WriteMaps.com is a handy web-based tool for planning website structures in a mind map -like format. The tool allows for storage and working on the designs in collaborative fashion.

Simon Josefsson was giving a talk on OpenID in the Scandinavian Free Software Conference. OpenID is a lightweight single sign-on and auto-registration system for web applications. In concept it is quite similar to Shibboleth but easier to deploy.

Today Finland is celebrating 90th birthday of the Republic, and so it is appropriate to write about how things are better in Sweden, where I’m visiting the first Scandinavian Free Software Conference.

It seems that with the rising oil prices the Age of Sail is returning, even if in a modified format. SkySails is a system that enables freighters to tap into high-altitude winds with a power kite to reduce fuel consumption.

VectorMagic from Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a pretty interesting tool. You upload a bitmap image, give a few parameters about it, and you get a vectorized version back.

Like probably everybody else, I’ve been quite lazy taking backups. Through the Linus backup philosophy this hasn’t been so bad: my code is in various repositories and my photos are on Flickr. But when a hard drive died on me last year, a bunch of small things were still lost.

Midgard is quite a huge framework, and so caching is needed to keep things efficient. To that effect, MidCOM 2.4 in 2005 added a major feature of caching generated pages until they needed reconstructing.

Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle was launched today, and it looks quite interesting:

Version 0.7.0 of CouchDb was released yesterday. CouchDb is a very interesting object database that powers our Ajatus CRM.

While there is no public release yet, I though to give a heads-up on a project we’re working on with Jerry: Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.