The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

The idea of a content repository is that instead of coming up with new, isolated file formats or database setups for your application you can just work with objects and signals, and let Midgard handle the rest. This is something that lots of people are doing with CouchDB as well, but we feel Midgard, with its light footprint and native APIs for languages like Python, C, Vala and PHP fits better in the mobile applications context.

Installing Midgard

Midgard packages are available for many different Linux distributions through the OpenSuse Build Service. To find the right repository for your setup, go to the OBS project page. For example, on my Ubuntu Karmic netbook the URL to add to apt sources.list is deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/midgardproject:/mjolnir/xUbuntu_9.10/ ./. Then I just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-midgard2

Midgard is also available in Maemo extras and for OS X on MacPorts.

Defining a schema

The first thing when developing a Midgard application is to define your storage objects. This is done using the MgdSchema XML format. In this case we're doing a simple "attendee" object that amends Midgard's built-in person record with information related to the conference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Schema xmlns="http://www.midgard-project.org/repligard/1.4">
    <type name="openbossa_attendee" table="openbossa_attendee">
        <property name="id" type="unsigned integer" primaryfield="id">
            <description>Local non-replication-safe database identifier</description>
        </property>
        <property name="person" type="unsigned integer" link="midgard_person:id">
            <description>Person attending the event</description>
        </property>
        <property name="registration" type="datetime">
            <description>Registration date of the attendee</description>
        </property>
        <property name="likesbeer" type="boolean">
            <description>Whether the attendee likes beer</description>
        </property>
    </type>
</Schema>

Then we just save this XML file into /usr/share/midgard2/schema/ so that Midgard will find it.

Initiating the repository connection

Once the MgdSchema is in place it is time to import antigravity and start hacking in Python. The code works pretty much in the same way in other languages Midgard is available for, but Python is used here for the sake of simplicity. First we load the Midgard extension:

import _midgard as midgard

Then we setup the repository connection. With these settings we will store our content into an SQLite database located in ~/.midgard2/data/midgardexample.db:

configuration = midgard.config()
configuration.dbtype = 'SQLite'
configuration.database = 'midgardexample'

# Open a Midgard repository connection with our config
connection = midgard.connection()
connection.open_config(configuration)

As this is the first time we're interacting with the repository we need to tell Midgard to prepare the storage for itself and also for our new openbossa_attendee class:

midgard.storage.create_base_storage()
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_person')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_parameter')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('openbossa_attendee')

Interacting with data

First we create a person object with our attendee:

person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
person.firstname = 'Leif'
person.lastname = 'Eriksson'
person.create()

Then we create our attendee object and link that with the person we just created:

attendee = midgard.mgdschema.openbossa_attendee()
attendee.person = person.id
attendee.likesbeer = True
attendee.create()

Querying data

Later we'll want to find out about all Leifs attending the event. We do this by using the Midgard query builder:

qb = midgard.query_builder('openbossa_attendee')
qb.add_constraint('person.firstname', '=', 'Leif')
attendees = qb.execute()

The query builder returns us a list of matching attendee objects. We can go through them and also fetch the associated persons:

for attendee in attendees:
    person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
    person.get_by_id(attendee.person)
    if attendee.likesbeer:
        print "%s, %s is attending the event" % (person.lastname, person.firstname)

Then we can update the persons with their email addresses:

    person.email = 'leif@vinland.no'
    person.update()

For basic data handling, that's it! When you need more, you can extend objects with file attachments or parameters. You can also create joined records using Midgard views. Midgard provides D-Bus signals, transactions, centralized metadata, synchronization and many other things.

Here are some other submissions I made:

The idea behind the Midgard content repository is that instead of coming up with your own file formats you can just keep working with objects and signals, and let the repository deal with the rest.

It is always fun to go to Brazil and meet the vibrant free software community there. The plan is to fly over this weekend, spend a few days in Sao Paulo and then head for the Amazon. Feel free to ping me if you're around.

Unlike Android, both Moblin and Maemo stacks have been very promising in the sense that they've been closely aligned with existing and well-known Linux desktop technologies. All RPC communications happen through D-Bus, Qt or Clutter is used as the GUI toolkit, there is Telepathy for integrated VoIP and IM communications, and Moblin even comes with the GeoClue location service.

