So, the controversial Lex Nokia passed today, with 47 members of parliament absent. Here we go:

To make the GNOME desktop more user-friendly we should utilize context information in more places. And now that laptops are becoming more and more mobile, location is one important part of that context. For that, we developed GeoClue, the location framework that is in incubation for GNOME Mobile. Today I was talking with a student who wants to work on...

Benjamin Otte is asking on Planet GNOME why the GNOME desktop doesn't do more to integrate with the cloud. He reasons that: ...GNOME developers are not “web-enabled”. We’re a bit like Microsoft in the early 90s: We focus on the local computer and ignore the internet. which, to my experience is somewhat true. I went to GUADEC for the first...

Jaiku, the microblogging service I use, has been frustratingly often down in the last couple of days, apparently kicking off another mass migration towards Twitter and Brightkite. And they report it only in human-readable way, not in fashion a browser, a proxy or a search engine would understand it. While being down, Jaiku still responds with HTTP 200 OK: HTTP...

Thanks to the IKS project, I've spent some thought lately in how to make something practical from the concept of Semantic Web. As always, the big issue is getting the semantic information out there. In a strongly typed CMS like Midgard, many semantics can be gathered from content structure directly, but to really get there we need users to add...

Good work, Debian Project: Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 is released! As Midgard release manager Piotras wrote in his Jaiku: debian Lenny (5.0) is out. It means vinland will run on stable debian. It means we have php5-xcache in stable debian, we have solr in stable debian. It means we can think about Midgard in official 'squeeze' (debian testing) Big step indeed,...

From the bubble-era start-up times in 2001, Nemein has based its invoicing on hours used, as is typical in the software consulting industry. The company provides services on a 100% pure, organic free software stack, and therefore there are no other additional costs beside maintenance on top of the normal work hours used for a client's benefit. With some clients...

I've been following the Java Content Repository story since the OSCOM conferences of old. Last week, I took a new look at it as Bertrand Delacretaz from Day held a JCR presentation in the Interactive Knowledge Consortium meeting. And you know what? Midgard and JCR resemble each other quite a lot: Both follow a repository-centric approach, where the content repository...

I spent this week at Salzburg Research in Austria attending the kick-off meeting of the Interactive Knowledge Consortium, a €6,5m EU-funded project to introduce semantic capabilities into open source content management systems. Nemein is participating in the project as one of the six industrial partners. For the next four years we will be working together with cool CMS companies like...

Ars Technica has a nice introductory article about GeoClue: A multitude of factors are contributing to a mobile computing renaissance. Some of these factors include the growing availability of ubiquitous mobile Internet connectivity and the rising popularity of netbooks and other Internet-enabled small form-factor devices. These changes are inspiring a renewed interest in location-aware software and web services. A framework...