Planet Midgard

This is a powerful poem and one I felt that should be shared.

I tried to track down the author of this poem but I was unable to determine who the author was. However there is some claim a little girl wrote this poem. If anyone can prove the author or further history please contact me.

Source: Mary had a little lamb

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Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The Lamb was sure to go.

He followed her to school each day,
T’wasn’t even in the rule.
It made the children laugh and play,
To have a Lamb at school.

And then the rules all changed one day,
Illegal it became;
To bring the Lamb of God to school,
Or even speak His Name!

Every day got worse and worse,
And days turned into years.
Instead of hearing children laugh,
We heard gun shots and tears.

What must we do to stop the crime,
That’s in our schools today?
Let’s let the Lamb come back to school,
And teach our kids to pray!

I’m seeing many posts that worry about computing devices like iPhones and the new iPad preventing people from having direct control over the hardware. Mark is telling us about a Ctrl+Reset and a BASIC prompt. Nowadays you get started with the following on an HTML page: <script type="text/javascript"> document.write("Hello, [...]

With the change to the new server infrastructure, we also changed the way developers can use dput to upload their source packages to the autobuilder. We created a special host named drop.maemo.org for uploads using dput (and scp). The uploading to Extras wiki page has been updated with the correct information. Short story: replace garage.maemo.org with drop.maemo.org and continue like before.

Another change we had to make was how packages are promoted from diablo Extras-devel to Extras. The old promoter was no longer suitable for the current setup and needed to go. Promotion now works the same way as it works for fremantle Extras-devel to Extras-testing (direct promotion). The package interface for diablo Extras-devel can be found here.

There are still a few features missing for the diablo part of the packages interface, but promotion should work. I'll add build logs and context sensitive searches at a later point.

Arkistojen kätköistä löytynyt video Lasten Päivän vietosta vuodelta 1947. Näkymiä sen hetken tivolista.

Linnanmäen vanha mainos Juice Leskisen laulamana. Muistan nähneeni tämän telkkarista.

Apple iPad is certainly interesting. It seeks to challenge the concept of PCs by providing something that is at the same time more personal, and a lot easier to use. The personal computer of the future.

Gone is difficult file organization - instead, applications use their own purpose-build content repositories. Instead of seeking software from many places, all of it is easily available in an App Store, all quality-controlled by Apple. And same thing with content - forget about bookshelves and stacks of CDs, instead simply dowloading all you need from iTunes.

This sort of user experience obviously comes with a cost. Important computing concepts like multitasking are not supported. The iTunes/App Store experience means that Apple is in the position to ensure no software or content competing with its or its business partners' business model gets on the device. And most of the content you buy for the device is DRM'd, meaning that you're only renting it for the time allowed by content owners, never buying.

Even with the limitations concerned I can see myself buying an iPad. It would serve as a very nice device for web surfing from the couch and as an e-reader on business trips. I can also see myself running demos and presentations from it instead of a laptop.

Even with the limitations concerned, it is likely that the iPad will happen, and will blaze the trail towards a new way of personal computing. Stephen Fry says it well:

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

The success of iPad will mean more than just a completely new level of App Store economy. Other companies will certainly seek to emulate the model, coming up with their own post-WIMP devices and their own content and software ecosystems. This all will be a challenge for the free software movement.

The world of free software is still very much stuck in what computing was in the 90s. We think of desktop computers, we do not integrate with the web. And we do not get the transformation that is happening with personal computers. Taught by smartphones and cloud applications, users are moving from desktops through simple netbooks towards information appliances.

With information appliances you need a seamless user interface. You need an ecosystem where content comes alongside the software to utilize it. You need to move past the old WIMP metaphors and the idea of separation between data stored in a a file system and the software manipulating it.

So far the first convincing attempt towards this direction I've seen in the free software world is KDE's Social Desktop initiative. It allows users to connect with each other straight through the desktop, and it allows discovery of new applications and content to download and use straight in the applications. We also use it with Maemo's new App Downloader.

Threatened by the cloud from one end, and closed-ecosystem appliances from the other, it will be interesting to see how we react. Will we rise to the challenge and start providing new user experiences? Will we build a free cloud? Will we integrate with initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Creative Commons to provide the content integration? Will the open web be our safe haven?

Definitely interesting times to be a software developer.

