the "uppercase semantic web". Use cases range from smarter queries into content inside a Midgard repository to automatic maintenance tools utilizing semantic content in external resources.

In addition to taking Midgard to a new level as a CMS, it will be great to collaborate again with several familiar faces from the old days of OSCOM - people like Bertrand from Day, Sandro from InitMarketing and Alexander from Alkacon.

Technorati Tags: iks-project, semanticweb