FOSDEM, held in Brussels on Feb 7th and 8th, is the most important free software event of the year in Europe. While I'm going to Poland instead of there this time, the event is an excellent opportunity to learn more about two projects I'm involved with: Midgard and a replicated P2P filesystem Sun Feb 8th 2009 at 16:20, Room Ferrer...
As it was for the Zend folks, 2008 was quite a busy year also in the Midgard-land. I think the last time there was so much activity and energy in the project must've been sometime in the early days. Here are some highlights from it: Midgard 2: finally a reality The big news of 2008 was that Midgard 2, the...
I have criticized the remote-readable EU passports before, but today I got to try their benefits: the automated border controls at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. I was returning back from Switzerland, and although they've recently joined the Schengen treaty, air passengers are still checked for passports until March. This means that the Finnair flight still ended up in the non-Schengen terminal of...
Since today is Epiphany, the last of Christmas holidays, I thought to post a screenshot of our xmas-themed staff page before it goes the way of the Christmas tree:
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Frustrated with how some Midgard-powered community sites were being spammed (their fault, not using CAPTCHA or registrations, I know), I decided to add a little feature to MidCOM's forum and page commenting tools: automated spam filtering. To make this happen, I hooked Midgard with the Mollom anti-spam service. When enabled, all posts sent to Midgard either on-site or using the...
Since Midgard does now Python nicely alongside PHP, some Midgardians have recently been looking at Django as an optional web framework to use with Midgard's replicated storage system. Looking at other systems than yours every now and then is great, as you can get some ideas. First such idea to come to Midgard from the Django world is error interceptors,...
Lex Nokia, the controversial snooping law is about to pass in the Finnish Parliament pretty soon, the latest of a series of clueless, unconstitutional laws passed because our MPs are just hopelessly out of touch with the modern world (well, except one). This means that soon in addition to the Swedish, any organization providing you an internet connection can listen...
Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote: The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the...
Prompted by a recent COSS news release, I thought to write about two Summer of Code success stories: In addition to Google's Summer of Code, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) runs a localized version called Kesäkoodi. One of this year's projects was adding 3G configuration support for the GNOME Network Manager. This feature made it to Ubuntu...
Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this! in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some...