Planet Midgard

Dave Neary summed this up well:

...I fundamentally disagree with discouraging someone from pursuing a technology choice because of the threat of patents. In this particular case, the law is an ass. The patent system in the United States is out of control and dysfunctional, and it is bringing the rest of the world down with it. The time has come to take a stand and say “We don’t care about patents. We’re just not going to think about them. Sue us if you want.”

With Midgard we have prior art on some software patents. Software patents only promote big multinational monopolies, and therefore are against the interests of both Europe and the Free Software movement. They're silly, don't apply here, and therefore the only rational response is to ignore them.

Technorati Tags: softwarepatents

Qaiku's twitter-like API has been one of the first major contributions I've made to the project, and it is great to see some first applications start to use it. Here are some examples:

Mauku is a microblogging client for Maemo. The new Fremantle version supports Qaiku nicely:

Gwibber is a Linux desktop microblogging client. Qaiku support is now available in the development version:

There is also an XMPP bot that we're going to launch soon for wider use. This enables you to monitor your mentions or some channels and post via any Jabber client:

If you're doing something cool with the API, please let me know! The #Qaiku-api channel is good for usage questions and ideas.

Every now and then people ask me why we're doing Qaiku instead of "just using Twitter". Here are some points why Qaiku just works better:

• Qaiku culture and features promote more meaningful and threaded discussion - in general, people comment much more than start conversations which is a good sign
• Qaiku has language tagging and filtering meaning that when I post in Finnish it will not bother my international friends
• Messages and comments are proper Markdown, reducing ugliness typical of tweets
• Features like feed import and image sharing are built-in, removing need for external tools
• Channels, and especially private channels enable us to do workstreaming in Qaiku

If you want to comment, you'll anyway find me both on Qaiku and on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: mauku, gwibber, qaiku, xmpp

Firefox 3.5, the latest version of the best desktop browser was released yesterday. Upgrade now, and you'll get cool new features like browser geolocation and native HTML5 video support, not to mention much faster javascript.

With both Firefox 3.5 and iPhone OS 3.0 out, a significant number of browsers suddenly have geolocation support. It will be interesting to see how quickly web services start to follow up, providing more meaningful content through the location context.

There is even a patch to make Firefox use GeoClue for its location needs.

Technorati Tags: firefox, geoclue, iphone

As I've written before, the cell phone is the computer for majority of world's people. Google's new set of SMS services for Africa follows this idea in an interesting way:

...mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

This brings my earlier "solving the logistics of mamona" post to mind.

Now, how about making maemo support SMS? That would be another step to turning our tablets into universal communicators.

Technorati Tags: google, maemo, africa, sms

Workstreaming means collecting activities of geographically dispersed team members into a consistent news feed, enabling managers to track process and colleagues to stay up-to-date with the day-by-day happenings. As maemo.org is a distributed project worked on by a group of both volunteers and paid employees, some sort of activity monitoring is quite necessary.

For a while this has been done in wiki pages, but since that is not very flexible or connected, better ways have been discussed. The current approach being tested is workstreaming via a Qaiku channel:

Qaiku is a conversation-oriented microblogging service that suits workstreaming quite well:

• It has both a web view and a mobile view, meaning you can workstream on-the-go
• Channels support means activity log entries don't need to "spam" normal microblogging contacts with workstreams
• Private channels means you can track workstreams of confidential projects too
• API and RSS feeds enable us to integrate the workstreaming feed to the wiki pages or where ever we want to
• Separation of comments and actual activity log entries make it easy to discuss things related to the activities

In near future there will also be support for additional machine-readable "Qaiku Data" (like hour amounts, bug numbers, whatever). This is inspired by the Twitter Data initiative, but keeps the data separate from actual message contents to keep Qaiku human-readable. Once that is done, we could possibly build some more workstreaming-oriented UI for this on maemo.org.

So, if you're doing anything on maemo.org, sign up on Qaiku and start posting your updates!

Technorati Tags: microblogging, qaiku, workstreaming

Just a little teaser before we all head out to countryside for the midsummer weekend:

Yes, you're seeing the software versions right. The screenshot is from the "About Midgard" screen of Ragnaland, a hybrid setup of Midgard's MidCOM MVC framework from Midgard1 (MidCOM 8.09) and Midgard2 running in an App Builder instance (Midgard 9.09).

