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On behalf of the Activity Log Manager team and the Zeitgeist Project, I am happy to announce the first release of Activity Log Manager (0.8.0), a user interface for managing Zeitgeist blacklists, deleting recent events as well as temporarily pausing the logging.

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Grab it while it's hot. Note that you'll need Zeitgeist 0.8.0 (or later) for it to work. If you're an Ubuntu user you can get packages for both from our PPA; I've also uploaded it to Debian.

I'd also like to use this chance to thank Collabora for sponsoring my (and Seif's) work on Zeitgeist!

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist 0.5.1 released!
2. Zeitgeist 0.7.1 “Made in Aarhus” released!
3. GNOME Activity Journal, and installing it on Ubuntu

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2011. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, Programari lliure, zeitgeist

On behalf of the Zeitgeist team I am proud to announce the release of Zeitgeist 0.7.1 "Made in Aarhus". This is a minor release before 0.8.0 (which will be the first one introducing storage awareness).

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users's activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations, and makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is also able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not provide a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journalling applications and deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download (zeitgeist-0.7.1.tar.gz)

About Zeitgeist: zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: wiki.zeitgeist-project.com

See also Zeitgeist Datahub, GNOME Activity Journal and the repository for additional Zeitgeist data-sources. You may as well like Sezen.

News since 0.7.0

Engine:

 - Expose property information in the D-Bus introspection output.
 - Mention column names explicitly when inserting events, for compatibility
   with the upcoming 0.8 release.

Python API:

 - Expose DataSourceRegistry's enabled status in a callback.
 - Automatically reconnect to Zeitgeist if the connection is lost when using
   methods asynchronously (so far this only happened for synchronous calls).
 - Reinstall all active monitors upon reconnection (LP: #673008, #727226).
 - Fix a (harmless) race condition requesting the bus name (LP: #732015).

Overall:

 - Added new event interpretation types: AcceptEvent, DenyEvent and ExpireEvent.
 - Include NCO in the generated ontologies.
 - Better ./configure check for python-rdflib.
 - Update the manpage to document exit codes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, and since I hadn't blogged about it before, also to everyone who made the Zeitgeist Hackfest in Aarhus possible, including our sponsors:

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist 0.5.1 released!
2. Activity Log Manager for Zeitgeist released!
3. Zeitgeist 0.3.3 is out!

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2011. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Programari lliure, zeitgeist

Some may have seen that I was pimping my session Rocking out with libunity at the Ubuntu Developer Week promising a surprise. The surprise was that I had a fully working Unity Place implementation all in Python. If you want you can peruse the full log from the IRC session, it might be helpful if you want to try this out yourself.

Hopefully unsurprisingly – the Python integration is all done with PyGI, the Python bindings for GObject Introspection. I must admit that it was a slight challenge getting everything working smoothly, but we’re there now. I want to give mad props to the pygobject- and the GObject Introspection teams. Without their enduring help we wouldn’t have got to this point. So thanks guys, you rock!

So lets get down to business. How does this work, what does it look like?

Setting up a Development Environment

First you need to make sure you have the required development packages installed (you can just click the links to install them if you want):

sudo apt-get install gir1.2-unity-3.0 gir1.2-dee-0.5 gir1.2-dbusmenu-glib-0.4

Now, unfortunately not everything you need is packaged just yet. Namely you may need to install the so called Python overrides for the Dee library. Check if you have this file on your system:

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/gi/overrides/Dee.py

If you don’t have that file it means you’re in in the vicinity of the writing of this blog post, in the time dimension; and thus must install it manually. Here’s how. Download Dee.py and copy it to the right location for PyGI to pick it up:

sudo cp Dee.py /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/gi/overrides/

With that in place we’re ready to hack.

Writing a Place in Python

The easiest way to start is to check out lp:~unity-team/unity-place-sample/unity-place-python:

bzr branch lp:~unity-team/unity-place-sample/unity-place-python

And then closely follow the README. If you read through it while having the Unity Places spec and IRC log from the devsession at hand you should have a chance of grokking what’s going on. If you have any problems or questions don’t hesitate to ping me on IRC on the #ayatana channel on FreeNode.

I should also add that we’re working on getting some Python API docs for Dee, Dbusmenu, and libunity out. Watch this space!

So I didn’t really stick to my original idea of reporting each day of the Zeitgeist hackfest in Aarhus. I guess this must be a classical hackfest syndrome – you give 120% during the day and when night draws near you’re just flat out of batteries. ‘nough with the excuses

My own pet peeve, the Storage Awareness branch is inches from landing. It will allow the following kinds of new features:

• Exclude files from a query that are not available to the user right now. Fx, because they are on a USB stick or require internet access when you don’t have any, or
• imagine a journal-kinda-view where you can still see files you accessed that where on drives that are no longer attached. When you click them a dialog pops up “Please insert the drive ’2GB SanDisk’ in order to open the file ‘foo.txt’”.
• When you plug in a USB drive you are presented with your most recent activity related to that drive
• List which storage devices you’ve used an when

Michal was just all over the place doing integration work on everything between glib, libzeitgeist, gedit, totem, what not. From where I sit this guy just had an amazingly productive week!

