Weblog: Archive

Midgard is a very active free software project, and it is quite difficult to keep up with all the changes, decisions and discussions happening around it. Therefore I decided to bring the Midgard Weekly Summaries back.

• Midgard Weekly Summary #75: October 2nd 2009

MWS has been running before, with 66 issues released between 1999 and 2002, and 8 issues in 2007. This time we follow the idea of a Collaborative MWS.

Notices about new published summaries will be sent to the Midgard user mailing list, Qaiku #midgard channel, Twitter @MidgardProject and are available via RSS. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: midgard

Fake Steve Jobs on the Trouble with Android:

Um, hello? Folks, the whole point of doing open-source code is to let it fork. The idea is to accelerate evolution by encouraging weird mutations. Creating an open source program and hoping it won't fork is like decorating your house with a zillion Christmas lights and a forty-foot inflatable Santa and hoping nobody stops to look at it.

This is an interesting way to look at Open Source. Traditionally freedom to fork has been seen as a safeguard against dead projects or vendors, as a way to hand maintainership over to parties that are still interested.

But what FSJ is talking about is forks being beneficial by themselves. This is the model that Distributed Version Control Systems like git also promote: every developer has their own fork of the software, and merges to "blessed" repositories happen under the watchful eye of a maintainer.

This is quite a different model than the traditional centralized way of working with projects. Merging between forks has its costs, but if we embrace this model we gain lots of new developer flexibility and possible new workflows. DVCSs haven't been with us for a long time yet and so it takes some time for this new distributed way of working to take root.

Microfeed is a new D-Bus service for handling status updating and microblogging entries from various services. Just like Telepathy allows various applications to utilize instant messaging connections, Microfeed does the same for microblogging:

Microfeed is a specification and a reference implementation of client-server architecture providing access to various information sources that have a feed-type interface. Examples of those feed sources include micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Qaiku, and Laconi.ca. By utilizing Microfeed architecture, a client application can focus on user interface, while the actual feed fetching is done in the background independently. The communication between a local Microfeed server publishing information about feeds and a client application displaying that information to an user is done with the D-Bus messaging following the publisher-subscriber principle.

Microfeed service already is the power behind Henrik Hedberg's new Mauku microblogging interface for Maemo 5. Here you can see a stream of updates from both Qaiku and Twitter:

If you're implementing a tool that deals with microblogging services, please consider using microfeed for it. Advantages from this include:

• User accounts to various services need to be entered only once and can be reused
• You don't need to concern yourself with the particular features or quirks of a microblogging service API, just use the D-Bus interfaces provided by Microfeed
• Twitter? Qaiku? StatusNet? Facebook? You can let your users choose what services they want to use, without overhead of having to implement the protocols for each of them

More information from http://microfeed.org/

When returning from lunch today I found a package on my office desk. The handwriting on the envelope looked familiar from pictures I had seen on Qaiku before, so it was clear: I had received my own mystery book:

Mystery books have been received by many prominent Qaiku members before. They are beautifully handcrafted notebooks personalized for the recipient, often containing hints about Qaiku involvement, like having the inner covers made in printed version of that user's profile background. There is no information about the sender or the reason for making them. All are sent from random Turku post offices.

My copy of the mystery book is a mobile notebook, a bit in Moleskine-like style. The inner covers have a map of Europe from 1810, fitting my interest in history and geography spot-on. The book came with a pen, and had been sent from Turku 10 at 12:02 yesterday.

Several Qaiku members have posted pictures of their books on Flickr with tag "mysteerikirja", and there is a Qaiku channel about it. It remains to be seen whether the books are some viral marketing campaign, or have been made by some individual with Amélie-like tendencies. Anyway, quite a delightful surprise!