Still requires some tweaking and bug fixes, but consider the possibilities:

• Ragnaroek sites running on truly legacy-free Midgard codebase, with other databases than MySQL
• Midgard1 and Midgard2 sites coexisting in same installation and database
• Applications like OpenPSA that you can install and run like any OS X .app, thanks to App Builder

Technorati Tags: midcom, midgard, osx

Today I ran into the Open Collaboration Services API, planned as the vendor-neutral specification for Social Desktop services:

Core idea of the Social Desktop is to connect to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself.

This sounds exactly like the stuff I was talking about back in GUADEC 2003. I was there on behalf of OSCOM to see how the free desktop could be integrated with the various open source content management and collaboration systems developed by OSCOM members. It is great to see these ideas finally gain some traction.

There are many specifications to help us get there:

• OCS API caters for sharing things like activities, messages, and even file contents
• Tomboy API provides synchronization and sharing of notes, with some existing implementations like Snowy and its Midgard equivalent
• Atom Publishing Protocol was used by Nokia's Lifeblog tools
• Telepathy's peer-to-peer collaborative model is used in OLPC Sugar
• ...and of course WebDAV handles managing web content, potentially more usefully through Neutron introspection

With these the free desktop might become more than just an isolated island.

Such collaborative features will make the free applications much more compelling to users, especially if coupled with web interfaces that can be used when away from your own computer. Being built on open source server software and open standards they can be hosted by companies, schools, or even Linux distributions, instead of tying users to the big cloud vendors.

I'll be talking more about the relation between the desktop and the web and our approach to it in my Gran Canaria Desktop Summit talk on Tuesday Jul 7th.

Technorati Tags: freesoftware, gnome, opencollaborationservices, socialdesktop, web

Bugzilla isn't really the best place for contributing and discussing new ideas for a software project. Like Ubuntu and openSUSE before us, the Maemo community now also has a better tool for this: Maemo Brainstorm.

Maemo Brainstorm, developed as part of our efforts to the April 09 Sprint is a new web service that follows the model of Drupal's IdeaTorrent, but with a particular Maemo flavor.

Users can propose new ideas:

Users can also comment and propose solutions for ideas:

The ideas then enter "Sandbox", from where moderators can put them through the Brainstorm workflow:

After voting, popular ideas may then be chosen to be implemented by a team of moderators.

In addition to normal IdeaTorrent-like functionality as described in the Task page on Maemo Wiki, there are some adaptations for the maemo.org environment, including:

• Posting popular or implemented ideas will give Karma to the user (and posting duplicates will take it away)
• Promoting and demoting solutions, or commenting an idea will give Karma to the user
• The system follows the new Maemo visual style everywhere
• Users and permissions are managed using normal Midgard groups system

Some work is still being done on Brainstorm, including a dedicated search for this area of the site. In the meanwhile, please go and submit your favorite ideas, and vote for the ideas others have submitted. You can also follow the categories you're interested in via their RSS feeds, or the progress of your own ideas via the Dashboard.

And be sure to report any issues or ideas you have about Brainstorm itself!

Technorati Tags: brainstorm, maemo, midgard, moderation, ideatorrent

In our various GeoClue presentations we've been arguing that location comes in many flavors, of which GPS is only one. In many cases cell tower position or even WiFi connection can provide quite "good enough" location. On Mozilla Hacks they write about an OpenStreetMap-based browser location demo. I'd say the results are quite convincing:

This is just a gentle reminder to allow other location sources that just GPS. By using GeoClue you get that for free.

Technorati Tags: firefox, geoclue, openstreetmap

To get more effective i started to think if there was a way to combine openpsa and the pbx system my company is working on.

The first stepp was to implement a click to dial functionallity. In other words. When i am in openpsa and watch a contact card the phone numbers will be linked to the pbx.

As a start i modified org.openpsa.contactwidget with two new options (these options is in midcom svn).

/* This needs a pbx that can you can send links to. For example speakroute http://www.speakroute.net */
'click_to_dial'         => false,
'click_to_dial_url'     => 'https://yourdialurl.com/dodial.php?to=',

So creating a configsnippet for that in midgard and set the option to true and add the url to the pbx and the click to dial script.

