This project will be finished soon as a few minor bugs will be fixed. Go and grab it.

First and foremost, evolution doesn't have a direction. It doesn't steadily go towards a conclusion as that would require some intelligence to plan forehand the play. Evolution is an eliminative process, pointing always only towards current moment, letting only those who are right there and then having some kind of an advantage in procreating.

Even those that appear as living fossils like platypus or Coelacanth have had exactly the same time to evolve. Platypuses appear as less evolved than other mammals as they

1. lay eggs instead of give birth to living babies
2. don't have nipples, but secrete milky substance straight on the skin
3. have a beak instead of a nose

How about its evolved traits like electrolocation that is so sensitive that it can locate a shrimp by the electric signal shrimp's muscles transmit when contracting? Or that platypuses are the only (known) poisonous mammals?

And for all of those who ever have heard that "I can't believe that we humans evolved from chimpanzees": it's all true. We didn't. We branched from common ancestors and we really aren't any more evolved than chimps, only different. Chimps and bonobos aren't our parents, they are our cousins.

Second, changes in genes and in appearance do not correlate. Genetic changes can be very subtle and small but still have dramatic effects (e.g. comparing Homo Sapiens to Chimps) or they can be very big while phenotype remains apparently unchanged (platypus compared to any other mammal group, according to genetic sequencing). There are numerous factors that can alter the phenotype while keeping the genes relatively unchanged, like pedomorphosis (changing the time when species becomes fertile) in Axolotls.

P.S. This all reminds me of a very educating and entertaining video that tells what really makes us different from any other animal: Robert Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Humans.

There's a very godlike creature swimming in the oceans, what comes to lifespan. A jellyfish that is biologically immortal has shown 100 % bypass rate of cellular death, since it is able to revert from adult back to polyp stage from which it grows back into adulthood.

(Photo from ZMEScience)

Read more from Times Online

I assume returning back to polyp stage wipes out much of the memory, which might be very scarce resource for simple jellyfish, but if evolution turned it into highly intelligent creature... Oh boy, what a fascinating thought.

PNG sticks to color profiles, leading often issues like different colors with same RGB values on a browser view. In supporting browsers, image with #f0f0f0 might have different color than a div with the same color set to its background.

Fortunately there is e.g. pngcrush, which can be used to strip PNG from color profiles. Warped Visions described an easy way:

# pngcrush -rem cHRM -rem gAMA -rem iCCP -rem sRGB -d fixed/ *

P.S. Remember to think twice before accepting free lemonade.

Our site, Ihmistulva, is about an event happening September 5th and our goal is to gather 5000 people. The working force behind is Friends of the Earth Finland.

The cool thing about hacking a new site without a company limiting the creativity is that, well, it's more free and (hopefully) doing general good.

Although I am very anxious to get to move to work on Midgard MVC, Ragnaroek got still a new contributive effort, a new discussion component (cc.kaktus.discussion). I wanted to create something new instead of extending the old components available and to provide more microblog-like interface that combines old tree topology to flat "give me the newest items" microblog.

I still cut some corners and wrote a more streamlined script:

#!/bin/bash
cd;
mkdir packages;
cd packages;
apt-get install devscripts gcc debhelper fakeroot;
apt-get source php5;
cd php5-5.2.4;
apt-get -y build-dep php5;
rm debian/patches/suhosin.patch;
mv debian/patches/series debian/patches/series.bu;
sed -e 's/suhosin.patch//g' debian/patches/series.bu > debian/patches/series;
debchange -v 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.4.1~custom -b -m SuhosinFree;
debuild;
dpkg -i ../*.deb;

This might be useful if you are installing Midgard on Ubuntu 8.04 and want to use org.routamc.photostream, which otherwise fails due to Suhosin patch.

Future MidCOM Ragnaroek branch will be even snappier as it loads less of JavaScript. New features include e.g. jQuery powered toolbar, UI messages and - as I am writing this - on-site AJAX editor.

Impatient may wish to update their SVN checkouts to see the changes.

First training session will be held next Wednesday on June 11th, 2008. This workshop will start at 9.00 and will last until 17.00 or when the information overload becomes overwhelming.