There certainly is a lot of buzz about Apple's rumored Tablet product. Daring Fireball writes:

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

What I find most interesting are the view that the Tablet may bring new computer interaction paradigms. Again from Daring Fireball:

Our “desktop” computers’ human interfaces haven’t fundamentally changed since 1984 — keyboard and mouse/trackpad for input, overlapping draggable resizable windows on-screen, and a hierarchical file system where you create and manage “document files”. Have you ever sat back, scratched your chin, and wondered when the computer industry will break free of these current interfaces — which can be a hassle even for experts, and downright confusing (e.g. click vs. double-click) for the non-experts? Surely no one expects the computer interfaces of, say, 50 years hence to be based on these same metaphors and input methods. What’s the next step?

A touchscreen tablet isn't really suited for the WIMP paradigm as for example text entry is quite difficult, and you probably want larger, thumb-friendly user interface elements. This is where Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative failed, trying to bring the regular WIMP user interface to the tablet.

Instead what seems to be happening is that all the Wiis, iPhones, and N900s are now heading us towards a post-WIMP world. Instead of indirect manipulation by mouse and keyboard we can now interact with our applications using the more natural ways of touching things on screen or moving the device around.

This innovation will not be limited only to mobile APIs, web applications can already now know whether user is accessing them via a WIMP system or a touchscreen device thanks to CSS media queries and Javascript orientation events in latest Firefox.

The user interface innovation that is arriving thanks to these new interaction possibilities is quite promising, though it will probably take a while before we know what things actually work, and what are just fun demos.

If you're thinking about new kinds of user interfaces, it might be a good time to read papers like Noncommand User Interfaces (Jakob Nielsen, 1993) and Magic Ink (Bret Victor, 2006).

I certainly am as we are in the process of defining a new kind of CMS UI for Midgard 2.

Update: Gizmodo has a very nice article on Jef Raskin's information appliance concept and the evolution of GUIs.

I stumbled into Internet Eyes a while ago and it is Big Brother on steroids. You randomly plug yourself to one of the 4.2 million CCTV cams spread over the UK and watch if something happens. If it does and it’s a crime, you can report it and get points (and perhaps get rewarded). If [...]

I've been discussing this issue with some people before as hypothetical case, but now it seems that we run into it: Compiling and application against the PR1.1 SDK creates packages which can not be installed on earlier firmware releases.

In this case we have have a libosso version which is higher than the one in previous releases. As this dependency gets automatically added when compiling in the PR1.1 SDK this poses a problem.

The autobuilder uses the repository.maemo.org repository, so it automatically uses newer packages when they are available.

For Extras this means that install of an application which is compiled against the new SDK fails without any description we can expect an end-user to understand. This is something which should be prevented.

How can we work around this problem:

1: Only compile against the original SDK.

This prevents new features from ever be available to developers, but should work until there is real API/ABI breakage in a new firmware.

2: Use version specific repositories

This needs Application Manager support as we need to fetch from a separate repository every time. Also requires us to build against every sdk version known to man.

3: Depend on >= mp-fremantle-generic-pr | maemo-version

We would need a hack in the autobuilder to add depends to pr and maemo version. This way a user needs to upgrade to at least the required firmware image. I think this will make it easier for an end-user to understand what is happening.

We could, with help of the AM team, even detect in the AM that a firmware upgrade is required and give a the end user a nice warning/description.

Currently the AM doesn't have any means to detect which firmware version a package requires. Option 3 solve that issue at the same time.

If you have an alternative solution on how to go about fixing this
issue, then please let me know.

Discussions on the maemo-developers list or talk.

It has taken some time to get this second part online. Perhaps even too long, but that’s life. More important stuff always seem to come around and mess up the plans on these less important things. Well here is a follow up on the parking…not as good as the first post, but this is more [...]

Google launched a new mobile web service called Near Me Now that can recommend things like restaurants, bars and ATMs near you. This uses browser geolocation to provide only results relevant to where you are.

The idea is quite good: to replace business directories like Yelp or eat.fi with something that is easily accessible from Google's homepage and uses Google's great relevancy algorithms.

However, the implementation is not quite there yet. My main gripe is that they implemented this using browser sniffing so that the feature can be accessed only with iPhones and Android devices. Even though I'm using N900, a mobile device that has GPS and provides geolocation through the browser I cannot access that site. That reeks of the bad old times of IE-only websites.

Lesson: if you need browser sniffing to provide some feature, implement it based on browser capabilities, not the user agent (which can anyway be spoofed easily).

Background Knowledge

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When trying to print an entire Microsoft Excel workbook to a PDF using Adobe PDF or PDF Creator multiple PDFs are created for each worksheet instead of a single PDF file. This is caused by Excel itself on how the worksheets are setup due to one or all of the following settings, print quality, print area and page orientation for each worksheet.

