I'm glad to announce the first (experimental) release of a project I've been working on recently — Midgard bindings for the ObjectiveC language. Those bindings are for the upcoming Midgard2 — the brand new fresh version of the library.

Midgard2 is an Open Source Content Repository and it provides an objectified view to the data and services surrounding it. At the basic level it abstracts the database access (SQLite, MySql, PostgreSQL) but this is only where it all starts. Serialization & replication, managing own storage objects, multi-process access to data are all covered. The fully object-oriented (GObject-oriented) API allows you to focus on the data, not the database syntax.

For many desktop software developers, database technologies belong to where they belong — the web alone. This is not necessarily true. As the software & services en masse move to the web, the need to integrate the cloud with the desktop becomes indispensable.

Midgard is quite ready for that — it based & engineered fully on the top of the desktop (Gnome) software stack. Being highly modular and having very little dependencies it scales from a note taking application to a full-blown CMS system.

ObjectiveC bindings

The Midgard objc bindings come in a shape of a standard Mac installer. The package (which requires a Leopard+ system) installs a Midgard private framework which allows to develop Midgard applications using XCode. The applications built this way have Midgard embedded dynamically into them — they don’t require any extra libraries/components on the target machine.

Links

• Midgard installer for the mac — requires Leopard.
• Source code of the bindings — the bindings are auto-generated from API description.
• Technical overview — a couple of notes about the process.
• XCode tutorial — building your first application with Midgard on the Mac.

Note: As many people have reported to me, the practices described below seem to be pretty common among mobile operators in Europe. To some extent the proxy can be bypassed — at least on the desktop.

I've been spreading the news here and there for few days now but it’s time to make it official.

After quitting Novell I decided to take the plunge and try something I've been long waiting for… – go self-employed and start own company. New Wild is just that — a young company offering services related to mobile software, web and unix(ish) engineering. Additionally (and that’s new) it’s also about cocoa — both mobile (iPhone) and desktop.

One part of what I'm planning to do at New Wild is pushing my own software projects — first of which I hope to be announcing quite soon. Another part is helping others to make their ideas happen. That’s more commonly known as contracting & consulting.

The decision to start New Wild is not something that came out of a profound business analysis and huge preparations. Quite the contrary — like every important decision it came out of an impulse. The very basic promise behind New Wild is that after spending the last several years working at big companies I know how to provide some real value to people who want to make their software ideas happen.

I'm open for business!

Update: My changes were merged into the original code.

As services such as DropBox become more mature, it makes again sense to store simple textual content (ie. notes) as files — instead of going for Everything Buckets. For simple text files DropBox provides an actually working synchronization, offline access to the data and a pretty good integration with the native platform (be it GNOME or OSX).

I usually store my notes and other simple text snippets as markdown-formatted plain-text files. The simple markdown format is exactly the amount of syntactic sugar I need to get along. Additionally, the markdown format is supported by all popular editors (gEdit, TextMate, vi…) and many web-writing platforms.

On OSX by default the markdown files (.markdown) have two limitations when compared to standard (.txt) files:

• Can’t be Quicklook'ed
• Contents are not indexed by Spotlight (can’t be searched)

Installing an editor such as TextMate gives support for the .markdown extension but does not solve either of the above problems.

Phil Toland did a great work and created a markdown quicklook plugin. I took his code and improved a bit on it. In particular, my version does 3 things more:

• Uses discount C library to render markdown (instead of calling-in Perl)
• Styles the output a little bit (Helvetica vs. Times)
• Adds spotlight indexing

To get going you need to install the compiled binary plugin in ~/Library/Quicklook/ (create if it doesn’t exist).

Links

• Phil’s original repo
• My fork
• Compiled plugin

I’ll be attending and giving a presentation at Libre Graphics Meeting this year in Wrocław.

Title: “Programmer’s hell: working with a UI designer”.

Time: Friday, 14:25.

Lot’s of fun guaranteed, come to feel some hot flames.

I’ll be attending and giving a presentation at Libre Graphics Meeting this year in Wrocław.

Title: ”Programmer’s hell: working with a UI designer”.

Time: Friday, 14:25.

Lot’s of fun guaranteed, come to feel some hot flames.

I rarely feel like blogging about personal stuff but today my patience finally went off. Since I switched from Finnish Nordea (which provides excellent service BTW) to a Polish one I'm having only problems. Not the only one being that for two months now they’re unable to send me a banking card for my account.

Today, however, something much more scary happened. When trying to send them email (using their own banking account messaging system) I got this nice failure:

Warning: pg_exec() [function.pg-exec]: Query failed: ERROR: syntax error at or near 
"u" at character 2101 in /www/pglib/libs/c_db_postgres.php on line 106
error: query(): ERROR: syntax error at or near "u" at character 2101 
INSERT INTO cms.tabmail ( sto, ssubject, scontent, sheaders ) VALUES 
( 'solopl@nordea.com', 'produkty i usługi bankowe', 
'Temat: produkty i usługi bankowe...

As garrett pointed out — of all the places you want to see this kind of error, your bank is not one. For those unfamiliar with the problem — it’s esentially an Sql injection bug which, in short, means that your system security is a piece of shit.

Miguel has a good status update on Moonlight. Complementing that I recorded a few simple demos presenting current state of our Moonlight trunk.

While talking to friends at FOSDEM I noticed that while everybody pretty much heard about Moonlight/Silverlight, not so many people have actually seen it in action. This is understandable — at the moment building Moon from source is not trivial. Hopefully those little videos will help a little.

Microsoft showcase — a website collecting links to various Silverlight-enabled pages and web apps. Users can browse sites and rate them. Built with Xaml and Javascript. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

Podium — A dynamic mashup of various news related to US election candidates. Shows some more advanced text-flowing and formatting capabilities. Again — Xaml and Javascript. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

Surfaces — A very simple surface manipulation/D&D example. Clutter has a similiar demo. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

This is only a small selection of Silverlight-enabled sites which was easier to record (ie. not using media playback). A bigger list we use for testing is available at Moonlight 1.0 test sites.

Just a small status update: I recently quit Nokia and joined the new old faces at Novell for a brighter future. Cheers guys! Helsinki folks — don’t despair, you still have Meritahti.

Also, like last year, I’ll be coming to Brussels for FOSDEM this year. Let’s meet!