Beagle

Exam done. Got cracking on the code today. Slow start, but some progress made. I've now got the skeleton code to hook up to DBus and listen for messages. You can even connect to my tool using the Xesam NewSession method, but that's about it. I've ... [More] started out with GetProperty, but came upon an interesting hitch.GetProperty is supposed to return a so-called "Variant" type. Depending on the property requested, the method might return a bool, an int, a string, or even an array of strings. Now I'm not sure how the C# bindings for DBus (dbus-sharp) handle this. Intuitively, returning an 'object' (the class from which all types are derived) should work, but it doesn't seem to. Will need to dig deeper, since this might just be a problem with my version of dbus-sharp (0.63, from Gentoo's gentopia overlay), and speak to the creator of dbus-sharp (Alp Toker) about it.It feels good to be writing C# code. The focus is purely on solving the problem at hand, rather than small, nagging, ancillary tasks. For example, setting up the Xesam listener is as simple as: public static int Main(string[] args) { Application.Init(); Connection conn = Bus.GetSessionBus(); Service xesam = new Service(conn, "org.freedesktop.xesam.searcher"); Xesam.Search search = new Xesam.Search(); xesam.RegisterObject(search, "/org/freedesktop/xesam/searcher/main"); Application.Run(); return 0; }I'm using the xesam-tools package written by Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen for testing this, which makes things a lot simpler for me. The idea now is to continue implementing the Xesam methods by translating to the equivalent implementation using the BeagleClient interface.Many thanks to jonp and mdx4ever on #mono for their patience with all my n00b questions. :-)Fun, fun, fun! Good night! [Less]

This marks my 261st blog entry as a Novell employee. It shall also mark my last. An operose decision, I resigned as Chief Architect of our Linux Desktop endeavor, effective today. In the house that Ximian built, we dreamt and saw to fruition the ... [More] world's finest Linux desktop, Linux's first desktop commercial success. Seated at the table aside some of the industry's sharpest hackers, we challenged ourselves not with the goal of building another Linux desktop, but with the aim of engineering a more perfect desktop—Linux or otherwise. Unsatisfied with simply cheaper, we went for broke: better and faster, too. SLED's éclat is ours. Leaving is never easy. But here and now the timing is right and so, after three and a half years, here's to what's next. My work email won't forward, so hit me @rlove.org. [Less]

Finally! Perhaps one of the last major features that Beagle needs to match Spotlight and Windows Live Search. Integration into every file choice made in the Gnome environment has long been a dream of mine, and a little less than a year ago, this bug ... [More] was filed with hopes of making that dream a reality. After lots of hard work, a rough cut of the patch has been committed to the gtk trunk, with plans to add missing features in time. While it will still be some time before this code reaches a Gtk release (development releases for the next major series start in late April) its great to feel some awesome love from our friends over at Gtk, a special thanks to Federico Mena Quintero for really being the driving force that finally got this done. What great is that plans for using Beagle’s index to help GtkFileChooser already seem underway. For any budding Gtk /Gnome/Beagle hackers out their, this feature still needs a lot of love. A list of bugs/todos exists here, and if someone were to get the ball rolling on anything on that list, it would be a huge help! And last, the obligatory (if unexciting) Screenshots: Here were searching for a Mail Attachment in Evolution. And here we search for a file to upload in Epiphany: [Less]

Yesterday in a fit of mind I decided to upgrade to Mandriva latest release. The steps included - backing up .kde, .kderc, .qt, .gtk* and .local- logging out of kde- setting up a mirror as a distribution source for urpmi (mandriva is offering non-free ... [More] e.g. sun-java in its free source these days, but I still need the PLF sources for codecs, BCI enabled freetype and fontconfig and a few other things)- # urpmi urpmi- # urpmi <bunch of> kernels- # urpmi --auto-select and then selecting the ones I would like to upgrade from themSoon I was running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring (Free). Yay! Its beautiful. The Ia_ora theme and other Mandriva artwork is gorgeous. I legally own a XP cd, from which I extensively use Verdana (for text) and Tahoma (for widgets). They look wonderful as always with plf freetype (w/ hinting). I like to use large fonts, enough to be readable 4 ft afar but somehow the deja or bitstream fonts have a weird fuzziness in the curves of 's' and 'o's. I cleared the settings of a test user account and a default new account looks quite good (apart from the kbfx-styled mandriva menu).KDE was upgraded to 3.5.6; I was actually using a few kde-3.5.6 packages from cooker so there was no huge surprise. I was worried that mandriva would mess up some of my settings when I log in for the first time as my normal user but thankfully that did not happen. The system feels faster, konsole definitely starts faster than before. Overall, I am extremely pleased with 2007.1; I wish them all the best.http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/TourSome minor annoyances:- mandriva kernel (based on 2.6.17) still has the weird cpufreq bug where scaling_max_freq is same as scaling_min_freq (thus rendering all the governors useless). It is probably the same problem described inhttp://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg04484.html- Suspend to RAM is broken in mm kernel (Mandriva has moved to pm-utils and it works like a charm w/ the default kernel)- tmb kernel has some problems of high CPU usage when copying files and broken resume from s2ram. I still need to test the other tmb versions. I really like the tmb kernel improvements. [Less]

I decided to give the Yahoo Publishers Network Beta a try, I never really make much money from ads, but it will be nice to have something to compare Adsense to. So feel free to play around with the new ads, and my new analytics system (sorry if its slow!).

