Henri Bergius - Life

Mobile blogging, the past and the future

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog has been running more or less continuously since mid-nineties. The site has existed in multiple forms, and with different ways to publish. But what’s common is that at almost all points there was a mechanism to publish while on the move.

Psion, documents over FTP

In the early 2000s we were into adventure motorcycling. To be able to share our adventures, we implemented a way to publish blogs while on the go. The device that enabled this was the Psion Series 5, a handheld computer that was very much a device ahead of its time.

The Psion had a reasonably sized keyboard and a good native word processing app. And battery life good for weeks of usage. Writing while underway was easy. The Psion could use a mobile phone as a modem over an infrared connection, and with that we could upload the documents to a server over FTP.

Server-side, a cron job would grab the new documents, converting them to HTML and adding them to our CMS.

In the early days of GPRS, getting this to work while roaming was quite tricky. But the system served us well for years.

If we wanted to include photos to the stories, we’d have to find an Internet cafe.

To the Alps is a post from these times. Lots more in the motorcycling category

SMS and MMS

For an even more mobile setup, I implemented an SMS-based blogging system. We had an old phone connected to a computer back in the office, and I could write to my blog by simply sending a text. These would automatically end up as a new paragraph in the latest post. If I started the text with NEWPOST, an empty blog post would be created with the rest of that message’s text as the title.

In the Caucasus is a good example of a post from this era

As I got into neogeography, I could also send a NEWPOSITION message. This would update my position on the map, connecting weather metadata to the posts.

As camera phones became available, we wanted to do pictures too. For the Death Monkey rally where we rode minimotorcycles from Helsinki to Gibraltar, we implemented an MMS-based system. With that the entries could include both text and pictures. But for that you needed a gateway, which was really only realistic for an event with sponsors.

Mystery of the Missing Monkey is typical. Some more in Internet Archive

Photos over email

A much easier setup than MMS was to slightly come back to the old Psion setup, but instead of word documents, sending email with picture attachments. This was something that the new breed of (pre-iPhone) smartphones were capable of. And by now the roaming question was mostly sorted.

And so my blog included a new “moblog” section. This is where I could share my daily activities as poor-quality pictures. Sort of how people would use Instagram a few years later.

Internet Archive has some of my old moblogs but nowadays, I post similar stuff on Pixelfed

Pause

Then there was sort of a long pause in mobile blogging advancements. Modern smartphones, data roaming, and WiFi hotspots had become ubiquitous.

In the meanwhile the blog also got migrated to a Jekyll-based system hosted on AWS. That means the old Midgard-based integrations were off the table.

And I traveled off-the-grid rarely enough that it didn’t make sense to develop a system.

But now that we’re sailing offshore, that has changed. Time for new systems and new ideas. Or maybe just a rehash of the old ones?

Starlink, Internet from Outer Space

Most cruising boats - ours included - now run the Starlink satellite broadband system. This enables full Internet, even in the middle of an ocean, even video calls! With this, we can use normal blogging tools. The usual one for us is GitJournal, which makes it easy to write Jekyll-style Markdown posts and push them to GitHub.

However, Starlink is a complicated, energy-hungry, and fragile system on an offshore boat. The policies might change at any time preventing our way of using it, and also the dishy itself, or the way we power it may fail.

But despite what you’d think, even on a nerdy boat like ours, loss of Internet connectivity is not an emergency. And this is where the old-style mobile blogging mechanisms come handy.

Any of the 2025 Atlantic crossing posts is a good example of this setup in action

Inreach, texting with the cloud

Our backup system to Starlink is the Garmin Inreach. This is a tiny battery-powered device that connects to the Iridium satellite constellation. It allows tracking as well as basic text messaging.

When we head offshore we always enable tracking on the Inreach. This allows both our blog and our friends ashore to follow our progress.

I also made a simple integration where text updates sent to Garmin MapShare get fetched and published on our blog. Right now this is just plain text-based entries, but one could easily implement a command system similar to what I had over SMS back in the day.

One benefit of the Inreach is that we can also take it with us when we go on land adventures. And it’d even enable rudimentary communications if we found ourselves in a liferaft.

There are various InReach integration hacks that could be used for more sophisticated data transfer

Sailmail and email over HF radio

The other potential backup for Starlink failures would be to go seriously old-school. It is possible to get email access via a SSB radio and a Pactor (or Vara) modem.

Our boat is already equipped with an isolated aft stay that can be used as an antenna. And with the popularity of Starlink, many cruisers are offloading their old HF radios.

Licensing-wise this system could be used either as a marine HF radio (requiring a Long Range Certificate), or amateur radio. So that part is something I need to work on. Thankfully post-COVID, radio amateur license exams can be done online.

