Beagle

Chinatown, New York City: November 5, 2005

I’m pleased to announce the release of Beagle 0.1.3. Among other things, this release contains Python bindings to libbeagle (courtesy of Raphael Slinckx), so you can now easily search from any Python program. So what are you waiting for? Go write some code! At the GNOME Summit: October 10, 2005

I’m pleased to (belatedly) announce the release of Beagle 0.1.2. This release is chock-full of bug fixes, optimizations, and reductions in memory usage — for all of the lurid details, be sure to read the release notes. One important detail: Beagle ... [More] 0.1.2 requires Mono 1.1.10, which was released at the end of last week. 1.1.10 fixes some serious io-layer bugs that caused Beagle to crash or lock up, so everyone should upgrade right away. [Less]

Bryant Park, New York City: November 6, 2005

I’ll be in New York City this weekend for the CUNY Conference on Contemporary Poetry. I’ll be demonstrating Gnoetry, and my co-conspirators Eric Elshtain and John Tipton will discuss the broader implications of computational poetics. Our talk is on ... [More] Saturday at 11:20, at the CUNY Graduate Center. If you are in Manhattan, come and see our show — a splendid time is guaranteed for all. [Less]

Beagle Newsletter - 2 August 2005 Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you’ve new to the project you can read up about it on our website: http://www.beagle-project.org Releases —- inotify The inotify kernel patch, that we have all ... [More] come to love and adore, has worked its way into the Linus’ kernel tree starting with 2.6.13-rc3. This version of inotify, which uses syscalls, works with Beagle CVS and is not compatible with Beagle 0.0.12. Beagle Beagle 0.0.12 was released in July and was the most feature packed release we’ve seen in a while. Amongst the tons of bug fixes things like a C API, static index support and the ability to run without extended attributes have been added to Beagle. Hacking —- Running over NFS Beagle certainly comes as a great resource to traditional desktop users but those of us who have a home directory that is NFS mounted have been limited by NFS not supporting extended attributes. Recently, work has been done to allow Beagle to run on file systems that do not have a supported EA scheme such as as NFS and Reiser4. However, on these systems Beagle is still much slower so you are strongly encouraged to use a file system with extended attributes enabled. Static indexes To aid system administrators who may have to deal with many users logged into a server at once Fredrik has created the beagle-build-index tool which will create a static index of the directory it is given. This tool can be scripted to work similar to the standard updatedb tool. Dave Richards has done an excellent job testing the static indexing tools for Beagle and will be working on making sure Beagle works well with this style of usage. libbeagle An API for the C programming language has been developed as to allow Beagle to work with a huge verity of applications. Work has begun on several applications, including Nautilus, to include support for Beagle. Maildir Support A filter for indexing maildirs is now included in Beagle. Beagle not only indexes the mail but the attachments as well. Mail applications that use this style of storage, such as KMail, are able to open the search results. It should be noted that this work is ongoing and through help of the community, developers are trying to incorporate maildirs into Beagle. Galago Support Lukas has been hacking on the Galago support that is now in Beagle. Now, if you have Galago installed, you can check to see if your buddies are online right there in your Best search results. Start up time Daniel Drake has worked on improving the start up procedure for Beagle. By combining the scanning and crawling procedures into one, Beagle is able to start up more quickly and limit its time spent hammering the disk. Project —- Why won’t my IM logs work? Beagle 0.0.12 had a slight problem with it displaying IM logs in search results. Beagle CVS has a fix for this problem, so fear not, the next release will be set to go with your IM logs. You mean I really don’t have to patch my kernel anymore? Yes, this might come as a shock to some of you, but you won’t have to spend so much time working on creating inotify enabled kernels anymore. With the Beagle CVS version of inotify in many Linux distributions unstable branches there is less need for community packaging of the kernel. There is, however, plenty of other work to go around. Beagle frontends can now be written in C or C# so there is little excuse for you not to work on a frontend you enjoy. There are, as always, plenty of filters to be written, applications to be supported and bugs to be squashed so keep on helping the Beagle project. Even if you are not a hacker, by testing Beagle and reporting the bugs you may run into as well as documenting your findings on the wiki you are helping out the community immensely. As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com [Less]