Seif worked on the “grid plugin” for GEdit which is originally Michal’s idea and something we where all pretty hyped about. Really something that I feel could make a huge difference in the user experience of many Gnome apps.

Morten did a lot of work to get Zeitgeist ready for some deep Telepathy integration, this required a lot of hard thinking and a lot of discussion (with Seif and yours truly, but don’t worry we’re all still friends ). Getting it “just right” was not trivial, but I think we got to a point where we have a very good battle plan on how to get all the way to working code.

Siegfried worked on Gnome Shell integration and I think we should start seeing the fruits of that very soon now – and Federico joined remotely.

We also got some media coverage which, as often goes, was not entirely accurate, so Manish took the time to straighten out the facts

Once again, big thanks to our sponsors – the opportunity they have given has made a huge difference!

So. The first day of the Zeitgeist hackfest has ended. The venue at the CS department of Aarhus University worked really well. The wifi worked without a hitch and we all got keys and keycards to access the premises of the Incuba Science Park all 24 hours of the day. Awesome.

We spend the first 2 hours figuring out what items to focus on and who does what and Seif compiled it into a list of assigments on the wiki.

Seif, Morten, and I talked about what pieces we needed to fit together to make the Zeitgeist and Telepathy integration work perfectly. Got some nice and simple work items nailed down that’ll take us a long way.

While we did that Michal updated the zeitgeist-datahub to listen for the new DBus signal emitted by GDesktopAppInfo when they are launched. He also worked with Colin Walters on getting a nifty little patch that adds some extra info to the DBus signal that will make Zeitgeist even more clever when logging your app usage patterns. Uh… And Michal is brewing up something awesome for you as well, but I shall not steal his thunder

My personal little project was to update and make my “Storage Awareness” branch from a while back ready to merge to trunk. There are some kinks to iron out before it’s ready, but I’m most thrilled about the prospect of getting this done.

Oh! And there is a #zeitgeisthackfest hashtag if you wanna bigbrother us on Twitter

Prepping up for the Zeitgeist hackfest which is kicking off tomorrow in Aarhus, Denmark. You’ve probably not heard a lot about this event before this late moment – that’s because it has all happened a bit fast. As we where internally discussing the possibilities of a hackfest a bit back, it quickly became evident that we needed it hold it Very Soon Now (TM) if we wanted all the core maintainers to have a chance of showing up.

I was wincing a bit because we recently expanded our family (can you believe I have three kids now..? I’m not sure I can) and I wasn’t very keen on traveling more than I already do with my work. Seif, being the man of action that he is, didn’t let that put him off an arranged that we could hold the hackfest conveniently close to my home. Not only that, but he pretty much did all of the necessary arrangements for getting a cool venue, accommodation, and not least – getting some sponsors to help us out. Seif – this one is to you – you rock man!

The sponsors are the GNOME Foundation and Collabora, and the venue will be the CS Department at Aarhus University, in the Incuba Science Park. All have been incredibly helpful despite our short notice. Thanks to everyone involved!

I’m gonna have to hold the suspension a bit about what we intend to do with this precious opportunity we’ve been given. I’m just too tired right now – but my plan is to have a short daily log posted on my blog each day. So by the end of this week you should all hopefully have an idea Stay tuned.

I don’t think this has reached Planet Gnome yet – so let me just give some major props to Markus Korn for his awesome Zeitgeist optimizations. Go read it! The post has multicolor graphs and the whole shebang!

Refresh page in Firefox: Control-r

Refresh feeds in Liferea: Control-a

Refresh messages in Gwibber: F5

Refresh inbox in Evolution: F9

I like how my desktop challenges my, otherwise limited, memory. Who knows where I’d be at without the daily exercise?

What is Facetting?

“Facetting” is a word which has a special meaning in search-engine-world. It could be defined as the generalization of “Tagging” which I assume you’re familiar with (from Twitter, Flickr, et al).

So instead of having just one kind of tags we could be creative and have two kinds; “Tags” and “Jags”. To help you organize your stuff your system displays statistics about your Tags and Jags with counts on how many matching items you have. Fx.