With this setup we could send and receive text-based email. The Airmail application used for this can even do some automatic templating for position reports. We’d then need a mailbox that can receive these mails, and some automation to fetch and publish.

Sailmail and No Foreign Land support structured data via email to update position. Their formats could be useful inspiration

My blog, the 2017 edition

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I guess every five years is a good cadence for blog redesigns. This year’s edition started as a rewrite of the technical implementation, but I ended up also updating the visuals. Here I’ll go through the design goals, and how I met them.

More robust and secure delivery

This year the web has been strongly turning towards encryption. While my site doesn’t contain any interactive elements, using HTTPS still makes it harder for malicious parties to track and modify the contents people read.

For the past five years, my blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages. While otherwise that has been a pretty robust solution, they sadly don’t support SSL for custom domains. A common workaround would be to utilize Cloudflare as a HTTPS proxy, but that only works if you let them manage your domain. Since bergie.iki.fi is a subdomain, that was off the cards.

Instead, what I did was turn towards Amazon Web Services. I used Amazon Certificate Manager with my iki subdomain to get an SSL certificate, and utilized Travis CI to build the Jekyll site and upload to S3.

From there the site updates are served using Amazon CloudFront CDN, routed using Route53.

With this, I only need to push new changes to this site’s GitHub repository, and robots will take care of the rest, from producing the HTML pages to distributing them via a global content delivery network.

And, I get the friendly green lock icon.

Easier image rescaling

I moved the site from Midgard CMS to the Jekyll static site generator in 2012. At that point, images were stored in the same GitHub repository alongside the textual contents.

However, the sheer volume of pictures accumulated on this site over the years made the repository quite unwieldy, and so I moved them to Amazon S3 couple of years ago.

This made working with different sizes of images a bit more unwieldy, as I’d have to produce the different variants locally and upload them separately.

Now, with the new redesign I built an Amazon Lambda function to resize images on-demand. My solution is implemented in NoFlo, roughly following the ideas from this tutorial but utilizing the excellent noflo-sharp library.

This is a topic I should write about in more detail, but it turns out NoFlo works really well with Amazon Lambda. You can use any Node.js NoFlo graph there by simply wrapping it using the asCallback embedding API.

The end result is that I only need to upload original size images to S3 using some tool (NoFlo, s3cmd, AWS console, or the nice DropShare app), and I can get different sizes by tweaking the URL.

I could have gone with ImgFlo, but right now I need only rescaling, and running the whole GIMP engine felt like an overkill.

New visuals

After the technical side of the blog revamp was done, I turned towards the design aspects. I wanted more color, and also to benefit from the features of the modern web. This meant that performance-hindering things like Bootstrap, jQuery, and Google Fonts were out, since nowadays you can do pretty nice sites with pure CSS alone.

In addition to the better CDN setup, the redesign improved the site’s PageSpeed score. And I think it looks pretty good.

Here’s the front page:

For reference, here is how the 2012 edition looked like:

I also spent a bit of time to make sure the site looks nice on both smartphones and tablets, since those are the devices most people use to browse the web these days.

Here is how the site looks like on different devices, courtesy of Am I Responsive

Better content discoverability

This site has over 1000 articles, and it is easy to lost in those volumes. To make it easier to discover content, I implemented a related posts feature.

I originally wanted to use Jekyll’s Latent Semantic Indexing feature, but with this amount of content that simply blows up.

Instead, I ended up building my own hacky implementation based on categorization and similar keywords in posts using Liquid templates. This makes full site builds a bit slow, but the results seem quite good:

Staying up to date

While most people probably discover content now via Twitter or Facebook (both of which I occasionally share my things in, in addition to places like Reddit or Hacker News as needed), RSS is still the underpinning of receiving blog updates.

For this, the site is available as both:

Feel free to add one of them to the news aggregator of your choice!

I also supply /now page for current activities, inspired by the NowNowNow movement. Here is how Derek Sivers described the idea:

People often ask me what I’m doing now.

Each time I would type out a reply, describing where I’m at, what I’m focused on, and what I’m not.

So earlier this year I added a /now page to my site: https://sivers.org/now

A simple link. Easy to remember. Easy to type.

It’s a nice reminder for myself, when I’m feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities.

Previous redesigns

I’ve been running this site since 1997. Here is what I’ve written about some of the previous redesigns:

I hope you enjoy the new design! Let me know what you think.

Sailing across the Atlantic

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Sun, 22 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly a year ago today we flew from Berlin to Tenerife to depart on a sailing trip across the Atlantic on the Finnish sail training schooner T/S Helena. The Grid had just reached 10.000 founding members, and it was time to charge batteries before the next big push towards the beta.