In case you speak Finnish and are around Helsinki area, please feel free to join us. Workshop will be held by the Lake Vitträsk in a very beautiful location and the fee will be around 60 euros - basically our cost price - depending on the amount of participants. Breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea session included.

I need to reserve the facilities soon, so please contact me as soon as possible, if you are interested in joining. Latest next Monday.

Agenda for June 11th, 2008

• MidCOM coding standards
  • your handwriting does matter
  • namespacing - after this it's easy to find the files you are looking for (doesn't necessarily mean that you know what you are looking for)
• How do MidCOM components work
  • How the URL request is received
  • URL as a part of interface planning
  • request switches
  • can_handle
  • handler
  • show
• What are little components made of
  • config/manifest.inc
  • midcom/interface.php
  • viewer.php
  • navigation.php
  • config/config.inc
  • handler/
  • style/
  • locale/
  • documentation/
• How does midcom.helper.datamanager2 work and what are the benefits
• Whatever I will remember when I'm actually teaching
• "Hands on MidCOM" workshop
  • We will create a simple component with the following functionality
  • save
  • view
  • edit
  • delete

Requirements: a working copy of MidCOM (either an SVN checkout of trunk or MidCOM_28) accompanied with Midgard 1.8.4+. Installation on-site is not part of the deal, but I will have a VMWare images of both with me.

Later in June/July

More workshops are on their way. The next ones will go through the following subjects:

• quick recap through the previous episodes during each workshop
• AJAX editing - how do I do that?
• Going carefully through midgard_query_builder and midgard_collector
• Metadata
• Purecode components
• Using MidCOM SVN
• Component specific privileges
• Component specific MgdSchema objects
• Writing your own navigation with midcom.helper.nav
  • I've heard some cases that my baby, fi.protie.navigation, doesn't do and there are every now and then need for a very special navigation
• Whatever comes along
  • Post me your ideas

Arttu Manninen - Protie Oy
arttu@kaktus.cc - +358 10 408 4007

Concept itself is simple: when someone is editing an object, it is marked as locked. If someone else tries to edit the same object at the same time, it will be prevented. Lock will expire by itself in configurable amount of minutes and the object will be unlocked, when the object is either saved or editing has been cancelled. These are implemented by default already in midcom.helper.datamanager2, which should cover most of the editing.

If you by any chance want to use the features to anything, here is a quick HOWTO:

Check if the object is locked

When you have a MidCOM dbobject at hand, you can check it e.g. like this:

get_metadata();

if ($metadata->is_locked())
{
    // Object is locked
}
else
{
    // Object is not locked
}
?>

Locking and unlocking an object

To lock and unlock and object do the following:

get_metadata();

// Lock the object
$metadata->lock();

// Unlock the object
$metadata->unlock();
?>

If using PHP5

One more reasons why to update. PHP5 has neat features for using methods of the returned object on the fly:

get_metadata()->is_locked())
{
    // Object is locked
}

// Lock
$object->get_metadata()->lock();

// Unlock
$object->get_metadata()->unlock();
?>

There is no interface for changing the public key, username, email address or anything else afterwards, so do the steps carefully. It's only a small inconvenience to create a new user and SSH key pair after each failure, but I had to repeat this three times myself.

1. Create a user account for your development machine or use an existing one.
   • unfortunately there is no way to check beforehand if the user account name is already used in MidCOM GIT repository.
2. Create an SSH key to use for authenticating yourself with $ ssh-keygen -t dsa
3. Copy the public SSH key and paste it on the new user creation page
   • do not use less or any other program that would add line breaks, using e.g. $ cat /home/example/.ssh/id_dsa.pub will help through this step
4. Paste the whole key
   • starts from ssh-dss and ends up in example@example.com
   • wish that the username hasn't yet been reserved
5. Ask for the project manager (in this case Bergie) to join you to the project
6. Set the user configuration
   • with my Debian installation it was $ git-repo-config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname" and $ git-repo-config --global user.email "firstname.lastname@example.com"
   • GIT manual tells to use $ git config --global ..., but that didn't work at all with me
7. Get the latest checkout with $ git pull
8. Now you should be able to make commits. Syntax for doing so is $ git push git+ssh://example@repo.or.cz/srv/git/midcom.git