Python specification for a Web Server Gateway Interface has been accepted, with quite ambitious goals: If middleware can be both simple and robust, and WSGI is widely available in servers and frameworks, it allows for the possibility of an entirely new kind of Python web application framework: one consisting of loosely-coupled WSGI middleware components. Indeed, existing framework authors may even...
IKS, the EU-funded effort to add semantic capabilities to open source CMSs, will organize a semantic editing hackathon in Vienna this winter: We invite you to join us at next month's IKS Semantic Interaction Hackathon in Vienna taking place over 3-days February 24th-26th, 2011. The goal of the hackathon is to provide a framework, that enables CMS developers to exploit...
Wow, 2010 was quite a hectic year in the Midgard world. Here is a quick summary: We held three Midgard Gatherings: one in Lodz, Poland in April, one in Tampere, Finland in July and one in Gothenburg, Sweden in November. In April we announced the new directions of the project. The project completed a migration to Git (and GitHub) for...
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:...