I had sailed on Helena once before, on a weekend trip in the Turku archipelago. But crossing the Atlantic would be a more interesting adventure. For a month this two-masted tall ship would be our home on the ocean.

Departure

Arriving to the harbour, Helena was easy to find moored next to a Czech “pirate ship”. We registered with the captain and got assigned to the first watch, and then went out for a dinner dinner and some wine with some friends from Berlin who happened to be holidaying on the island.

The next day was busy with provisioning the ship and getting to know the rest of the crew. Every possible nook and cranny would be filled with fruits, fresh produce, water, and other things needed on the long trip.

The ship’s electricity system also needed some repairs, causing delays with the departure. But at the last moment to catch the high tide, on the evening of November 24th, Helena sounded the three long blasts on the foghorn and we were on the way!

Almost immediately after leaving port, we encountered the larger waves of the ocean. This caused some discomfort for many of our students. Our first watch was on kitchen duty, and there were several moments where there was a need to get out of the fumes and out in the fresh air to get one’s bearings.

But human beings being as adaptable as they are, by the next day any signs of seasickness would be gone from pretty much everybody, and the whole group could enjoy the adventure ahead.

T/S Helena

Built in 1992, the steel hulled schooner T/S Helena is the main training ship of the Finnish Sail Training Association. Displacing 110 tons and with length of 38 meters, it is not a small sailboat.

It has a capacity of accommodating 28 crew members and students, as has undertaken many epic adventures on its journey. Cape Horn following the trail of frigate Suomen Joutsen, north to Svalbard, and many many Atlantic crossings.

Inside the ship we’d have cabins for each of the four watches, and a separate area for the professional crew. Also, several restrooms, a shower room, and a kitchen and lounging area.

While the primary means of moving the ship is by sail, it is also outfitted with a powerful engine, as well as an auxiliary power unit for producing electricity and making drinking water.

Life on board

While underway, the life on board of Helena is dominated by the traditional naval watch system, where the crew is divided into four watches, each with their own cabin.

The watch on deck duty handles all the sailing tasks of steering the ship, adding or removing sails, as well as navigation and monitoring the radio and AIS. The watch on standby makes and serves the meals, as well as keeping the ship clean.

When on free watch there is time to sleep, read, and relax on the deck. The cabins are quite a tight fit, and so on the nice warm tropical nights many preferred to sleep inside the sail stash on the deck.

Alongside the normal duties there were lessons on sailing theory, navigation, safety equipment, knots, and other matters. Various students had also been tasked with giving lectures on the islands of Cape Verde and Barbados where we were stopping, as well as on marine life.

The three warm meals of the day were obviously a highlight, with the crews ending up in friendly competition on what kind of epic meals could be made of the supplies. And this being a Finnish institution, on Thursday the lunch is always pea soup and pancakes.

As always, when food is good, everything goes smoother. The last cooking shift of my First Watch ended on a high note, when we prepared rum-marinated swordfish with garlic mashed potatoes.

Along the way provisions would of course dwindle, and once all fresh fruit and bread had been consumed, the kitchen shift would also start to include baking bread.

While the space is tight on the ship, and you’re rubbing elbows with other crew members pretty much everywhere onboard, there are still some places that are more secluded and fitting for relaxation. Especially the bowsprit has proven to be a place where one can focus on meditation and the open ocean.

One thing that I didn’t consider before the trip is how sticky everything would be through the constant presence of sea salt and sweat. The cabins were hot, and since there were issues with the water maker, we had to wash ourselves and do laundry with sea water.

In these conditions we’d often freshen up with a “prison shower” where the whole crew lined up and were washed with the firehose. But a highlight was definitely when while becalmed we were able to stop the ship and go for a swim in the middle of the Atlantic. Only five kilometers deep below…

Night sailing

One of the most memorable parts of the trip were the nights when our watch was on deck duty. Steering the big ship by stars, just like ancient Phoenicians.

Or when somebody else was manning the wheel just enjoying the constant shooting stars of the Geminid meteor shower, the play of moonlight on the sails and the sea, and even an occasional dolphin jumping by the ship, lit with phytoplankton.

The route

Starting from Tenerife, we followed the traditional Age of Sail route along the coast of Africa to the Cape Verde islands, where we stopped for some provisions and recreation in the sleepy town of Mindelo.

After Cape Verde we headed west across the ocean, setting out sights for the island of Barbados.

After some sightseeing and sail repairs, the route continued past the Sail Rock to the Tobago Cays marine park, where we stopped to enjoy a very nice lobster dinner on the beach.

Then the trip continued northwards to St. Lucia, stopping in Marigot Bay for a farewell dinner.