Tags

• pony (3)
• kitten (27)

Jags

• ninja (5)
• samurai (68)

If I now search across my system for anything containing the word “ramen” these statistics would narrow down to show the counts for the search results. Fx:

Searching for “ramen”
Tags

• kitten (3)

Jags

• ninja (5)
• samurai (2)

In any part of my journey I could click on on a particular Tag or Jag and narrow my search results down to only match items with that particular attribute. Fx. clicking on the “ninja” Jag:

Searching for “ramen”, restricted to the “ninja” Jag
Tags

• kitten (1)

Jags

• ninja (5) X

In real life we don’t deal as much with Tags and Jags, so consider that you could stuff anything old metadata attribute in there instead. Searching a library catalogue very useful facets would be

Example facets for a library system:
Author
Title
Publisher
Year

To be honest these facets where not exactly grabbed out of the thin air I highly encourage to go play with the real deal and the homepage of the State Library of Denmark.

Technical Aspects of Facetting

If you take indexing libraries like Lucene or Xapian out of the box – you have to do quite a lot of work to get correct facetting. And by correct I mean always getting the counts exactly right and always calculating the entire facet sets for the active query.

A common solution to give the illusion of facets is to simply calculate them on the search engine for the first 100 hits (or 1000, or whatever). This leads to a slow and resource hungry solution that doesn’t provide the right results for large results sets (with more than 100 hits).

Fear not! There are shrink wrapped products like Summa or Solr that can give you correct facets pretty much out of the box. However it’s still not exactly something you are going to run on low end servers (unless you have a very small index).

This is where my true inspiration behind this blog post is revealed! Toke Eskildsen (my awesome former coworker) has been hacking away, trying to get the facetting system from Summa upstreamed into Lucene. Along his way optimizing the internals of Lucene with facetting in mind and providing hooks to make facetting more efficient. Toke’s latest status update certainly heralds a brighter future!

It’s my hope that Toke’s work can help bring facetting more into the mainstream – because it’s truly and awesome way to browse huge datasets.

Facetting on the Open Source Infrastructure

Dreaming on into a world where facetting is ubiquitous I can certainly see Bugzilla, Launchpad, translations sites, wikis, and what not making lives a lot easier for everyone from passers-by to professional developers if they could do facetting across their metadata.

Facetting on the Desktop

Even though Toke’s work is all sorts of awesome, my gut instinct tells me that general facetting still would be too heavy a task for a normal desktop.

That said, it may not be impossible. At the very least I want it to be possible! Really polishing of the low level data structures, maybe cheating just a wee bit, we can get something which is good enough.

A while back I actually configured Summa to harvest my desktop (wiring it up with Tika) configuring Summa to create facets for document titles, uris, and mimetypes. Stuff like that. And when I started browsing my files in Summa I just immediately had one of those Eurika moments:

Files are meant to be browsed through facets!

It just felt so right

(Bonus: Facetting and Zeitgeist?)

Sorry I don’t have a cool demo to show here Just a pipe dream to share.

In theory; it is possible to define a Timeline facet where each entry would correspond to a certain time range (the histogram for Gnome Activity Journal is actually more or less doing this).

Couple this with the zeitgeist-fts-extension to give you a full text search interface and you have the foundations. Now you “just” need to intersect the searches with some facetting info on the logged metadata and do a heckuwa lot of counting, and presto – magical interface to replace the aging hierarchical file system metaphor

Ok – I may have made that last part sound easier than it’s likely to be… To be honest it’s gonna be darn friggin hard to implement in an effiencient and light way. So don’t hold you breath… I’m not.

On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zeitgeist 0.5.1.

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is an event-logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log, and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity, such as file usage, communications, browsing history, etc.

The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not provide a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journalling applications and deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download (zeitgeist-0.5.1.tar.gz)

About Zeitgeist: https://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.5.0

2010-09-09: Zeitgeist 0.5.1 "Spongebob is not funny"

Engine:

- Don't use the return value of Extension.post_insert_event() when
dispatching the post insert hooks. The post_insert_event() method
has no return value.
- Initialize ZeitgeistEngine after RemoteInterface, so that --replace
does its job before the main engine and extensions start (LP: #614315).
- Added support for queries on the Subject.Storage field of an Event
(LP: #580364).
- Some optimizations in the find_events() method. Also the profiling
data is much more useful.

Python API:

- Check arguments of Event.new_for_values() and Subject.new_for_values()
(LP: #580372).
- Redefined the result of TimeRange.always(), UNIX timestamp "0" is now
the left corner of the interval (LP: #614295).
- Added a new helper module called zeitgeist.mimetypes which basically
provides two functions (LP: #586524):
* get_interpretation_for_mimetype(), which tries to get a suitable
interpretation for a given mime-type.
* get_manifestation_for_uri(), which tries to lookup a manifestation
for the given URI.
- The DataSource model now provides easy access to the information it
holds through properties.

Overall:

- The tool to build our ontology now supports rdflib2 and rdflib3
(LP: #626224).
- Added "make check" and "make doc" commands to the rootlevel Makefile
(LP: #628661)
- Translation updates.
- Updated test suite.
- Documentation updates.

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist 0.3.3 is out!
2. Zeitgeist since UDS
3. Zeitgeist Data-Source Registry

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Programari lliure, zeitgeist