This is not really techie but has a somewhat tech-vs-theory war flavor. The following list came out of today's departmental Friday lunch. Top 10 "ways to tell a theory person from a systems person": 10. One gets job and another does not. 09. One ... [More] likes 10000n^2 better than n^3. 08. Space-time is important outside Star-trek. 07. In therory they are same, but in practice they are not. 06. P is not equal to NP divided by N. 05. n^10 is efficient. 04. SAT (Famous NP complete problem also known as Satisfiability) is most of the times easy to compute. 03. (Specific to our department) One can be only be found across the street. 02. Its pronounced "Lee-nux" (not "Lai-nux") 01. Computers do more than just email ?! [Less]

Its been an awesome week, its done justice to the last 6 months of blood tears and sweat that were poured into the great release that is Feisty Fawn. A few things I wanted to mention, but first off, I should say Hi! My Ubuntu Membership was just ... [More] approved, and I wanted to give a shout out and say hello to all those I haven’t met yet. Second, I wanted to do a little introduction, but given the general excitement, I figured I would link to my wiki and launchpad page, where most of you can get an idea of what I do, and where I can help. I’m always looking for new ways to get involved in the community, and if your working on something that you think I could help with, drop me an e-mail or find me on the IRC, and theres a good chance I’ll be all over it ;). That said I look forward to all the great releases down the road. Just a few minutes ago I figured I would help the Ubuntu servers as best I could by seeding all the i386 iso’s, at the moment, there are close to 4000 seeds. I couldn’t ask the Ubuntu community for anything more, I downloaded the whole thing in close to 2 minutes, and am seeding now. Seeing as the bittorrent community needed no help, I decided that I would host the most popular iso on my site to help as best I can. (I thought about trying a full mirror, but this late, I figured it would do more harm then good, if I’m wrong, let me know!) Here are the links, I know they aren’t for the main mirror site, but if you read my blog or one of the planet’s I’m on, and are thinking of grabbing the iso, consider using this link. If it doesn’t work, it means I could only be so generous, and I was going way over the 2TB limit this month, but I don’t think I’m that popular. http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-server-i386.iso Technorati Tags: ubuntu, feisty Powered by ScribeFire. [Less]

I'd mentioned that I'd be participating in the the Google Summer of Code programme this year. More details ensue ...I will be working on Beagle, an uber-cool desktop search tool. The idea behind such a tool is that most of us today work with a ... [More] massive amount of diverse information everyday. Often we find ourselves trying to remember the answers to questions like "where'd I put that email about ...", "what was that site I saw on ...", "what was that phone number X gave me on IM", and "where the !@#$ did I put that file ...". Beagle tracks all this and more information, and makes is very simple for you to find. If you haven't used it, or a similar tool, I highly recommend it, especially if you do a lot of work on your computer.I've posted more details on what I'll be working on, and why at http://beagle-project.org/BeagleXesamPhew! Comments, feedback welcome.Personally, this is great for me, having a focused task to work on and being able to contribute to an open source project. I'm also excited about working with Mono/C#. This might seem strange, given my reservations about a Microsoft-controlled platform. You have to see the code to understand how much cleaner Beagle looks than an equivalent C/C implementation would.Once the semester ends (2 weeks), I will dive into the code and familiarise myself with it.Update: It seems that I forgot one thing. :D [Less]

A month or so ago, I moved the bulk of my rlove.org services to Google Apps Premiere. Joey, as he is wont to do, soon followed. With confidence in your equal satisfaction, I highly recommend it. Jon Stokes in Ars Technica on the new instructions and ... [More] performance characteristics of Intel's Penryn core. Also, Anand's—I know, I know—take on the same. Peter informed me that TurboTax is not quite so turbo. Thankfully, I filed last week. And in other signs that the end of the world is neigh: The BlackBerry network breaks. Ingo Molnar releases a completely new, and fair, process scheduler. A fair scheduling class is ideal for desktop workloads. Check out the patch. David Leondardt in today's New York Times on the economic advisers advising each presidential candidate. John Stossel, in a posting today in Real Clear Politics, on tax reform. No surprise where John falls. His post mentions H.R.25, the FairTax, an excellent implementation of a consumption tax with rebate. I suspect it will need a deduction for mortgage payments, however. Robert Robb in the Arizona Republic: Senator McCain shines on fiscal issues. [Less]

The preferences dialog.And the add pattern dialog