Our final port of call was Le Marin on the French colony of Martinique. So, in a way we did a very long sailing trip to get from Spain to France!

A traditional “crossing of the Atlantic” ceremony was held and then it was time to leave the ship and return to being a pedestrian traveler.

Christmas in the Caribbean

It didn’t feel sensible to fly home directly, and so we decided to spend the Christmas on Martinique. This ended up being a very relaxed few days with nice cheese and wine and a candlelit balcony, as the power went out from the part of the island where we were on.

Since our flights were from St. Lucia, we ended up finding an Australian catamaran that we were able to commission to take us across. After the strict routines of a sail training vessel, it was quite a culture shock to get on a recreational sailboat.

We still got our last glimpse of Helena on the trip by accident. As we were watching the sun set behind the Piton mountains from our hotel balcony in Soufriere, the ship glid majestically across the bay, getting ready to anchor somewhere outside of the marina.

But that was another crew, embarking on an adventure of their own. For us it was time to fly home and prepare for another hectic Grid meetup in Hawaii.

Travel: all you need is a good backpack

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, mainly through client work and the European projects I’ve been involved with. To be more exact, I’ve spent more than half of my time traveling. This year should definitely be more light on conferences!

Now, people have very different styles of traveling. Some plan everything in advance, and pack for every possible contingency. But not me.

Over the years I’ve built a style of traveling that involves very minimal planning and late arrangements. This can fire back — making flights or trains more costly, but it is still often worth it through the added flexibility. Maybe there is a meeting or a conference that pops up at the last moment, and can be combined with the trip with minimal detours?

An important component of that is to have travel gear that gives you the needed flexibility. For me this means a largish backpack that can carry all the work gear I need, and also fit about a week’s worth of clothes and other things I need on daily basis. No need to wonder what extra to pack when the space is limited, and no need to check in luggage when flying.

And even more importantly, having a light and easy to carry bag so that you can just keep it with you for a day out in the city instead of having to first visit the hotel to drop it.

My current backpack is a Haglöfs Connect 17” that I got last Christmas. Prior to that, I was traveling with another backpack that I originally acquired for the long walk to Santiago de Compostela. That backpack was great for anything from daily commute to month-long trips around Europe, but was starting to be quite beaten up.

The new one is slightly smaller, more stylish, and most importantly, organized better. Now, for instance, I have a separate compartment just for my computer and its accessories. This makes airport security a lot smoother than trying to dig the computer up from behind clothes and other random things before putting it on the tray.

To keep the bag organized, I have an Eagle Creek packing cube to keep my clothes together, and occasionally one of their shirt folders whenever more businessy attire is required. I also have two toiletry bags, one of the actual toiletries and the other for cables and whatever adapters I need to connect when giving presentations.

One week’s worth of clothes can sound like too little, given that often the trips can be longer than that. The solution for this is to use either laundromats, or, in a pinch, to pay for hotel laundy service.

All you need for travel is a good backpack. The Pack Lite blog shows other examples of packing lite for both work and holiday travel.

Hacker-Nomad's toolkit, the 2012 edition

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Back in last July – when choosing photos to use in the epic The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora post – I noticed that it is quite fascinating to look at the various tablets and mobile phones we’ve been using over the years. Back then they all were so new, shiny, and exciting, and yet hardware moves so fast that something from a year or two ago would look quite dated now.

And so I thought it might be interesting to keep some sort of record on what kind of computing devices I’ve been using for my work – and how – over the years. This post is the first of the series, and shows the setup I’ve had during 2012.

The setup, and what I do with it

Many programmers believe in beefy workstations and huge multi-display setups. I was never so much into that, and as I’m spending half of my working time on the road, it has made sense to adapt to a more minimalist setup. A small laptop, a small tablet, and not much else.

Most of my programming is for web services, and so the main things I need are a browser and a terminal. After the move to Berlin, various video conferences with project partners all around the world via Google Hangouts or Skype are also almost a daily fare. My current setup handles these use cases quite well, and is simple and light to be carried around Europe without any problems.

At the same time, the nomadistic lifestyle has meant there is really quite little use for a phone. I do couple of calls or SMS per week, but in general the roaming charges, and better communication tools that Internet offers means that phone is just another screen to the services I use, essentially just a small tablet.

Workstation: 2010 MacBook Air 11”

My current main computer is the MacBook Air I got in early 2011. Apart from the lousy battery life, I’ve been generally very happy with it. It is small, light, and still has a reasonably good screen and keyboard. The solid state drive makes it also quite fast.

I’m running this laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 and the GNOME Shell. Linux supports this hardware quite well, meaning that I’ve never had issues with things like sound, the multi-touch trackpad, WiFi, or suspending. But external displays have sometimes been tricky.

