Planet Midgard

The news is just in about Adobe being set to acquire Day Software (see also the FAQ). Assuming the deal goes through, it looks like I’ll be working for Adobe by the end of this year. I’m an open source developer, so I’m looking forward to finding out how committed Adobe is in supporting the [...]

To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic HTML5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:

• Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
• Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
• Saving the content back to Midgard
• ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information

The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:

Editing content with Aloha in Midgard

Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin

RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor

Additional semantic information suggested by FISE

All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).

Frankencamera, or fCam, the open source computational photography platform from Stanford's Camera 2.0 project was unleashed for the Nokia N900 this Wednesday. PhysOrg has a story outlining the significance of this:

Computational photography refers to the ways computers can extend the capabilities of digital imaging by combining multiple photographs taken with different camera settings to create an image that could not be taken in a single shot, or with an ordinary camera.

Some of these new ways of combining images can be done in Photoshop or another such program, but until now they could not be done inside the camera, Levoy said. That's because commercial cameras are closed to development by all but their manufacturers. Frankencamera, on the other hand, brings computational photography directly to the camera, by making the camera a programmable platform.

I installed fCamera and the HDR photo assistant from Maemo extras-devel yesterday, and the results (taking .DNG RAW images, automatically generating HDR pictures) seem quite impressive. Here is a quick example from our office. Sun is shining outside and the office is not lit:

For comparison, here is the same setting with the regular N900 camera application:

It will be interesting to see what developers will come up with, now that all these camera capabilities are available through an open API!

Midgard 8.09 is an industrial CMS that is now in Long-Term Supported stage, with the community maintaining it until 2013. As we all know, performance is a feature, and with a CMS framework that has lived through many changes including transitions from PHP4 to 5.2 and from Classic Midgard era to the modern APIs, there is a lot to do.

For the next 8.09.10 release we decided to put quite a bit of efforts into performance tuning, with some excellent work done by Content Control to simplify ACL handling and cache navigation information. As you can see, the result is quite impressive:

What is left to be done is some work with the multilingual content database queries. After that we should be good to go with what is probably the fastest Midgard1 ever.

Zeitgeist, the desktop activity logging engine is now becoming geo-aware. From Seif Lotfy's blog:

It allows you to ask Zeitgeist stuff like

• “Get me the recent files I edited at university”
• “Who do I contact most when I am at School?”
• “Which pictures did I take in Brazil?”
• “Where was I when an Email came in?”
• “What files did I open during the conference?”

As I've been advocating since 2006, location is important for making applications smarter. While you might not remember where you stored some file, you probably remember where you were when working on it. Then Zeitgeist's location features, powered by GeoClue, will be able to get it for you.

This is especially cool since Zeitgeist is coming for Maemo as well. My laptop is quite mobile, but the N900 is even more so.

aKademy 2010 was hosted in the sunny city of Tampere by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, an organization that I'm a steering group member of. In addition to helping a bit with the arrangements and organizing the Midgard Gathering there, I also gave a talk about GeoClue, the positioning framework for Linux desktops.

• Presentation slides (PDF)
• Video of my talk

We initially started the push for location-aware desktops around 2006, and now the efforts are finally starting to bear fruit. Both Zeitgeist and Nepomuk are looking at indexing documents based on where you accessed them, Telepathy can share your location with your friends, and hopefully soon also your desktop clock will switch timezones when you travel.

It is very cool that this development seems to be happening on both GNOME and KDE at a reasonably similar pace. GeoClue is also a service in MeeGo and I've been told another major mobile phone manufacturer uses it. Maybe soon Mac OS X will not be the only platform with location APIs built in?

Photo by Alexey Zakhlestin.

We tried to get the combined GUADEC and aKademy conferences to Tampere in 2009, but a warmer place unfortunately won. However, we will be hosting this year's aKademy so at least KDE and Qt fans will get to enjoy this beautiful northern industrial city.

The main conference will be held at the Tampere University over the weekend, and then the remaining hackweek will be in the nice Demola facility in the Finlayson district. Expect great connectivity and close proximity to all Tampere nightlife.

I'm involved with two aKademy activities:

• GeoClue presentation on the location service that can be used on any Linux desktop and is used in MeeGo. I'll also talk about what desktops can do when location is available
• Midgard Gathering during Mon-Wed of the hackweek. Midgard provides a content repository for applications that should be available also for Qt apps through GObject Introspection. With some proven performance benefits and replication support, Midgard should be interesting for any desktop or mobile app that deals with structured data

In addition there will be a Maemo / MeeGo meetup in the Plevna brewery on Friday evening. See you there!

Midgard2 10.05.1 was released yesterday, bringing a long-waited feature finally to the Midgard installation packages: the Midgard Runtime.