So far the discussion about this merge has very much focused on technical terms: what toolkit to use (Qt is recommended), what package manager (RPM) and so forth. However, what hasn't been discussed yet is what will happen to Maemo's excellent infrastructure for community involvement:

• Brainstorm is a tool for proposing ideas and solutions to them, and then voting to qualify them. This is a very good way to gather ideas and feedback from the community, and some brainstorms have even ended up having community-led free implementations available, freeing Nokia from having to write all platform functionality
• Talk is the very popular forum for both Maemo end users and developers. Having an open forum to discuss it all, and having also people from Nokia and Intel there would help to communicate the aims and decisions around the platform a lot better
• Packages and Downloads provide a fully open and crowdsourced "app store experience" where the community is free to develop, upload and install Maemo applications through a consistent service that provides quality control, nice installers and a free API for browsing the software available
• Community Council and the Sprint process have been the way Maemo's community infrastructure has been designed and developed out in the open. The various tasks have been documented in the Wiki, and people have been able to follow the progress through a Qaiku workstream
• Karma is a way to credit community members for their involvement. The involvement can be technical (for instance, developing a popular Maemo application) or social (publishing popular blog posts or helping people on Talk), and has been used as a criteria for Community Council and other elections. Karma also helps Nokia to qualify community members, to find the people who should have access the developer devices for instance. In a large community it is hard to identify the people who are just loud and the people who are doing actual valuable contributions from each other without such tools
• Social News and Planet are a way for the community to aggregate and promote important posts around the project. We look at things like social bookmarking, blog links and votes happening on the Maemo site to determine the most important stories of the day, to provide an "automatic newspaper" for the project

Providing all or some of these services as part of the MeeGo infrastructure would enable the community to feel involvement, and even ownership in the new project that is shaping up. This is critical for a project that has such a big reliance on new innovation and connectivity with the upstream, especially at the time of such big change.

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

The success of iPad will mean more than just a completely new level of App Store economy. Other companies will certainly seek to emulate the model, coming up with their own post-WIMP devices and their own content and software ecosystems. This all will be a challenge for the free software movement.

The world of free software is still very much stuck in what computing was in the 90s. We think of desktop computers, we do not integrate with the web. And we do not get the transformation that is happening with personal computers. Taught by smartphones and cloud applications, users are moving from desktops through simple netbooks towards information appliances.

With information appliances you need a seamless user interface. You need an ecosystem where content comes alongside the software to utilize it. You need to move past the old WIMP metaphors and the idea of separation between data stored in a a file system and the software manipulating it.

So far the first convincing attempt towards this direction I've seen in the free software world is KDE's Social Desktop initiative. It allows users to connect with each other straight through the desktop, and it allows discovery of new applications and content to download and use straight in the applications. We also use it with Maemo's new App Downloader.

Threatened by the cloud from one end, and closed-ecosystem appliances from the other, it will be interesting to see how we react. Will we rise to the challenge and start providing new user experiences? Will we build a free cloud? Will we integrate with initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Creative Commons to provide the content integration? Will the open web be our safe haven?

Definitely interesting times to be a software developer.

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

What I find most interesting are the view that the Tablet may bring new computer interaction paradigms. Again from Daring Fireball:

Our “desktop” computers’ human interfaces haven’t fundamentally changed since 1984 — keyboard and mouse/trackpad for input, overlapping draggable resizable windows on-screen, and a hierarchical file system where you create and manage “document files”. Have you ever sat back, scratched your chin, and wondered when the computer industry will break free of these current interfaces — which can be a hassle even for experts, and downright confusing (e.g. click vs. double-click) for the non-experts? Surely no one expects the computer interfaces of, say, 50 years hence to be based on these same metaphors and input methods. What’s the next step?

A touchscreen tablet isn't really suited for the WIMP paradigm as for example text entry is quite difficult, and you probably want larger, thumb-friendly user interface elements. This is where Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative failed, trying to bring the regular WIMP user interface to the tablet.

Instead what seems to be happening is that all the Wiis, iPhones, and N900s are now heading us towards a post-WIMP world. Instead of indirect manipulation by mouse and keyboard we can now interact with our applications using the more natural ways of touching things on screen or moving the device around.

This innovation will not be limited only to mobile APIs, web applications can already now know whether user is accessing them via a WIMP system or a touchscreen device thanks to CSS media queries and Javascript orientation events in latest Firefox.

The user interface innovation that is arriving thanks to these new interaction possibilities is quite promising, though it will probably take a while before we know what things actually work, and what are just fun demos.