During a typical workday, I only have two windows open: a full-screen Firefox window for email, browsing, and testing the software I write, and a full-screen terminal window running Vim with various splits. All of the rest of the software runs usually on a cloud hosting provider, or inside a Vagrant virtual machine. I sometimes also run Libreoffice, but more and more of my office productivity needs are now handled by Google Drive.

The battery life issue is what’s making me rethink this part of the setup. Apple promises a new MacBook Air about five hours of use, but after two years, and with running Linux instead of OS X, I’m down to maybe two and half hours. This is by far not enough, especially during conferences or travel where power outlets are not readily available.

I’d also love to get to a device with a bit more standardized ports. Having to replace faulty Apple laptop chargers and to remember the display dongles when presenting something is a bother.

Tablet: Nexus 7

Having used tablets daily for a long time, I’m a big believer in them as both production and communication devices and as a much better computer during free time. Actually, to help maintain a sensible work-life balance, our household of two programmers has a strict no laptops at home policy.

I used a Transformer Prime convertible tablet during the first half of 2012. With its detachable keyboard it was a great device as a travel computer and for conference live-blogging. The keydock contained an additional battery, and so I could rely on being able to use the device for a full day.

At the same time, the tablet was a bit big and clunky for travel. You’d always have to dig it out of the bag separately, and such a big device wasn’t comfortable when reading in bed. And so, when the Google’s Nexus 7 came out, I swapped devices. The seven inch form factor is great for both reading at home, and during travels. When you need to swich trains or board an airplane, you can just stick the device in your pocket. It certainly isn’t comfortable to keep there for long times, but pn short transfers this is a very handy possibility. No wonder people on the iOS side of the fence are so excited about the iPad Mini!

I use the tablet for the various video conferences I have, and do most of my web reading with Firefox Mobile and Instapaper. On work trips I also read books on the Nexus, so that I don’t need to bring the dedicated Kindle e-reader as an extra device. Firefox Mobile is great in that it synchronizes my passwords and browsing history between the tablet and my laptop, so that I can always easily pick up and continue on either device.

Internet access: Huawei MiFi

Since much of what I do happens online, being able to connect from everywhere is very important. While I could use JoikuSpot to share the Internet connection from my Symbian phone, having a dedicated device for this purpose makes sense. With the MiFi wireless base station I can spare the battery of my phone.

As the MiFi is only used for Internet access, I can buy cheap pre-paid SIMs from each country I travel to. Paying somewhere around ten euros for a month of Internet abroad certainly beats the usual roaming charges!

However, having to dig this device from my bag and start it whenever I need connectivity is a slight hassle. Now that there is a Nexus 7 with 3G support available that might be a better option.

Audio: Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones

This is actually a piece of gear I’ve had for a while: For music and teleconferences I’m using Sennheiser’s noise cancelling headphones that I bought back in 2008. While they’re bulkier and pricier than typical in-ear headphones, they are great especially when traveling or working in a noisy environment.

The headphones are slowly getting a bit frayed, and so I will probably have to look for replacement soon. Having optional Bluetooth could be handy.

Thoughts for 2013

The current setup has generally served me well for about two years of intense travel and open source development. We generally run our computers with a two year replacement cycle, and so at least my laptop is due to be replaced quite shortly.

Thanks to services like Travis CI and Heroku, my computer needs are becoming even simpler than they used to be. Theoretically I could work with any device that has a good screen, a good keyboard, and can run terminal and a web browser. This means I could even work on an iPad. At least nearly.

For the next cycle of devices, the focus will be on features like:

Endurance: the battery should last a full working day when traveling or at conferences
Connectivity: I want Internet everywhere, without any unnecessary hassles
Resolution: having used some of the high-DPI devices like the new iPads and MacBook Pros, I definitely want something like that

I’m also intrigued about switching to a Kindle Paperwhite 3G as my reading device. Better screen, and ability to access WikiPedia anywhere in the world for free!

If you have any great suggestions for a device or a combo fulfilling those requirements, please comment!

If this all sounds very consumeristic, it should be noted that my old work devices always get recycled to other users. When you do mobile and web development, you need to have access to the new hardware that people are buying and using.

My blog, the 2012 edition

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the latest iteration of my blog! I recently realized that I’ve been blogging since 1997, but actual visual or technical updates have been a lot more seldom.

This new blog aims to focus on simplicity and content, much in the spirit of Zeldman’s 2012 web design manifesto. You can find a lot more about how this iteration was built in the colophon.

For reference, here is how the old site layout from 2007 looked like:

And here is the current iteration:

I hope you enjoy the 2012 edition. I’ve also imported lots of old posts that have not been available on this site for years, including this one from 1998 telling how we were starting to work on Midgard. You may also enjoy the old motorcycle travel journals.