Midgard Runtime is an application that consists of a simple Qt WebKit viewer that, when run, starts a local Midgard web server on the background and connects to it. This means that you'll have the full Midgard MVC stack available on your own desktop, in a way that is easy to install and easy to run. Get it for your favorite Linux distribution from OBS!

As a whole, the Midgard Runtime stack is quite interesting:

• SQLite is used as the default storage through the libgda4 abstraction layer
• Midgard2 is used as the content repository, brought to PHP through an extension
• Midgard MVC provides the web development framework
• Alexey Zakhlestin's AppServer is used as the pure-PHP web server
• The Qt application starts server processes on the background and displays the site in a WebKit view
• Runtime's bundle setup tool uses libraries from the Pake build system

The AppServer is particularly something that other PHP projects might find useful. Since the server itself is written in PHP you don't have any additional dependencies besides php-cli. It also means your application can use a lot more efficient caching as files have to be loaded only once, and things can be kept in memory between requests. Of course the downside is that if your PHP script dies, then the whole server is down. But that is easy to deal with by a bit of defensive programming.

At this point the Runtime is targeted at web developers interested in trying out Midgard, but eventually we'll be using the bundle system also for distributing full Midgard-powered web applications to the desktop. The progress on this can be followed on GitHub.

Compared to Nokia's Web Runtime, the Midgard Runtime should be more familiar to developers as you'll be able to write also server-side PHP code, not just JavaScript. In addition to PHP, the whole system is also accessible via any language that can handle GObject Introspection.

So, what can I do with it?

• Install a Midgard environment with $ midgard2-runtime-bundle-simple-install
• Start the runtime with $ midgard2-runtime-bundle-simple-run
• Midgard MVC and components are located in ~/.midgard2/simple-bundle/. This is where you can also place your own code

Both companies and public administration are starting to understand the benefits of free software: reducing vendor lock-in, possibility to continue development of a project after a vendor has gone out of business or lost interest, and in general enjoying the four freedoms. But unfortunately much of this understanding has been limited to the context of licenses.

In reality, licenses are only a small part of a project being truly open. They are just a layer of insurance comparable to traditional source code escrow.

What we really need is understanding of a bit more wholesome project openness. The actual goals of openness that the license should derive from. Here are some aspects to consider:

Project transparency

If a project aims to have outside users or contributors, they need to be able to see the history of changes in the software, decisions that have been made, and the open list of bugs or enhancements being worked on.

A released software package answers these questions poorly regardless of a license. Instead, what is needed is the project being developed out in the open, preferably using one of the common project hosting environments like Gitorious, GitHub, SourceForge, Launchpad or GNU Savannah. You can also host the project yourself using something like Trac or GForge but this limits access and visibility to the project.

The project must actually use the service, not just by code dumps at release time, but with constant development activity visible as code commits and active issue tracking. Depending on business goals it is also good to have future plans for the project visible to the public.

All of this is mandatory for others to gauge the viability of a software package to their needs. Josh Berkus presented a good list of things you shouldn't do to create a community around your project.

Contribution policy

Potential users and developers need to know how they can make their changes available to a package. Is it possible at all, are copyright assignments or some contributor agreements necessary, is there a documented process for submitting changes or even becoming an acknowledged developer in the project? Or is the project being developed behind closed curtains of a company?

Requirements and software stack

Another area some projects fail at is communicating how the software can be built and installed. If the only practical way to run the software is from released binary packages, or through buying consulting, is it truly open? Does the project require additional closed software or specific hardware to run with?

Specialized licensing concerns

Depending on the type of software other concerns may be being able to provide it as part of a Software as a Service offering, or being able to deploy it on some constrained or closed hardware.

Some software licenses address these questions clearly, like EUPL requiring contributions to be opened also when the software is offered in SaaS manner, or GPLv3 forbidding device manufacturers from locking down or 'Tivoizing' their hardware products.

Wrapping up

Most of these questions are well understood within the free software community itself. But we generally communicate it poorly by focusing the discussion on license technicalities. I guess this is because we're so used to working in this open manner that we take the it as a given. But users, especially in the public administration only see the licensing side of things because that is the only aspect we talk about and have definitions for.

A good exception for this is the Apache Software Foundation that has a well-defined set of rules that projects must follow before they can be adopted under the ASF umbrella. Maybe FSF and OSI should also publish some understandable guidelines and definitions for project openness?

Partitioning

Usually, you get your device preinstalled by OEM and this means you have whole disk space dedicated to your WinXP. If you don't intend to erase it, you need to make some space for your new MeeGo installation.

