FOSDEM, held in Brussels on Feb 7th and 8th, is the most important free software event of the year in Europe. While I'm going to Poland instead of there this time, the event is an excellent opportunity to learn more about two projects I'm involved with:

Midgard and a replicated P2P filesystem

Sun Feb 8th 2009 at 16:20, Room Ferrer

Tero Heikkinen, who spoke about Midgard already in OpenMind and FSCONS will be giving a lighting talk about building a peer-to-peer replicated filesystem with Midgard and FUSE. If you thought Midgard was just a CMS, this is an excellent opportunity to learn how things have changed.

You may want to have your data available and editable everywhere, even you are not connected. You may also want to share data with your friends as you meet them or just make some copies of you most important files. Keeping files sync or sharing them without any extra work is challenging.

...Storage backend is done with Midgard 2 that uses libgda for database connection. Midgard 2 provides GObjects that are available for Midgard's python bindings. Python has also bindings for FUSE so now there's a working stack for creating userlevel filesystem that is very versatile...

Bringing geolocation into GNOME

Sat Feb 7th 2009 at 16:15, Room H.1302 (GNOME developer room)

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, the developer of libchamplain, a GTK map rendering widget, will be giving a talk about the potential GNOME (and GNOME Mobile) geostack that includes GeoClue for getting user position and handling conversions between civic location and coordinates, and libchamplain for visualizing location in various applications.

libchamplain is already on its way into various GNOME applications like the EOG image viewer and the Empathy instant messaging tool. GeoClue is in incubation into the GNOME Mobile stack, and has already been featured in the Garmin Nüvi 880 navigator.

Technorati Tags: fosdem, fuse, geoclue, gnome, midgard, p2p, libchamplain

Technorati Tags: fosdem, fuse, geoclue, gnome, libchamplain, midgard, p2p

As it was for the Zend folks, 2008 was quite a busy year also in the Midgard-land. I think the last time there was so much activity and energy in the project must've been sometime in the early days. Here are some highlights from it:

Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

The whole N series of devices seems dedicated for allowing you to take that active part: decent cameras, video recording capability, reasonably good keyboards. Not so with the iPhone.

With Apple, you're given the role of a consumer: browser the web, watch videos, buy music from huge corporations. Just don't think different.

Comparing my current iPhone and previous N95, on the Nokia I uploaded a bit more data than I downloaded, on the iPhone, I've downloaded ten times more than uploaded. With difficult text input and no background applications, the device simply seems to push users into the consumer mindset.

Two years ago we handled the whole Death Monkey Rally experience using three Nseries phones. They took our pictures and video, all blog entries were written and published with them, and they recorded our stories to the YleX radio show. Try doing that on an iPhone!

As a product, N97 looks very promising. It has pretty much all features I want from my universal communicator, except one little detail: it doesn't run Maemo.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, nokia, n97

Prompted by a recent COSS news release, I thought to write about two Summer of Code success stories:

• In addition to Google's Summer of Code, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) runs a localized version called Kesäkoodi. One of this year's projects was adding 3G configuration support for the GNOME Network Manager. This feature made it to Ubuntu 8.10, and was mentioned as one of the main new features of the distribution in many press stories
• I was a mentor in the maemo project of Google SoC 2007. The project I mentored was Jussi Kukkonen's work on porting GeoClue to Maemo. While in the end Nokia decided to go proprietary with their positioning framework, as result of the SoC project we got GeoClue into GNOME Mobile and Jussi got a job in the field. Via the GNOME Mobile stack, GeoClue is already in at least one device on the market

Not bad!

Technorati Tags: coss, geoclue, gnome, google, maemo, soc

Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this!

in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some smart caching and removed redundancies. In addition, a new database server is now in place. Together, these should get us quite far in the "Fast Server" agenda.

We're however still not done, and now we will do more optimizations that will be part of 8.09.3, due next week, and will move static files (images and javascript) to a separate lighttpd instance to remove that load from the normal Apache. When all this is done, the Maemo community should have infrastructure that will be able to serve it for a long time.

In addition to optimization, we've been working on some other features related to the website:

• Many new activities, such as Internet Tablet talk and Maemo Wiki now count towards karma, with more karma refinements on the way
• Issues with weird email formatting in Maemo forums has been fixed and will be part of 8.09.3
• Per-module karma listings are now showing correctly, making it possible to see the top contributors to different aspects of the community

Midgard is a big and complex piece of software. If you notice any issues related to this upgrade, please let us know. And if you have any ideas on improving the website, be sure to file those too!

Technorati Tags: lighttpd, maemo, midcom, midgard, ragnaroek

Last weekend we went to the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit in Gothenburg to talk a bit about the new direction Midgard has been taking: making it a general replicated persistent storage library for multiple programming languages. The CMS itself is just an application using the library.

The basic idea is that the cloud is a trap that will move your data, and your applications beyond your control to proprietary data servers and web applications run by multinational corporations. If free software doesn't provide a compelling answer to that, we risk irrelevance.

A replicated, peer-to-peer system of synchronizing and sharing your data could be the answer. And Midgard2 is a framework providing just that. Bindings to different languages like PHP, Python and Mono, interprocess communications via D-Bus and XMPP, replication, and ability to run the same software from big server clusters to Nokia internet tablets should all help us get there.