Hacker-nomadism

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I build software for a living. This means creating the new generation of Content Management interfaces in the IKS Project and developing custom client applications at Nemein.

As my office is where my laptop is, none of this work is particularly tied to a physical location. And as much of the work is communicating, I end up spending quite a lot of time traveling between meetings and conferences.

For this my previous home town of Helsinki, Finland wasn't quite ideal. From an European perspective, Finland is an island. And so I've accumulated airmiles instead of being able to travel more comfortably (and productively) on the European railway network.

I've previously dabbled with living in other locations like Istanbul and Saint Petersburg, but this time I hope the move will be more permanent: in the beginning of this month we packed our stuff, got rid of the Helsinki flat and hopped on a plane to Berlin.

The modern world makes this easy: my whole library fits on a Kindle and music collection on Spotify, version control and testing happens in the cloud, and banking and invoices are on the web. And thanks to EU there is minimal red tape in setting yourself up anywhere in Europe.

My current setup is such: I'm traveling with about two weeks' worth of clothes, my trusty work laptop, and tablet with an amazing 18 hour battery life. Accommodation happens in furnished, short-term rental apartments, and Internet comes from an old N900 serving as a WiFi access point via prepaid 3G.

While Berlin has excellent co-working spaces, I'm currently sharing office with Content Control, the local Midgard shop. Though at the time of writing my office is temporarily relocated to the nearby Hasenheide park where there is a nice sunny spring day.

I'm still planning on popping into Helsinki every now and then. With Air Berlin, the travel cost and distance is almost the same as if I lived in the Finnish city of Tampere (yeah, VR is expensive). Once the snows there melt, I'll also ride my motorcycle over.

If things work out, I may be eventually able to say: ich bin ein Berliner. This city is quite amazing - the amount of cultural activities and hacker meetups probably beats any other place in Europe right now. If you're around, ping me!

And if Berlin doesn't work, then there are lots of other interesting places for a working nomad...

Some good things in Google+

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

So, Google Plus launched, the first truly viable Facebook competitor. The timing is quite interesting, given Google's recent failures with the Buzz microblogging platform, and the impending Facebook IPO. After a bit of time with Plus, here are some thoughts:

Google already knows everything I do, so sharing stuff there feels less risky
The UI is pretty and a lot less bloated than Facebook's
Messages and comments can be edited, saving from unnecessary typos and having to post quick clarifications separately
Circles are a great way to organize your contacts, and I like the fact that they avoid the loaded friend term
You can export all your data, so you have a way out if you need one
Group videochats are also a promising concept

But of course there are some downsides:

Facebook already has a crazy critical mass. We'll see whether the non-geeks convert to Plus or not
There is no integration to third-party services like Flickr, and there is no API
Content is not language tagged and filtered, like on Qaiku. Google could probably do even better here, doing automatic language recognition and translation

We'll see how this plays out. In general, Google is a more friendly player than Facebook, but if they have both search and social, they'll basically own the web.

Righ now Facebook is the social service with the users, alongside the more news-oriented Twitter. But Google's advantage may be how this now integrates with all their other services. If you register to Plus, the black "sandbar" that appears everywhere including search results will do its best to pull you back.

And they may do something interesting with the masses of Android devices out there, most with Google accounts already enabled.

Ten years of Nemein

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today it is ten years since my company, Nemein, started operating. Our team had been doing the internal Midgard-based information systems at Stonesoft, but as parts of that company were being sold, our team would've been split up. So instead we started our own business with Henri Hovi and Johannes Hentunen, with the idea that our Midgard expertise would be useful to a wider market.

The best laid plans

The initial plans were made at a Starbucks on New York's JFK airport while waiting for a flight to Atlanta, but their realisation had to wait until I finished my military service on the latter half of 2000. When I got rid of the bazookas and uniforms, we registered the company, wrote some business plans and started looking for seed money to get our business started. We were quite young then, and it was interesting to run around Helsinki talking to investors.

How did these plans look like? Our initial idea was to get into the fashionable SaaS (or ASP, as it was known then) business by building collaboration tools on top of Midgard. The first product was a document store intended for the construction industry. With this system all plans and other documents related to a building project could be easily stored and accessed. This is how we described ourselves:

Nemein Solutions is the leading provider of Open Source Midgard software for mobile collaboration and information management.

But as plans go, this had to soon change due to the IT bubble being burst. To quote von Moltke:

No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength

In spring 2001 IT bubble burst, and we suddenly found ourselves sitting in the office with all our projects being abruptly frozen. Around the same time our seed investor got embroiled in some large-scale customs lawsuit, and so not much help was to be expected from them. This meant we couldn't continue with our original plans, and instead had to start generating cash flow, quickly. Luckily Midgard was (and is!) a quite capable web framework, and so we had the option of going into the CMS business.