In order to repartition the disk, we need a fancy tool that is capable of looseless partition operations. I decided to use EASEUS Partition Master because i) I found it and ii) it was free. If you have some LiveCD versions of, say, Ubuntu or Fedora you can also boot it and use GParted shipped. The idea remains the same - to move all existing data into one space and cut out some free space for new, unallocated area. With EASEUS it was fairly easy.

First, you'd better defragment your disk so you're sure no data left in the physical area of the disk you will cut. It usually takes some time, so once you hit OK go and get your coffee.

 

Next go to 'Move/Resize' and define a new size of your Win partition. You can put numbers or move the slider. I suggest to allocate at least 8G for MeeGo, however if memory servers, the installer will go on with 4.2G at least.

If you forgot to defragment the drive, no worries - it'll do it anyway.

Installation

Once repartitioning is complete just reboot the device from your USB key. In case you don't have booting key, please refer to MeeGo release page to learn how to do it.

Installation process looks quite generic. Next, next, next, and when you get to partitioning screen let the installer use remaining disk space and proceed. Never mind boot settings as installer shamelessly ignores your settings anyway.

Booting and post install

First time boot has to be completed in MeeGo to let you access fully operating system. Once it's done go to Applications -> Terminal:

$ sudo vi /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

prompt 0

timeout 5

To have some time for the decission before it boots.

 

#menu hidden

To show the boot menu

label meego
        menu label MeeGo (2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook)
        kernel vmlinuz-2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook
        append ro root=/dev/sda3 quiet vga=current
label Other
        menu label Windows
        kernel chain.c32
        append boot 1
        menu default

Put menu default for your OS that you want to boot automatically and save&exit. From now on every time you boot you have a choice of OS to start.

At Nemein we have a monthly staff meeting to go through all project backlogs, new initiatives and happenings in the R&D side of things. Today the weather was nice, so we decided to keep the meeting in the nearby Sinebrychoff Park, armed with croissants, cake and the company waterpipe. Quite pleasant change from routine!

Thanks to Aslan for the cake!

In terms of system and/or application development I am no more than a user with a bit extended view & experience in Linux systems, so I guess my testings are not infected with too much geek'ism and will trurly show what statistical device fan could feel taking first steps into MeeGo.

Downloading & preparation.

OK, that's easy. Community released two USB images with Chrome and Chromium browsers respectively. I took Chromium version - one click less to get it and besides, this image was available from official MeeGo repository so I could avoid huge traffic at downloads site. Clever, huh?

Installation instructions are pretty clear to newbies, even for Linux they noticed not every Linux user knows how to use 'dd' command. After few minutes I had my USB key ready with bootable MeeGo Live. Next step:

Installation.

That hurt a bit. But mostly because I tried to be smart and didn't want to wait until get home to play with my testing laptop. Instead I downloaded Virtual Box and quickly prepare a VM. Installation went smooth and even after first boot I got into post-install settings wizard, but that was the end of story since every subsequent reboot ended with blank screen. Referring to the source one can find:

System Requirements

 * CPU: Intel Atom or Intel Core 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)

    Note: MeeGo will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs

 * Platforms with the GMA-500, Nvidia, or ATI Graphics chipset are not supported.

OK. I got Dell D630 and perfectly fill both conditions, so what the heck? Never mind... let's try VMWare. Another couple of hours to download and install VM (including few Windows reboots) and another MeeGo installation and yet another boot up fail. Arrrrrghhhh... Apparently MeeGo wants to be the only known system that won't work under VM.

I was so desperate, that I quickly downloaded some tools and repartitioned my Windows laptop to have some spare Gigs so I could install MeeGo in a traditional way (I posted short how to on http://forum.meego.com). Boot from USB, install, reboot, post-install and "Houston, we got MeeeGo".

Usability.

First impressions? Sweet, even sweeter. Nice and fast UI animations, lightweight icons and clean interface gives very nice feeling of mobile system designed for web-mostly usage. After few minutes I had it configured for my GMail account and was already browsing the web. Funny, but I had a feeleing that first couple of minutes playing with Chromium showed the browser is quite unstable. Display was getting frozen intermittently and browser stopped responding. After some time it just started working properly.

What else do we get? The main entry point int MeeGo is called Myzone. It stands for a desktop place with shortcuts to most fresh calendar & tasks items, with unread main notifier, few icons for most used application like browser, mail client and eventually list of thumbnails from recent activity. By activity I mean recent pages viewed or twitter updates and other live feed coming from 'status' panel. The latter is a command center for all live feeds associated with internet presence of a user. At the moment we have Twitter and Last.FM, however I couldn't log on to Last FM using my account.

