Today Finland is celebrating 90th birthday of the Republic, and so it is appropriate to write about how things are better in Sweden, where I'm visiting the first Scandinavian Free Software Conference.

The example this time is computer usage in trains. While VR has only grudgingly added some power outlets to long distance trains, SJ's X2000 trains have them for every seat.

And even better, there is onboard internet with an updating map of the train's position:

Unfortunately the train position is embedded in the map image and can't be read programmatically. It would make for a nice, specialized GeoClue position provider...

Technorati Tags: finland, public transport, wifi, railway, sweden

Amazon's e-book reader Kindle was launched today, and it looks quite interesting:

• eInk display, so it is easy on the eyes and can be read even in sunlight
• Long battery life
• Amazon stores backups of books user has bought
• Storage expandable with SD cards
• Ability to send in your own files
• Newspapers, magazines and blogs
• Automatic updates and downloads via cell network, no need to tether to computer
• Shame about the closed format, though

While the device is ugly it seems usable enough. Now the question remains whether the device will be feasible for use outside the US, as Amazon's Whispernet system is apparently tied to Sprint, a local operator there.

When I moved away from the Five Corners apartment I decided to de-clutter to support a more working nomadistic lifestyle. I digitized all my music so I was able to get rid of the CDs and gave my old furniture away and replaced it with rented ones.

But books are still an analog product. As no good e-book reader has emerged I've been stuck with a collection of big and heavy books that I have to move around. Only when I've run out of shelf space I've been reluctantly forced to give away or sell them. If the Kindle approach works, it could help me get rid of the dead tree editions and paper magazine subscriptions. But time will tell.

Of course, Kindle is not the only device in the market. My Nokia N800 tablet with FBReader could do much of the same stuff, but the screen isn't as nicely readable and the book and magazine collection supplied by Amazon just isn't available.

Updated 2007-11-20: Dive into Mark has very good points about the problems with Kindle's proprietary approach to e-books.

Technorati Tags: amazon, eink, kindle, rss, travel, workingnomad

While there is no public release yet, I though to give a heads-up on a project we're working on with Jerry: Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we're taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

• Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
• Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
• Simple base data types (note, event, contact, ...) that users can customize and extend
• Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb's restful JSON interface)
• Speed

To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.

Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb, openpsa

Karma: The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his next incarnation. (wiktionary)

Many communities struggle with the question of how to recognize their most valuable members. This is true also for Nokia's maemo.org, the community for open source development on internet tablets. With the two latest device releases, Nokia has given hefty discounts to some members of the community, raising obvious questions on who should be entitled to such a developer device.

One part of answering that question (and managing the developer device program in general) was developing a CRM system for maemo.org including karma calculations based on community activity.

Karma is a complex concept which we decided to simplify a bit following the model we implemented for evaluating newsworthiness of incoming blog items in the Social News project:

• count different contributions user has made
• run those through a rating system (forum moderation, app catalog stars, social news favs, ...)
• apply a contribution type modifier
• add them up

...and we have karma:

Technically the Karma system was implemented as a feature of Midgard's net.nehmer.account profile management component. Out-of-the-box it is able to calculate Karma from various items like forum posts and blog comments inside the Midgard database. To complement that it has a quite simple plug-in architecture for Karma calculations from other systems like GForge, SVN or Bugzilla.

It will be interesting to see how Karma builds up when we start pulling it from different pieces of the open source community infrastructure and external services like Ohloh.

Technorati Tags: maemo, midgard, karma

GigaOM has a very interesting article on the new N810 internet tablet, and how it will be relevant for the developing world:

Infonetics estimates that 47 percent of all mobile subscribers come from the Asia Pacific region, 36 percent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and only 9 percent from North America. Nokia alone will ship 400 million handsets this year, and most of those devices can surf the web. Geography, power consumption, and lack of wired infrastructure mean that much of the planet will see its first web page on a portable handset. Not only will Internet handsets be everywhere, they’ll be open.

Via Internet Tablet Talk. Probably would be a good time to brush up my WURFL skills...

Technorati Tags: maemo

The new Maemo developer device program opened the user profile system on maemo.org. With it, we can now use profile avatars as the hackergotchis on Planet Maemo:

So, if your blog is syndicated there, go and upload an avatar for yourself! Easier than begging an administrator to add a hackergotchi...

Technorati Tags: maemo, planet

Quim wrote earlier on why red hearts matter in maemo news. The red hearts are important as they bring important news items forward in the maemo social news aggregator. But sometimes there are also news items that are not at all relevant to the maemo community. To solve the problem with them we've now added a burying option:

When you click the "Thumbs down" icon the item will enter a recalculation queue, and will soon disappear from the social news main page. It will of course remain in the news feed it came from, so everything for example coming from Planet maemo subscriptions will stay there.