Applies to:

• Microsoft Excel 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2000

Solution

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1. Set “Print Area” for each sheet under “Page Layout/Page Setup”.
2. Set the “page orientation” under “Page Layout/Page Setup” to portrait or landscape for each sheet as necessary.
3. Right click on a worksheet tab at the bottom of the screen and click on “Select All Sheets”.
4. Now under Page Layout/Page Setup set the paper size and print quality for all sheets.

Source: novaPDF Knowledge Base: Printing an entire Excel workbook to a single PDF file
Source: doPDF Forum: Trouble with Multiple Pdfs with one workbook

2009 was a pretty active year for the Midgard content repository project, and so it is good to take a look at some of the highlights:

• Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like the Nokia N900
• Ragnaroek, the long-term support version of Midgard1 kept chugging along with four new maintenance releases and total of 566 issues closed. Ragnaroek will be maintained until October 2013
• The Midgard Project turned ten years old in May. A gala evening and party was held in Helsinki, Finland
• Midgard's content repository gained bindings to two new programming languages alongside existing PHP, C and Python: Objective-C in March and Vala in December
• Midgard was one of the CMSs admitted to the EU-funded Interactive Knowlegde project that aims to increase semantic capabilities in content management
• Qaiku, a conversational microblogging platform powered by Midgard MVC was launched in March
• We had two Midgard Gatherings: in March in Linköping, Sweden and in October in Helsinki, Finland
• Ragnaland became a way to bridge the gap between Midgard1 and Midgard2 by enabling running of MidCOM applications on top of Midgard MVC
• Midgard was presented in several conferences including Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, FrOSCon, OpenMind and FSCONS
• Founding meeting for an association to support the Midgard project was held in December. The association will provide membership to all active Midgard contributors, and an alumni membership for people who have been part of the project in the past

Happy new year to everybody in the Midgard world!

2009 was a pretty active year for the Midgard content repository project, and so it is good to take a look at some of the highlights:

• Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like the Nokia N900
• Ragnaroek, the long-term support version of Midgard1 kept chugging along with four new maintenance releases and total of 566 issues closed. Ragnaroek will be maintained until October 2013
• The Midgard Project turned ten years old in May. A gala evening and party was held in Helsinki, Finland
• Midgard's content repository gained bindings to two new programming languages alongside existing PHP, C and Python: Objective-C in March and Vala in December
• Midgard was one of the CMSs admitted to the EU-funded Interactive Knowlegde project that aims to increase semantic capabilities in content management
• Qaiku, a conversational microblogging platform powered by Midgard MVC was launched in March
• We had two Midgard Gatherings: in March in Linköping, Sweden and in October in Helsinki, Finland
• Ragnaland became a way to bridge the gap between Midgard1 and Midgard2 by enabling running of MidCOM applications on top of Midgard MVC
• Midgard was presented in several conferences including Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, FrOSCon, OpenMind and FSCONS
• Founding meeting for an association to support the Midgard project was held in December. The association will provide membership to all active Midgard contributors, and an alumni membership for people who have been part of the project in the past

Happy new year to everybody in the Midgard world!

It’s been a month since my last post, and there are many reasons to it. I had eye surgery (femtolasik) that did not go too well…my left eye may need to have one more operation. This said, it’s been quite tough to read stuff and thus write…and work. Makes one appriciate the fact that one [...]

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project.

• An association will be founded to support the Midgard project. Founding meeting will be at 3pm on Dec 19th in restaurant Angleterre in Helsinki, Finland
• Midgard has an Activity Log that is compatible with the activitystrea.ms specification. The log is available in both MidCOM and Midgard2, and is already used in Asgard
• Midgard Vala bindings make it possible to use midgard2 with the Vala programming language. See example
• Midgard Brainstorming component has a new user interface that can be seen live on maemo.org
• Mjolnir nightly builds are now available in the OBS mjolnir-dev repository
• Development builds of midgard2-runtime are now available in the OBS unstable repository
• Midgard MVC autologin on Runtime is now possible, meaning that the Runtime user is also registered authenticated with Midgard
• Ragnaroek is now PHP 5.3 compatible. This support will come in next release

About Midgard
Midgard is a persistent storage framework built for the replicated world. It enables developers build applications that have their data in sync between the desktop, mobile devices and web services. It also allows for easy sharing of data between users.

Midgard does this all by building on top of technologies like GLib, libgda and D-Bus. It provides developers with object-oriented programming interfaces for C, PHP and Python. Web service developers also benefit from MidCOM, a modern MVC framework for PHP development that utilizes all the advantages of the Midgard storage framework. MidCOM helps web production also by shipping a set of content management tools.

About MWS
Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community. Notices about new published summaries will be sent to the Midgard user mailing list, Qaiku #midgard channel, and are available via RSS.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".