Next to Myzone, there is a 'zones' panel. Briefly, it works like multiple desktops in every regular Linux environment. You can place and arrange open application to bring some order to you device. Then there come 'applications' panel containing several games, simple editor tool, multimedia player and some system tools. The third is 'status' panel I already mentioned, followed by 'persons' - a place you can add you IM accounts to have your contacts displayed and to start chatting in an easy way.

Multimedia, the next panel, is somewhat tricky. Upon some unknown rules it displays mutimedia you can run in a player. It also shows current player queue and give the opportunity ti launch Banshee - MeeGo multimedia player. Banshee seems to be working fine, however again, I couldn't run any last.fm content although I logged in and it showed my favorites and stations. Surprisingly, it doesn't play MP3 on DivX and similar formats. This comes (I think) from MeeGo policy of being open source and supporting open source only technologies and formats. This was also the cause that my WiFi didn't start - I have Broadcom wireless card that shipd only closed driver binary.

Of course, you can download and compile drivers, codecs and whatever comes as closed, but for typical end user this may be a job too big. Although I totally agree with open source ideas, I don't think MeeGo is best counterpart to fight against closed formats, especially most popular ones like MP3 and position that OEM will provide whatever their device need (drivers, codecs, tools) closes they way for repurposing harware people already have. I believe there should be some kind of extras or non-free repository, that users CAN CHOOSE from.

Other panel or desktop icons contain shortcuts to device manager (storage, battery, sound volume), gadgets (errrm... this I think doesn't work yet) and Bluetooth and network connections.

MeeGo 1.0 was released with localizations to a great number of languages (including full Polish translation I am proud to be part of) so it is already prepared to conquer the Wolrd.

Conclusion?

Well.. I loved the idea at very fisrt glance, so I keep standing that this is it. A versatile OS for mobile computing, web & communication oriented system facilitating daily routines. Enriched with telephony, GPS maps or DVB-T software will make other than computers devices like phones, navi or TV sets more friendly and funny.

I realize version 1.0 is not perfect and can't wait to see more.

The thread model of Java is pretty good and works well for many use cases, but every now and then you need a separate process for better isolation of certain computations. For example in Apache Tika we’re looking for a way to avoid OutOfMemoryErrors or JVM crashes caused by faulty libraries or troublesome input data. [...]

Ceki Gülcü recently wrote an interesting post on the Apache community model and its vulnerability in cases where consensus can not be reached with reasonable effort. Also the discussion in the comments is interesting. Ceki’s done some amazing work especially on Java logging libraries, and his design vision shines through the code he’s written. He’s [...]

Last year we became a partner in the European Commission -funded Interactive Knowledge Systems project aiming to increase semantic capabilities in Open Source CMSs and vendors.

The first year of IKS has focused mostly on research and requirements gathering. As a project participant we at the Midgard project have taken this time for making our own preparations as well. Here are some initial results:

• grokking the semantic web and linked data ideas and terminology obviously required some amounts of studying
• we did a comparison of features and concepts between three content repositories together with Day Software. The similarities between Midgard, JCR and CouchDB are remarkable
• while others in the IKS sphere are focused on Java, we've started collaborating with the developers of Tracker, a GObject-based RDF triple store. Tracker would fit the Midgard architecture much better and we would be able to avoid big external dependencies
• we chose Wymeditor as the new rich text editor in Midgard CMS. Wymeditor is fast, jQuery-based and relatively sparse of features, allowing us to build the functionality we need in an integrated manner. Wymeditor is also capable of dealing with RDFa
• MgdSchema, the XML syntax for describing Midgard content types was expanded to allow us to link objects and properties to appropriate RDF ontologies
• we participated in several IKS meetings around Europe: Salzburg, Rome, Salzburg, Rome and now Paderborn
• preparations were made to migrate Midgard's default HTML templates from Microformats to RDFa

All of this aims for making Midgard compatible with the designs of the IKS project, but building as much of it on top of the pure GNOME + PHP stack as possible.

Now that Midgard2 is at Long-Term Supported stage it was time to finally make the jump and migrate our development efforts to happen on top of Git, the fast version control system. To maximize project visibility and enable easy tool access we chose GitHub as the Git hosting provider.

While migrating to Git we also decided to implement the Distributed Version Control model where the MidgardProject account contains "blessed" repositories of various modules of the Midgard2 ecosystem, with development happening in personal clones. Maintainers of Midgard modules will be responsible for merging changes from developers back upstream, based on pull requests. More information can be found from the developer list thread.

You can get started by following the MidgardProject account on GitHub! See also Midgard2 and Midgard MVC on Ohloh.

Midgard1 Ragnaroek maintenance and development will still happen in our old SVN environment and the Trac tool.