If you're thinking about new kinds of user interfaces, it might be a good time to read papers like Noncommand User Interfaces (Jakob Nielsen, 1993) and Magic Ink (Bret Victor, 2006).

I certainly am as we are in the process of defining a new kind of CMS UI for Midgard 2.

Update: Gizmodo has a very nice article on Jef Raskin's information appliance concept and the evolution of GUIs.

• Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like the Nokia N900
• Ragnaroek, the long-term support version of Midgard1 kept chugging along with four new maintenance releases and total of 566 issues closed. Ragnaroek will be maintained until October 2013
• The Midgard Project turned ten years old in May. A gala evening and party was held in Helsinki, Finland
• Midgard's content repository gained bindings to two new programming languages alongside existing PHP, C and Python: Objective-C in March and Vala in December
• Midgard was one of the CMSs admitted to the EU-funded Interactive Knowlegde project that aims to increase semantic capabilities in content management
• Qaiku, a conversational microblogging platform powered by Midgard MVC was launched in March
• We had two Midgard Gatherings: in March in Linköping, Sweden and in October in Helsinki, Finland
• Ragnaland became a way to bridge the gap between Midgard1 and Midgard2 by enabling running of MidCOM applications on top of Midgard MVC
• Midgard was presented in several conferences including Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, FrOSCon, OpenMind and FSCONS
• Founding meeting for an association to support the Midgard project was held in December. The association will provide membership to all active Midgard contributors, and an alumni membership for people who have been part of the project in the past

Happy new year to everybody in the Midgard world!

Web Content Repositories are more than just plain old relational databases. In fact, the requirements that arise when managing web content have led to a class of content repository implementations that are comparable on a conceptual level. During the IKS community workshop in Rome we got together to compare JCR (the Jackrabbit implementation) and Midgard's content repository. While in some cases the terminology might be different, many of the underlying ideas are identical. So we came up with a list of common traits and features of our content repositories. For comparison, there is also Apache CouchDB.

So, why use a Content Repository for your application instead of the old familiar RDBMS? Repositories provide several advantages:

• Common rules for data access mean that multiple applications can work with same content without breaking consistency of the data

• Signals about changes let applications know when another application using the repository modifies something, enabling collaborative data management between apps

• Objects instead of SQL mean that developers can deal with data using APIs more compatible with the rest of their desktop programming environment, and without having to fear issues like SQL injection

• Data model is scriptable when you use a content repository, meaning that users can easily write Python or PHP scripts to perform batch operations on their data without having to learn your storage format

• Synchronization and sharing features can be implemented on the content repository level meaning that you gain these features without having to worry about them

In addition to being a GObject-powered content repository for PHP, Python and Objective-C, the Mjolnir release provides several significant goodies on top of the older Midgard2 series:

• MgdSchema Views provide a way to define joined data types
• MgdSchema types can be extended with subclasses and additional information
• Transactions are available for storage engines that support them
• New authentication API provides support for different types like OpenID and OAuth
• ...and there are a lot more unit tests, helping to safeguard against regressions

We've been testing running the Qaiku microblogging service with Mjolnir. The exactly same PHP code that we used with Midgard 8.09 LTS performs 20-60% better when running on Mjolnir.

Get Midgard2 9.09 Mjolnir while it is hot! Builds for various Linux distributions are already starting to hit OBS repositories...

At base, these products represent two polar opposite ends of the spectrum: Apple prefers to hide complexity within the technology whereas the open source approach puts the complexity on the surface of the device in order to expose advanced functionality and greater transparency into how to directly manipulate the device. Put another way, the reason that people would buy the $69 Apple MagicMouse is because they want Apple’s designers to just “figure it out” for them, and provide them with an instantly-usable product. The reason why someone would pay $75 for this mouse is because it strictly keeps all the decision-making about what the mouse does in the hands (pun intended?) of the purchaser.

What I worry about, however, is that pockets of the open source community continue to largely be defined and driven by complexity, exclusivity, technocracy, and machismo. While I do support independence and freedom of choice in technology — and therefore open source — I prefer to do so inclusively, with an understanding that there are many more people who are not yet well served by technology because appropriate technology has not been made more usable for them.

More focus on usability and clarity would be needed with most Open Source projects, but there are already some bright spots. GNOME, for example, has good tradition in simple interfaces. I recently made the jump from Mac OS X to Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and have generally been quite happy with it.

