Weblog: Archive

GUADEC will be arranged this year together with aKademy as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on July 3rd - 11th. The event will be an excellent opportunity to learn about some new technologies for the Linux desktop:

• GeoClue and libchamplain presentation (Sunday morning):
  GeoClue is the position information service, and libchamplain is a very nice Clutter map widget. Together they provide a powerful framework for making the Linux desktop location-aware. We will present the projects together with Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, the guy behind libchamplain and Empathy's location-sharing features
• Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web (Tuesday afternoon):
  Midgard2 is a generic content repository that enables you to develop mobile, desktop and web applications that synchronize their data together using D-Bus and XMPP. It can be used anywhere from Maemo handhelds to proper data centers.

I will probably also have to defend my title in the Ice Cream Deathmatch. See you there!

Technorati Tags: geoclue, gnome, midgard, libchamplain

Ten years is a long time. Exactly ten years ago we were sitting in a cramped office room in Espoo with Jukka Zitting, frantically trying to put a release together. We had been building a web platform for our living history group, and it had become useful for others too.

We both were Linux users, and back then the concept of Open Source was becoming really popular. The Mozilla browser had been opened, and there were promising new projects like GNOME out there. Therefore it felt natural that our tool, too, should be released as free software.

And so we did, with a simple web site and an announcement:

Midgard is freely-available platform for creating powerful web applications. It is fully based on Open Source software, giving you freedom to create your solutions in an open environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, modifying and maintaining dynamic database-enabled web services.

Midgard already has a quite good set of features for creating powerful web sites, and is being used with successful results by some commercial and uncommercial organizations. But this is not where the development will end; rather, the development team also has more ambitious goals about revolutionizing the way people think about web development.

Indeed the development didn't end there. New people started joining the project, there was a company that invested in it, another company that contributed a component architecture, and so on. Soon we had an active and dedicated community working on Midgard. And that is the way it has remained - a project run by multiple companies and people, supporting multiple languages and character sets. We even made the dream of having Midgard in our pockets a reality.

I've been with the project the whole time, and it has given much. During these years I've traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa and America many times to tell about the project. I've presented our work in several prestigious universities. It has put the bread on my table. And most importantly, I've made friends with people from all around the world.

I don't think much of that would have happened if I had worked with proprietary software. The community, the friendships, and the opportunities are all something that makes the field of free software unique.

Now, ten years into the project it is time to celebrate the successes. And then dedicate ourselves efforts to the new generation of the project, Midgard2, released just before the 10th Anniversary. Thanks to everybody involved! I hope you will all join me in raising a toast for The Midgard Project.

Technorati Tags: midgard

This February I wrote how search engines play an important role in emergence of Semantic Web, and now it is becoming a reality:

Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa, and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites to participate. While the Google announcement makes it clear that this technology is being phased in over time making no guarantee that your site's RDFa or microformats will be parsed, Google has given us a glimpse of the future of indexing.

While I haven't seen any enhanced results yet in my searches, Search Engine Land had a screenshot of reviews being shown with a restaurant:

So far Google is using only review and person data, but they're also advising how to mark up company and product information. Yahoo! has been using microformats for a while now, too.

Once these "Rich Snippets" get rolled out a bit further the fact that Midgard-powered sites have been carrying microformatted content since 2005 will become a big advantage. With the Interactive Knowledge project we will start looking more seriously at RDFa too.

Technorati Tags: google, microformats, midgard, iks-project, rdfa

I've got no information on the validity of the claimed Harmattan screenshots that are floating around, but anyway wanted to comment on a part of it:

Having your today's meetings on a map would be really cool.

This is something I've wanted to do with OpenPSA ever since the days I spent motorcycling around office districts of Helsinki giving Midgard demos. I'd often have only 15 minutes to move from one presentation to another, and at that pace figuring out the locations was a pain in the ass.

Geocoding meeting and TODO item locations would be a problem, but if that was solved this would be a killer feature. Maybe something we could do with GeoClue and libchamplain?

Technorati Tags: maemo

Some friends of mine founded the Fat Catherine Sisterhood, an all-female Medieval cannon association. On Monday I got to go to the artillery range with them. Here are some pictures:

You can also see a shot on YouTube.

While being a light 15th Century field cannon, the Fat Catherine is with the modern times: it microblogs actively on the Qaiku microblogging service. You can follow her there to hear when shots are being fired, or when the cannon is going on tours.

Technorati Tags: cannon, history, paksukatariina

Linked Data is the W3C effort to move data out of silos and into the interconnected web. As search engines are becoming more semantically savvy, the next big thing will be establishing connections between different pieces of data by linking.

Sir Berners-Lee has an excellent TED talk introducing the concept.

In the talk he also shows how easy it is to edit the OpenStreetMaps, a bit like I've done before.

Promoting OpenStreetMap is great. But is this Linked Data? I'd say no.

It is great to know the shape of a building, and the location of it, and the fact that it is a theatre called Terrace Theater. But that is still slightly ambiguous. Things would be clearer by linking to it, then we'd know the boxy shape on the map is actually this place.

But still, to repeat Sir Tim's slogan: Raw Data Now!

Technorati Tags: iks-project, openstreetmap, ted, rawdatanow, semanticweb

Need I say more?

...indeed I do. Next Monday is the Universal Towel Day. Therefore:

How about Babylon 5?

Technorati Tags: montypython, wolframalpha

This week is the Interactive Knowledge project general assembly and requirements gathering workshop in Salzburg, Austria.

My notes from the meeting days can be found on Qaiku:

• Day 1: general situation, tasks and requirements
• Day 2: tools, persistent storage, meeting the community

As things are happening, it is also possible to follow progress on the #iks-project Qaiku channel or the #iks-project Twitter hashtag.

Technorati Tags: iks-project, semanticweb

Some very interesting developments in desktop wiki land: Tomboy, the popular note-taking application for GNOME and OS X now supports web synchronization.

The developers of Tomboy have launched Snowy, a web service that allows you to synchronize and access your notes online. As the API is documented, I decided to add support for it in Midgard too. This way the Tomboy notes will become regular objects in the content repository.

At the moment there is only the sync service, provided as a component for the MidCOM3 MVC framework. However, a web user interface will also be coming soon. Here's how synchronization with Midgard looks like:

In addition to Tomboy, the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend also showed new advances in mobile Midgard2 land: We launched a Midgardized version of Conboy, the maemo port of Tomboy. Both Midgard2 and Conboy were also built for Fremantle and tested on a developer preview machine. Very promising!

With the Midgard storage back-end Conboy will gain all the regular benefits of using a content repository:

• The data format is immediately scriptable with any language that there are Midgard2 bindings for
• Midgard's MVC framework makes it very easy to build web interfaces for managing and sharing the contents
• D-Bus signals are automatically fired for all changes to the content, allowing multiple applications to work on the data and still stay up-to-date with what is happening
• Contents can be stored to SQLite, MySQL, or any other backend libgda supports
• All content benefits from a set of standardized metadata

While there are plans to add web synchronization to next release of Conboy, the Midgard version will also be able to synchronize via XMPP in true peer-to-peer fashion.

Technorati Tags: midgard