News from OpenPSA Blogs
Dataset: Pamplona's bull run
Off the Map has posted an interesting dataset of the Pamplona San Fermin bull run:
In honor of the festival that kicked off this week, I thought that this was a great opportunity to show how Finder! can be a great trip planning tool. With the ability to download geographic datasets of your choice as well as create your own, you can use Finder! to make a custom and interactive map that displays everything you want to do and see on your trip.
I've run with the bulls three times: twice in 2001, and once during the Death Monkey excursion when I got hit by the bull in the arena, and so I found the dataset quite interesting.
At least we won the Ice Cream Deathmatch
While Tampere was lost, we won't return from GUADEC without any medals: I won the ice cream deathmatch held during the Collabora boat party on Bosphorus.
We of course had the Ice Cream Deathmatch. So, it seems people thought it was all about speed, while really it's all about enjoying :-) On the other hand, Henri Bergius (if I remember well) is just not a human since he ate everything so quickly. But, well, his bio mentions "Henri Bergius is a former Viking based in the Nordic country of Finland"...
Vincent, the whole point is that if you enter a competition, enter it to win. Regardless of whether that involves eating ice cream, racing crappy cars to the Arctic Ocean, or crossing Europe on 50cc "Monkey" mini-mopeds. If you're not the first, you're the last [1].
Some pictures from squidy.info:
[1]: No, I wouldn't have watched that movie if it hadn't been semi-mandatory in-flight show when crossing the Atlantic on TAM.
Notes from GUADEC Istanbul
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...
New profile pages on maemo.org
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 ;-)
Midgard2: Future in the clouds
There has been quite a lot of talk about cloud computing lately. When we had the previous MidCOM3 coding sprint we discussed over beer how Midgard2 could fit into the cloud. As replication has been a core Midgard feature since the early days, that was the obvious angle to start looking from.
The way I see Midgard2 in the cloud is the following:
- There are clouds of specialized Midgard2 and MidCOM3 processing nodes that can easily be duplicated. This could be done by setting up an easy Midgard EC2 image for instance
- The processing clouds could act as front-ends by themselves via round-robin DNS, or there could be front-end MidCOM servers that would call the processing nodes via MidCOM3 remote routing (feature that we've discussed but not implemented yet)
- Each processing node would be completely independent and contain its own database
- There would be a replication queue stored on permanent storage service like S3 that each processing node would replicate to and from
- When a processing node would boot up, it would connect to the appropriate S3 bucket and populate itself with data
Implemented this way it would be easy to add or subtract Midgard servers as needed. Each of them would be autonomous from application developer's perspective, but data replication would ensure each node would stay in sync with others.
This would certainly be worth experimenting with. Only things needed would be easy EC2 images, queue handling with S3 buckets, and possibly remote routing support, though the latter wouldn't be needed for simpler services where each Midgard node could contain a copy of all data of the web service. For faster replication of data between nodes, D-Bus update notices could be passed through a message queue service.
Volkswagen's 1 liter car looks promising
Volkswagen has released some information about their 1 liter per 100km car that will supposedly debut in 2010, and I have to say it looks cool:
It provides the combination of compactness and fuel economy that usually only motorcycles reach, and at the same time protects from the elements. As I've always loved the old Messerschmitt mini-cars it resembles I may be strongly tempted when it comes out.
At one liter, the mileage is even better than with my current extremely economical Royal Enfield...