But for Open Source projects the challenge is more difficult than for proprietary products. On the other hand we want to provide a nice, usable experience, but we also want to let our users delve deeper into the functionality, to make changes and maybe even become contributors to the project. This is where new tools like OLPC's View Source button can do wonders if implemented more widely.

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!

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/

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.

• September 30th - October 1st: OpenMind and MindTrek in Tampere, Finland
  I'll give a talk about the Midgard project and how our company has evolved together with it. In addition Linux-tekijä awards, where I was in the awards committee, will be announced
  
  
• October 9th - 11th: Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  While I'm not giving a talk in the event it will be great to meet the rest of the maemo.org team, and the community around the project
  
  
• October 17th: Finhack in Forssa, Finland
  A free-form hacking event for the Finnish free software community. Expect some progress with Midgard's XMPP capabilities
  
  
• October 23rd - 25th: Midgard Gathering Helsinki, Finland
  Midgard users and developers get together to learn about the new capabilities of Midgard 9.09 Mjolnir and discuss the roadmap for the next release
  
  
• October 29th: The Open Web in Ede, the Netherlands
  NLUUGs conference on new web technologies where I'll be speaking both about GeoClue and the Midgard Content Repository
  
  
• November 11th - 13th: Semantic Search workshop in Rome, Italy
  Together with a general meeting of IKS Project participants
  
  
• November 13th - 15th: FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden
  The annual Nordic free software gathering where I'll be speaking about Midgard2

Looking forward to all the interesting discussions and ideas that will surely come up from these events. If you will be around in one of those, make sure to look me up and we can chat. The events will also be covered in my Qaiku stream.

Tonight we're taking the ferry to Gdynia, and then the idea is to head south through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria towards Asia Minor and the Caucasus. There are no strict plans or schedules, except that we must be back in Finland by the beginning of September.

You can follow our trip on Qaiku (feed) and Flickr. If you are somewhere on that prospective travel route, feel free to send me an SMS and maybe we can have a beer :-)

Technorati Tags: adventure, motorcycle

Sure, the applications still give you a way to share things and take them out of the storage. You can export a contact out of your address book as a vcard file. But the role of The File here is slowly being reduced to a role of an intermediate storage medium. The business card is temporarily put in the .vcf file before it gets injected into somebody else’s database (another address book?).

As more and more applications operate on databases, the computer is becoming a monolithic black-box that “has things”. How exactly (and where) the data is stored is becoming less clear. The application and the interface becomes united with the user data. It becomes one.

This echos the sentiments of Alex Payne when he warned against what he calls Everything Buckets:

Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?”

And yes, I agree that obscure application-specific databases are not really better than obscure proprietary file formats.

This is exactly why I've been talking about content repositories, services like Midgard2 and CouchDb that not only can provide superior content storage and organization, but do it in a way that multiple applications can share. You can easily write your own scripts to perform batch operations on the data, and receive D-Bus notifications when something changes.

And good repositories also provide easy synchronization tools so you can have your data available on all of your computers, and even on the web. If they can also do peer-to-peer sharing, we're close to achieving the fully free cloud.

Technorati Tags: couchdb, gnome, midgard

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy," he wrote. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I'm at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I'll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I'll watch the rest tomorrow.

Exactly the same symptoms I'm having. This is the reason I've written some of my best code while offline at the countryside or on a road trip, and why it was so relaxing to be without a phone for a week recently.

How to solve the issue of constant distractions? Maybe we'll need to be sometimes offline. And even while connected, we need attention profiling and better user interfaces. Something for the developers of the future free desktop to consider.

Confession: I must've switched browser tabs a dozen time while reading the Salon article. Concentration indeed...

Technorati Tags: attention

Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when they see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.

This is a good point to consider as GNOME moves towards 3.0 with the promising GNOME shell. KDE's Plasma has taken some steps also, but really, the examples we should look at here are Moblin 2.0 and the Sugar desktop. Both of them have largely discarded the traditional "Windows model" in favor of more contextual and information-oriented user interfaces.

Technorati Tags: gnome, kde, moblin, sugar

If you want to contribute to a freely available map of the world, download OSM2Go to your tablet and start mapping! My slides are available on SlideShare.

See also my Qaiku notes for SoTM day 1 and SotM day 2. Really amazing to see how far the project has advanced since the 2007 conference. Much of Western countries is already mapped, and many NGOs are working to get the developing world mapped, in many places for the first time ever in digital format.

Technorati Tags: maemo, openstreetmap, sotm09