In the conference we focused on outlining the big vision, and then ran a workshop where we showed some practical aspects of this. We set up Midgard2, and built a web application that allowed user to input a RSS feed address. This was stored to the database via midgard-php. Then a midgard-python process got notified about this via D-Bus, fetched the items and stored them to the database. The web front-end then displayed the articles. A clean example of interprocess communications.

Peer-to-peer replication we demonstrated in Ville Sundell's XMPP workshop where we built a Python replication daemon monitoring for database changes via D-Bus and transmitting them via Jabber to other Midgard boxes. Quite promising! But still many things need to be written before we are in the "your data everywhere" utopia...

Oh, and for those wondering: Midgard2 is very much GNOME software, running on top of GLib, libgda, D-Bus and so forth.

Midgard follows Ubuntu's synchronized release schedule, and releases packages for that platform, but otherwise we have little to do with the distribution. Still, I found the following in Mark Shuttleworth's Jaunty Jackalope announcement interesting:

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications. "Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication - a desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!" This hare has legs - and horns - and we'll be exploring it in much more detail for Jaunty.

This echos quite well with our plans to take Midgard much further than just the web. As Everaldo often reminds me, Midgard may soon become very interesting to developers of desktop and mobile applications. What we provide to them is:

• A simple object-oriented persistent storage library
• Bindings for Python and Mono in addition to the C library
• Ability to use either SQLite or a "proper database" thanks to libgda
• Replication capability, with XMPP support on its way
• D-Bus signals for inter-process notifications of I/O events

And on top of all this, Midgard comes with a pretty efficient MVC framework for PHP. This means that the desktop applications can be coupled with a nice social web service, all built using same storage and replication mechanisms. Replicated, peer-to-peer applications could be a free software answer to the risk of cloud taking control of your data.

I'm currently in aKademy, the KDE conference, talking about adding the geographical context into the Linux desktop. GeoClue, our solution to this problem is built to be desktop-agnostic service, and therefore the same talk has been held in both GUADEC and aKademy.

Here are some notes from the conference:

• There was quite a good amount of interest in GeoClue. Both Plasma and Marble teams were talking with me, and I also gave an interview for Linux-Magazin Online
• Plasma is interesting tool for integrating widgets into the desktop. Being able to add widgets to the screensaver is also a great idea
• Another interesting Plasma idea is offering user widgets that are relevant for the current location coming from GeoClue. This means that when you land in London, you could be offered an Underground route planner app
• In general it seems the desktops are moving to a more service-oriented paradigm. With D-Bus your instant messaging functionality for instance can be part of any or all applications. This enables making much thinner and experimental applications that still integrate well with the desktop
• Marble is cool! With it, Qt developers can integrate a map widget into any application, making geo-aware tools much more visual
• openSUSE build service is about to get new features that will help generating virtual machine images
• The beer evening in the Het Anker brewery was a lot of fun. Thanks, Nokia!
• Speaking of Nokia, they are here really in force. They are the main event sponsor, and have a big bunch of people attending. Their acquisition of TrollTech has really changed the situation. Hopefully they'll do the right thing about GeoClue and Maemo

More stuff in my Jaiku notes. My GeoClue slides are also available.

GUADEC is held in Istanbul this year, and as has been the custom in 2006 and 2007, I again came there to discuss making the Linux desktop location aware.

This year I gave the "GeoClue and Gypsy - geo-information frameworks for mobile Linux desktops" talk together with Jussi Kukkonen and Iain Holmes.

With Linux devices hitting more and more pockets time was finally ripe for the talk, and hopefully soon we shall see GeoClue in places like the GNOME Panel Clock and Telepathy.

Slides are available from both Google Docs and Slideshare.

Other things to take out from this conference:

• GLib now has new introspection and testing infrastructure which will hopefully help in making and maintaining Midgard language bindings more easily
• Silverback is an usability testing application for OS X that records user's actions and expressions (via the computer's camera) for study. Once it is released it should really help with user experience design. Before that, Jing can be a good alternative
• Miguel de Icaza advocated abandoning the traditional toolkits and desktop application metaphor in favor of Rich Internet Applications served via HTTP and run on multimedia-rich toolkits like Silverlight or AIR. Something like HaXe could help here
• Telepathy's Tubes application data transfer system over instant messaging network could be used for many things we planned to do with the big-and-heavy DBE
• Turkish ice cream is a bit weird but good
• Red wine and white suits don't mix, even if it is a cocktail party :-)

Latest information about where GUADEC and aKademy will be held in 2009 is that it is still open. Apparently KDE's vote ended in draw between Gran Canaria and Tampere, and now the boards of both foundations are considering the options.

Tonight we will go to a cruise on the Bosphorus...

maemo.org has been having user profile pages for a while, and now it was time to overhaul their visual design. Here is the new design:

In addition to new visuals, the profile page also now displays automatically collected data like user's latest blogs and favourited news items, and allows entering of new data like IRC nickname and multiple email addresses.

The new profile page is now only available on the maemo.org internal testing server, but should be rolled out later today. In the meanwhile, I made a quick screencast of how it works. Shame favoriting doesn't work on the test server due to missing SSL setup, so the screencast ends in an error message ;-)