Nadmin Studio

Midgard's user interfaces back then were not very appealing, and so our first task was to go shopping for the CMS UI. There were two good options available: Nadmin Studio from Hong Kong Linux Center, a web based CMS and small business networking tool running on top of Midgard, and a Windows-based Midgard editing tool from DataFlow. As we were much more of a Linux shop, we went with Nadmin. It was quite a cool system, a customized Red Hat Linux install that set up not only Midgard and the web user interface, but also things like LDAP and IMAP servers talking directly with the Midgard database. And it had a quite nice WYSIWYG editor for people writing content on the web pages. We quickly became their reseller for Finland. Yes, back then you could get Midgard in a box (and even CD):

Having settled the tool question the next issue was finding clients. We took a list of hundred largest companies in Finland and basically called each of them, proposing a demo. We also approached several "new media companies" in order to see if they wanted a technical partner. Around these times our CEO Petri Kuusela also figured that we'd be a lot more convincing consultants in sweaters instead of Hugo Boss suits, and so the look of the company changed.

Through these efforts we were able to get some of our first and longest-term customers, including this one:

HELSINKI, Jun 12th 2001 -- Nemein Solutions helps Everscreen Mediateam, a Finnish multimedia company implement the Nemein.net Content Manager product to power Motiva's web services. Everscreen's and Nemein's cooperation provides Motiva with up-to-date and easy to use web sites.

Around this time we moved from the small four-desk office in central Helsinki to a much bigger place in Haukilahti, Espoo. My time was mostly spent motorcycling from one demo to another, as our two sales guys kept me so busy that on most days I didn't have time for a lunch break, and much less for actually writing code. The cash flow generated there helped to keep things running, but as usual, possibilities for product development suffered. This is called the Consulting Trap:

...Once the consultancy money rolls in, it is hard to give up. Like an addiction.

I spent years thinking just six more months, then I'm going to quit and work on my µISV project.

Nemein.Net

Consulting isn't such a bad business to be in. As long as the things you do produce value for customers it can be lucrative and interesting. But still the idea of having actual products was kept alive, and a bit later we built Nemein.Net, a project management tool for consulting companies. We changed the business model a bit, instead of providing hosted services we leased some industrial-grade servers to our clients with the software pre-installed. A cluster of engineering companies bought that, and as far as I know some of them still run it. Datex-Ohmeda was another customer, but they were later bought by General Electic.

"For our project work it is very important to reduce management overhead and enable real-time tracking of project status. The Nemein.Net Projects suite provides a good match for these criteria," says Bror-Eric Granfelt, R&D Manager at Datex-Ohmeda.

Free Software company

In 2004 we open sourced the Nemein.Net suite, now renamed to OpenPSA. This was done as part of the 5th anniversary celebrations of the Midgard project. By this time Nadmin Studio had also been GPLd and renamed to Aegir CMS. So suddenly we were a pure Free Software company. We quickly started adopting MidCOM, the emerging MVC framework for Midgard and PHP. MidCOM was produced initially by the German ISP Linksystem Muenchen, but very soon Nemein was the primary contributor.

The company structure changed, and we decided that instead of having a traditional office with desktop computers, it'd be better to be more location independent and work where our customers were. So we got a small office from the Innopoli business park mostly to facilitate Rambo, and the rest of our people were moving around. Once a week we had a coordination lunch meeting in Restaurant Mount Everest to keep the group spirit going. Some of that tradition has stayed.

Around this time we also started the switch on our workstations from HP's Linux laptops to MacBooks. This wasn't really a conscious strategy, but instead mandated by my laptop breaking a day or two before a training trip to South Africa. Back then Linux on laptops was still a quite cumbersome setup, and I needed a Unix machine where our software would run, quick. Later on I've returned to running Linux on my own machines, but most of the company still works on OS X.

The Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) was formed in 2003, and we soon joined up. A forming network of free software companies in Finland was good for both publicity and getting new projects. OpenPSA gained a boost there:

Collaboration with Nemein went well. Right from the beginning they were able to state their views clearly and backed by facts. We immediately understood how OpenPSA works, what customizations would be needed, and how much they would cost. Unfortunately we cannot say the same of all other solution providers, says doctor Ville Ojanen.

Dreams of networked business

Another interesting opportunity that came from the COSS network was the EU-funded Digital Business Ecosystems project. The project fit quite well in my view of the need for enabling cooperation between small companies in Europe, this time through having business systems talk to each other over a peer-to-peer network.

