News from OpenPSA Blogs
Using Yahoo! Fire Eagle with Midgard
Yahoo! Fire Eagle, kind of "GeoClue for the Web" was released last week. It acts as a central hub collection position information from services like Plazes and Dopplr, and with a simple PHP script, Jaiku. Services needing user's location can then ask it from Fire Eagle instead of having to support all the services separately.
Midgard's positioning framework has been Fire Eagle compatible since March this year. Now that the service is open for a wider audience, I though it would be useful to tell how to activate it with your Midgard-powered site.
You need to authorize Midgard with your Fire Eagle account. To do this, go to:
http://www.example.net/midcom-exec-org.routamc.positioning/test-fireeagle.php
and follow the authorization instructions. This is due to Fire Eagle using the nice OAuth protocol.
Once this is done MidCOM cron will start tracking your Fire Eagle location. All objects you have created (photos, blogs, comments, etc) will then be automatically tagged with where you made them.
Finding out available MidCOM routes
MidCOM is a PHP MVC framework where you create a site by building a tree structure and assigning components for the various folders. Each component is its own PHP application that can handle all URL requests under that folder using a set of configured routes.
In addition to making normal requests to the various routes available, routes provided by other folders can be loaded dynamically anywhere on the site. This is useful for instance for loading five latest news items to front page.
To make life easier, I now added a new feature to midcom.admin.help, the online help component. Each folder will automatically list their documentation and available routes when you access their URL __ais/help:
To get this feature you only need to upgrade the help component:
# pear upgrade midcom/midcom_admin_help
Micro-blogging as alternative corporate announcement channel
Today our ISP is having major power failures, and therefore many of our web services are down. For situations like this, it is good to establish an alternative channel of communications, and for us that is the micro-blogging platform Jaiku:
http://jaiku.com/channel/Nemein
If you are a Jaiku user, feel free to join the channel. Others can follow it via the RSS feed.
Why Finland is different
It is not only sauna, cold winters and Koskenkorva that sets us Finns apart, apparently:
The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders.
New York Times: The Genetic Map of Europe (via Slashdot)
Georgia without Russian troops
Just some pictures from happier days:
Best wishes to my friends in Tbilisi in these hard times.
Feature branches in Midgard development with git
The release synchronicity plan was accepted, and therefore Midgard will be switching from SVN to git, and the concept of feature branches.
With feature branches the idea is that each feature or bug fix is being developed in its own branch, and only landed to trunk (master in git terminology) when ready. This keeps the trunk clean and easy to test.
While the SVN migration will only happen in next developer meeting, you can already start using git for Midgard development thanks to git-svn. Once you have a working checkout, here is how you work with feature branches:
Ensure you have the latest stuff:
git svn rebase
Create a new branch:
git branch mynewfeature
Go to the new branch:
git checkout mynewfeature
Hack, add files, commit, test
Ensure the diff looks correct:
git diff master..HEAD
Go back to master:
git checkout master
Merge your feature branch:
git merge mynewfeature
Commit to SVN:
git svn dcommit
If you want to also work with other Midgard or MidCOM versions from SVN, check out the how to track multiple svn branches in git tutorial.