The item will also be marked as buried for you:

Also related to the Social News service is that the best of maemo news highlights is now available for browsing. Go and check out the most popular items related to the project!

Technorati Tags: blogpaper, maemo, midgard

CouchDB is a very interesting evolution in open source data storage: an ad-hoc document database with replication support. I heard the first time about CouchDB when Jan Lehnardt was presenting it in FrOSCon a month ago, and became immediately very interested.

The database is available for various different platforms, and provides a RESTful JSON API, which makes it very easy to access basically from any programming languages. To make things even simpler, access libraries have emerged for various languages like PHP and Ruby.

This weekend Jerry Jalava released a jQuery CouchDB access library. This is an important step for us as Midgard is already making the jQuery migration, and we are considering to use CouchDB for a project.

So, why CouchDb? First of all, it is something new and interesting. And it is multiplatform and replicated, meaning that we should be able to get our data everywhere, from a web server to Mac desktop to an Internet Tablet. Besides regular database usage, some of the PHP code deployment ideas are also promising.

Technorati Tags: couchdb, jquery

Today has been a big day for maemo.org: not only was the Maemo Community Calendar released for beta testing, but we also launched the new Social News section on the site. Social news is an area where users can easily with one glance see all interesting things happening at the moment in the maemo world.

We syndicate data from a lot of sources: official Nokia announcements, Garage project news, Tableteer, Flickr maemo group, YouTube maemo tag, Application Catalog updates, community blogs from Planet maemo and possibly in the future also ITT threads. However, Social News is not your ordinary aggregator. Instead of just showing everything in a single stream, we do some interesting relevancy calculation to determine what items are important at the moment and give those more prominence. Older and less prominent items slowly fall out of the news listing as time passes.

Relevancy-based display gives us a place where everybody can see the current topics. Social media is used for promoting items on the list. Here are some methods users can utilize the promote an item:

• Comment it on the maemo.org site (applies only to Application Catalog and Announcements)
• Add it to favorites on the site (by clicking the heart icon)
• Digg it or comment it on digg
• Blog about it and ensure the blog is listed by Technorati
• Bookmark it on del.icio.us

The more work-intensive methods like commenting and blogging are given the greatest value.

In addition to the "current news highlights" list, we also keep track of all-time favorites (starting from about two weeks ago), which can be seen in the Best Of list:

Social News is currently being beta tested as we tune the relevancy algorithms. Feedback is obviously welcome.

Thanks to Lasse Larvanko and Andreas Nilsson for the design!

Updated 2007-08-17: Lasse has a very good write-up of the service in Finnish.

Technorati Tags: blogpaper, maemo, midgard, rss

Bruce Sterling is running a fictional geoblog Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future on Wired. Much of it deals with the possibilities that the connection between GeoRSS, Microformats and neogeography with mobile devices will bring:

You see, the difference between the old-fashioned semantic Web and the new hyperlocal Web — that's hyper as in linked, and local as in location — is that the databases of the new Web are stuffed with geographic coordinates. Real positions. Real distances. So the bodyware I carry in my pockets and travel bag broadcasts its location to any device within earshot. (Of course, the RFID chips embedded in everything help the manufacturer get it out the door, but I programmed my own tags so I can't lose anything.) Roomware — that's houseware to you troglodytes who still live in houses — is the stuff that runs a hotel room. You know, the remotes that control temperature and unlock the liquor cabinet, plus the window overlay that displays the weather forecast and traffic conditions. Streetware is my mobile's navigator, plus social tags, ad filters, and all those black-and-white barcode blotches painted on walls like graffiti. Cityware is the next scale up. That's how the local government monitors traffic, chases down leaky water mains, and keeps tourists on the straight and narrow. Stateware, nationware, globalware — you get the idea.

Geopresence aggregation gets mentioned as well:

I'm dictating this entry — thank heaven for voice recognition — from the passenger seat of a Hyundai GPS-King careering along the Beltway. I downloaded a cool plug-in to block out the gas-food-lodging ads that hit my screen a quarter mile before each exit, so I'm free to concentrate. What do I care about lodging anyway? The best thing about being a top-tier geo blogger is that everyone knows where you are. When the buddy list tells folks you're in town, they ping to offer you dinner and invite you to sleep on the couch. They're my homies in a world where the entire planet is home. I love all you guys!

Much of the technology mentioned in the blog exists already today, but I guess it will be the blog's 2017 before the technologies are integrated and ubiquitous enough to really change our lives, cellphone-like.

Via Boing Boing.