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...
Tim Bray on the new mobile market: Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can't become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the number-one usability barrier...
From yesterday's PHP Advent article: PHP has been around nearly as long as there has been a Web to develop for, but it evolves constantly and is a modern programming language by almost any definition. Sure, it might not suit hipsters who only enjoy bands when they can say “you probably have not heard of them; they only formed tomorrow,”...
Midgard 10.12 was released last week as a developer preview of what is coming in the world of content repositories: MidgardCR 10.12 "Hrungnir" is a technology preview of the third generation of the Midgard Content Repository. It is released to allow developers to gain familiarity with the upcoming Midgard storage APIs and RDF storage. MidgardCR is available as a GObject-oriented...
As part of the IKS project we're working on semantic web editing. One area there is using RDFa to actually make pages editable. RDFa is a way to embed semantic information to regular HTML pages, and is already supported by some search engines, making this also a way of doing SEO. But in addition to telling search engines what the...
Snapshot from Bertrand's presentation in the Amsterdam IKS workshop: what does being an Apache project bring to the table? The answer is sustainability. IKS is an EU-funded project which will eventually end. Proper project governance handled together with the Apache Software Foundation can help the software to survive and thrive for long after that. Sustainability is something that is critical...
Finland's national brand strategy project released their report today on the Tehtävä Suomelle website. The basic idea is to promote the Finnish capability for getting things done, and the communal approach to problem solving. I found the beginning of the Finland - It Works document particularly interesting: "Just a hobby, won’t be big and professional" 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 Newsgroups:...
Next Wednesday will have the annual Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions member meeting and the Helsinki MeeGo Network meetup held together in Hotel Scandic Continental. The COSS meeting starts at 4pm, continuing with the MeeGo meetup at 6pm.
The event will be keynoted by Nokia's MeeGo Developer Advocate Ronan Mac Laverty. Register now!
One of my main concerns with PHP has been the lack of ecosystem. Almost all libraries and tools are written with a specific framework in mind, creating separate ecosystems around Drupal, Zend Framework, Midgard and others instead of an ecosystem benefiting all users of the language. There have been efforts at this, like PEAR before, but they have mostly stagnated....
This week in MeeGo Conference all attendees received Lenovo S10-3t IdeaPad convertible netbook/tablet computers from Intel and Nokia. For many of us this was the first time we're actually using MeeGo on a device, and so I thought to post some notes on how it feels. IdeaPad hardware The IdeaPad looks and feels like a typical netbook: cheap plastic construction,...