To realise this dream we connected our OpenPSA system into the ecosystem, enabling companies to fluidly share tasks, workflows and hour reports over the network. Unfortunately not much came out of that. A bit later the maintenance of the OpenPSA project was switched over to Content Control from Germany.

A later iteration of similar ideas was Ajatus, an experimental project to build a "personal CRM".

"Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity." - The Cluetrain Manifesto, these 18.

Remember a time when you needed to share a document with a business partner, colleague or a customer? The CRM should make this easy without requiring complex IT integration setups or the disconnectivity of emailing files.

Getting into position

Several Nemein people have been active motorcycle travelers. As all our projects were more or less visible on the web, this brough the question of location sharing into the picture. For the Death Monkey project in 2006 we built a set of location-aware features that enabled us to visualize the location of each participant on a map, and easily calculate distances to Gibraltar.

At that time using maps on the web was also growing, and so we stepped into the emerging business of neogeography. Over the years we've evangelized the usage of location information on Linux desktops, built weather-aware clothes catalogues, facilitated publishing open data of campus maps and made it easier to catch a tram. This is still one of the areas online that I find most interesting.

Growth and mobility

Over the years Nemein's business has been growing at a steady pace. Now we have a nice small office in the Hietalahti area of Helsinki, and serve quite a bunch of interesting, large Finnish customers in the CMS space. A major milestone for the company was achieving AAA credit rating back in 2007:

Ignited by Apple's iPhone launch, the mobile ecosystem has been a very interesting area to operate in. To be part of it, we built the community infrastructure for Maemo, Nokia's emerging mobile Linux platform, and also got involved in the MeeGo project. But now in the age of burning platforms the future of that business is in question.

The Midgard way

The Midgard content repository and web framework have been a constant core part of our business for the whole history of the company. Everything we've built has been running on top of it. Has this been a wise choice? In the course of ten years, the web landscape has changed quite a bit. While Midgard itself has stayed current through constant development and refinement, hundreds and hundreds of competing systems have risen up, some of them becoming very popular compared to us. And yet we have stayed the course.

Midgard, especially in the latest iterations, is an excellent tool for running information-rich systems. It has a very nice user interface and an elegant web development framework. These are tools that I feel have lots of possibilities still ahead of them. Some of the design decisions done in the early days of the project, like integrated support for multi-site hosting, and for multilingual content, are things that now power some of our most important customer deployments

But at the same time I've learned that especially for smaller open source projects like us, the monolithic "all or nothing" approach is not very healthy. Frameworks keep us apart, while libraries allow us to share our code and experiences. This is resulting to collaboration with other projects on many levels, from a shared PHP ecosystem managed through the Apache Software Foundation, to common tools for decoupling the Content Management experience. Linked Data also plays a large role here.

To wrap it up

Ten years as an entrepreneur is a long path. Financially it may not have been as rewarding as we initially thought it would be, but experience-wise it has been astonishing. I've been part of building many challenging business-critical systems, learnt a lot of things, and given talks in dozens of conferences all around the world. It is hard to see as varied and interesting possibilities in regular employment.

Thanks to the whole current Nemein team, and the people who've been here before for all the awesome work done over these years. You rock!

Better one file in the cloud than ten on the hard drive

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, after returning from a trip to Kenya, the hard drive on my old MacBook Air decided to die. Eventually I was able to recover most of it, but many files on my home directory were simply gone. But this isn't such a big problem, as everything of importance is anyway online, conforming with the Linus backup strategy:

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

So, where do I keep my stuff?

Code: GitHub or various version control systems used by upstream projects
Presentations: Ubuntu One for raw files, and SlideShare for the published ones
Other documents: company's BaseCamp intranet
Photos: Flickr for the good ones
Music: who needs files for this when there is Spotify?
Contacts, Emails and Calendaring: company's Google Apps account
Browser settings: Firefox Sync
Notes: Ubuntu One Tomboy sync

With all this, the network is truly the computer. The main hassle with a dead hard drive then is reconfiguring all of these, making checkouts of the code repositories etc. I wonder how much this could also be automated?

Privacy is the other obvious concern, making ownCloud an interesting prospect on the longer run. Update: Here is Paul Carr, who earlier moved most of his life into the cloud rethinking it because of recent US government privacy abuses:

Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.

Of course, it remains statistically unlikely that I’m going to be the subject of a subpoena any time soon. I’m hardly an enemy of the state. But then again, until recently, neither were many of the supporters of Wikileaks. Who’s to say that an innocuous organisation I give support to today won’t suddenly become highly controversial tomorrow?

Title for this post comes from the "modernizing traditional Finnish proverbs" Qaiku thread.