When done. All contact cards in openpsa will have a link that opens a new window and dials the number.

And .. for the screenshot ...

 

 

Quite a good blog post from the security expert:

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they're still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

...

There is one critical difference. When a computer is within your network, you can protect it with other security systems such as firewalls and IDSs. You can build a resilient system that works even if those vendors you have to trust may not be as trustworthy as you like. With any outsourcing model, whether it be cloud computing or something else, you can't. You have to trust your outsourcer completely. You not only have to trust the outsourcer's security, but its reliability, its availability, and its business continuity.

This is something I've written about before. Your data and applications stay available in the cloud only at the service provider's pleasure. Free software should aim to provide an alternative, using peer-to-peer technologies and desktop-to-web content repositories to provide both the flexibility and collaboration features of the cloud, while still providing the security and privacy of local application instances.

In a world of non-neutral networks, government snooping and, yes, even sometimes lack of connectivity we need alternatives that will work even when offline and allow collaboration over more ad-hoc, personal network connections.

EDIT: While I'm critical of going fully cloud-only, I have to recommend Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch which provides many compelling arguments and historical analysis for utility computing.

Technorati Tags: cloud, privacy, security

The punchcard graphs at Github are a nice way to quickly detect the rough geographical distribution (or nighttime coding habits) of the key contributors of an open source project. Here’s a few selected examples from the ASF. Apache HTTP Server Apache Maven (core) Apache Jackrabbit

Some very interesting developments in desktop wiki land: Tomboy, the popular note-taking application for GNOME and OS X now supports web synchronization.

The developers of Tomboy have launched Snowy, a web service that allows you to synchronize and access your notes online. As the API is documented, I decided to add support for it in Midgard too. This way the Tomboy notes will become regular objects in the content repository.

At the moment there is only the sync service, provided as a component for the MidCOM3 MVC framework. However, a web user interface will also be coming soon. Here's how synchronization with Midgard looks like:

In addition to Tomboy, the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend also showed new advances in mobile Midgard2 land: We launched a Midgardized version of Conboy, the maemo port of Tomboy. Both Midgard2 and Conboy were also built for Fremantle and tested on a developer preview machine. Very promising!

With the Midgard storage back-end Conboy will gain all the regular benefits of using a content repository:

• The data format is immediately scriptable with any language that there are Midgard2 bindings for
• Midgard's MVC framework makes it very easy to build web interfaces for managing and sharing the contents
• D-Bus signals are automatically fired for all changes to the content, allowing multiple applications to work on the data and still stay up-to-date with what is happening
• Contents can be stored to SQLite, MySQL, or any other backend libgda supports
• All content benefits from a set of standardized metadata

While there are plans to add web synchronization to next release of Conboy, the Midgard version will also be able to synchronize via XMPP in true peer-to-peer fashion.

Technorati Tags: midgard

This week is the Interactive Knowledge project general assembly and requirements gathering workshop in Salzburg, Austria.

My notes from the meeting days can be found on Qaiku:

• Day 1: general situation, tasks and requirements
• Day 2: tools, persistent storage, meeting the community

As things are happening, it is also possible to follow progress on the #iks-project Qaiku channel or the #iks-project Twitter hashtag.

Technorati Tags: iks-project, semanticweb

Need I say more?

...indeed I do. Next Monday is the Universal Towel Day. Therefore:

How about Babylon 5?

Technorati Tags: montypython, wolframalpha

Linked Data is the W3C effort to move data out of silos and into the interconnected web. As search engines are becoming more semantically savvy, the next big thing will be establishing connections between different pieces of data by linking.

Sir Berners-Lee has an excellent TED talk introducing the concept.

In the talk he also shows how easy it is to edit the OpenStreetMaps, a bit like I've done before.

Promoting OpenStreetMap is great. But is this Linked Data? I'd say no.

It is great to know the shape of a building, and the location of it, and the fact that it is a theatre called Terrace Theater. But that is still slightly ambiguous. Things would be clearer by linking to it, then we'd know the boxy shape on the map is actually this place.

But still, to repeat Sir Tim's slogan: Raw Data Now!

Technorati Tags: iks-project, openstreetmap, ted, rawdatanow, semanticweb