News from OpenPSA Blogs
Software patents are silly
Dave Neary summed this up well:
...I fundamentally disagree with discouraging someone from pursuing a technology choice because of the threat of patents. In this particular case, the law is an ass. The patent system in the United States is out of control and dysfunctional, and it is bringing the rest of the world down with it. The time has come to take a stand and say “We don’t care about patents. We’re just not going to think about them. Sue us if you want.”
With Midgard we have prior art on some software patents. Software patents only promote big multinational monopolies, and therefore are against the interests of both Europe and the Free Software movement. They're silly, don't apply here, and therefore the only rational response is to ignore them.
Technorati Tags: softwarepatents
Qaiku API brings first clients: Mauku, Gwibber and an XMPP bot
Qaiku's twitter-like API has been one of the first major contributions I've made to the project, and it is great to see some first applications start to use it. Here are some examples:
Mauku is a microblogging client for Maemo. The new Fremantle version supports Qaiku nicely:
Gwibber is a Linux desktop microblogging client. Qaiku support is now available in the development version:
There is also an XMPP bot that we're going to launch soon for wider use. This enables you to monitor your mentions or some channels and post via any Jabber client:
If you're doing something cool with the API, please let me know! The #Qaiku-api channel is good for usage questions and ideas.
Every now and then people ask me why we're doing Qaiku instead of "just using Twitter". Here are some points why Qaiku just works better:
- Qaiku culture and features promote more meaningful and threaded discussion - in general, people comment much more than start conversations which is a good sign
- Qaiku has language tagging and filtering meaning that when I post in Finnish it will not bother my international friends
- Messages and comments are proper Markdown, reducing ugliness typical of tweets
- Features like feed import and image sharing are built-in, removing need for external tools
- Channels, and especially private channels enable us to do workstreaming in Qaiku
If you want to comment, you'll anyway find me both on Qaiku and on Twitter.
Firefox 3.5: upgrade now
Firefox 3.5, the latest version of the best desktop browser was released yesterday. Upgrade now, and you'll get cool new features like browser geolocation and native HTML5 video support, not to mention much faster javascript.
With both Firefox 3.5 and iPhone OS 3.0 out, a significant number of browsers suddenly have geolocation support. It will be interesting to see how quickly web services start to follow up, providing more meaningful content through the location context.
There is even a patch to make Firefox use GeoClue for its location needs.
SMS as a query-based "mobile internet"
As I've written before, the cell phone is the computer for majority of world's people. Google's new set of SMS services for Africa follows this idea in an interesting way:
...mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.
This brings my earlier "solving the logistics of mamona" post to mind.
Now, how about making maemo support SMS? That would be another step to turning our tablets into universal communicators.
Maemo.org is testing workstreaming with Qaiku
Workstreaming means collecting activities of geographically dispersed team members into a consistent news feed, enabling managers to track process and colleagues to stay up-to-date with the day-by-day happenings. As maemo.org is a distributed project worked on by a group of both volunteers and paid employees, some sort of activity monitoring is quite necessary.
For a while this has been done in wiki pages, but since that is not very flexible or connected, better ways have been discussed. The current approach being tested is workstreaming via a Qaiku channel:
Qaiku is a conversation-oriented microblogging service that suits workstreaming quite well:
- It has both a web view and a mobile view, meaning you can workstream on-the-go
- Channels support means activity log entries don't need to "spam" normal microblogging contacts with workstreams
- Private channels means you can track workstreams of confidential projects too
- API and RSS feeds enable us to integrate the workstreaming feed to the wiki pages or where ever we want to
- Separation of comments and actual activity log entries make it easy to discuss things related to the activities
In near future there will also be support for additional machine-readable "Qaiku Data" (like hour amounts, bug numbers, whatever). This is inspired by the Twitter Data initiative, but keeps the data separate from actual message contents to keep Qaiku human-readable. Once that is done, we could possibly build some more workstreaming-oriented UI for this on maemo.org.
So, if you're doing anything on maemo.org, sign up on Qaiku and start posting your updates!
Technorati Tags: microblogging, qaiku, workstreaming
Ragnaland is coming
Just a little teaser before we all head out to countryside for the midsummer weekend:
Yes, you're seeing the software versions right. The screenshot is from the "About Midgard" screen of Ragnaland, a hybrid setup of Midgard's MidCOM MVC framework from Midgard1 (MidCOM 8.09) and Midgard2 running in an App Builder instance (Midgard 9.09).
Still requires some tweaking and bug fixes, but consider the possibilities:
- Ragnaroek sites running on truly legacy-free Midgard codebase, with other databases than MySQL
- Midgard1 and Midgard2 sites coexisting in same installation and database
- Applications like OpenPSA that you can install and run like any OS X .app, thanks to App Builder