Posted
over 3 years
ago
I just spotted a complementary article about Hadoop, Lucene & Nutch.
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Beard of Bees Press and the Red Rover Series are proud to present:
Stand Close to the Machine: An Evening of Computational Poetics
End-users at their “poetry stations” on a Gnoetic Assembly Line will compose poems in
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collaboration with the Gnoetry 0.2 poetry-generating software, and will clock the poems in to be read out loud by our Recitation Managers. Throughout the evening, the compositional process will be animated on the wall — written out in light, written on the fly, written without bathos, a new form of objective poetry will be created by our poetry factory workers before your very eyes.
Featuring Olivia Cronk, Eric Elshtain, Bill Martin and Matthias Regan
Saturday, October 21, 7:00pm
Locus: 2114 West Grand Avenue, Chicago, IL (map) [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Battelle’s blog has elicited a good discussion of search engine objectivity. I discussed this issue a while ago. One comment led to a good article (pdf) on the topic.
Posted
over 4 years
ago
Next Thursday, I’ll be in San Francisco for the Nutch Meeting.
I’ll be in Helsinki for most of July, hosted by Wray Buntine, attending the International Workshop on Intelligent Information Access there July 6-8, among other
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things.
I’ll probably also attend the Open Source Information Retrieval workshop at SIGIR in August. [Less]
Posted
over 4 years
ago
Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you’re new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.beagle-project.org
Hacking
Beagle Search Interface
As of the 0.2.0 release, Beagle
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sports a new search interface that was previously codenamed “Holmes”. You may remember this project was started during an interface hackfest initiated by Lukas Lipka. The new interface removes the Mozilla Runtime dependency and utilizes native GTK widgets. In subsequent releases, Dan Winship and other community members have provided many bug
fixes to the new interface.
Memory Consumption
It is no secret that in the past Beagle has, on occasion, consumed far to much system memory when run for a long period of time. As this was certainly a large annoyance and deterred people from using Beagle, it has received a lot of attention as of late. Joe Shaw, utilizing the mono memory profiling tool Heap-Buddy, was able to track down several key issues in Beagle and Mono that have been taken care of as of the 0.2.3 release. Other improvements in this
area have occured recently in CVS. Read all about it on Joe’s Blog:
http://joeshaw.org/2006/03/17/386
Video Filter
Many projects, relating to the Linux Desktop, have been focusing on video playback as a key feature for upcoming releases and Beagle is no different. A new filter, written by Alexander Macdonald, has been added to Beagle to help index all of those Internet videos, home movies and film trailers that are sitting on your hard drive. The new filter utilizes the power of MPlayer to extract the metadata and add it to Beagle’s index. Alexander has also created new filters
for GIF and XSLT files, which currently reside in CVS.
External Filter
Writing filters for Beagle just got a whole lot easier. As of the 0.2.3 release, Beagle includes a special “external” filter that allows for metadata collection by other applications. If a certain application already has a good way of extracting the metadata, instead of writing a whole C# filter for it, that application can be
utilized by simply placing some xml information in the systems external-filters.xml file. More info about this type of filtering can be found in the documented external-filters.xml file.
Stability
Along side the much needed work on memory consumption there has been an overall focus on the stability of the Beagle daemon. Bugzilla has be as active as ever as bugs are being squashed as quick as they come in. Great job everyone in the community for reporting and fixing Beagle related bugs.
Project
GNOME 2.14
With the release of GNOME 2.14, three new additions to the desktop environment have come with the ability to search your Beagle index. First, Nautilus now allows users to create new searches within the file browser and save searches based on that query. If enabled, Nautilus will use Beagle for this searching. Second, a new panel applet has been included for quick searching. The panel applet, Deskbar, allows you to query Google, Yahoo! and a number of the websites in real time. If the Beagle plug-in is enabled, your files can be quickly searched using this handy tool. Finally, Yelp, the GNOME help tool can utilize Beagle for quick searching of the systems help documentation.
Dashboard
There has, recently, been a revived interest in getting the Dashboard project running again. Dashboard, the predecessor to Beagle, was put on hold while a strong indexing agent, Beagle, was created. While the majority of the patches so far have been for fixing various compiling issues, there is a renewed interest in restoring this project with a well designed system to utilize Beagle’s indexing prowess.
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]
Posted
over 4 years
ago
A blast from my past. When I wrote that code I didn’t think anyone would ever read it, more less try to run it. I wrote the paper so that I could visit Barcelona, and thought that fleshing it out with code would impress the reviewers. It seemed
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to work. Barcelona was incredible. Folks danced to a crazy band playing on the plaza outside the cathedral after Easter mass. Traditional Catalan music, I guess. The “Flying Norwegians” kept me out all night at strange, unmarked clubs. Two men were fighting at 4am on the Ramblas. One hit the other over the head and he fell down, covered in blood. I thought he was dead until he rose up from the ambulance stretcher, swinging his fists, screaming, and ran off into the night. The culinary academy’s menu was only in Catalan, every dish a delectable surprise. Now someone’s actually read the code! [Less]
Posted
over 4 years
ago
I’ll be in Brussels this weekend for FOSDEM, and will be giving a talk on Sunday at 2pm about Beagle. Since I’ve stepped away from day-to-day Beagle development, it will be more of a meta-talk about lessons learned and the challenge of
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writing deeply-integrated desktop apps.
By the way, Google is a strange and wonderful place. I highly recommend it.
Mountain View: January 26, 2006
When the office is this pleasant, why go home? [Less]
Posted
over 4 years
ago
Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you’re new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.beagle-project.org
Hacking
Interfaces
While much work has been done stabilizing the
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Beagle core
a few new ways to search Beagle have come into existence:
Holmes
The new Beagle search interface has been uploaded to CVS. The application was started with an initial hackfest organized by Lukas Lipka based up on mockups done by Garrett LeSage and Jakub Steiner. Dan Winship has continued to work on Holmes throughout the fall making it even better. Check it out of GNOME CVS under the module “holmes”.
Deskbar Applet
One of modules proposed for the inclusion of GNOME 2.14 is the deskbar applet. The panel applet allows users to search a variety of backends right from their panel. There has been talk of a backend that would use Beagle to provide search results.
Nautilus
The GNOME file manager has recently had its search capabilities upgraded to allow for different backends. Anders Carlsson initially worked on this feature upon which Joe Shaw extended its Beagle support. Recently Alex Larsson has adapted this which you can read about on his blog:
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/alexl/2005/12/07/0
Yelp
The GNOME documentation browser is another application that has recently added Beagle support. Chris Lahey has worked on allowing the numerous help pages to be easily indexed and searched.
API’s
Allowing for the new search interfaces has been possible because of the new API’s that have been created to interact with Beagle.
pyBeagle
Raphael Slinckx’s work has lead to the creation of a common way for python scripts to communicate with Beagle. One of the more powerful uses could be with the previously mentioned Deskbar Applet that was written in python.
libbeagle
The Beagle C API has finally been put together to allow applications written in C to work with Beagle. After much, much work with wonderful help from the community to track down bugs, this API ensures Beagle’s ability to work with the countless applications that have already been written in C including the previously mentioned Nautilus and Yelp.
Improved Querying
One of the welcomed side effects of the new search interfaces is the improved querying that the Beagle core allows. Some search interfaces, to work as designed, required date range query’s or searches by extension. These and more have been built into the Beagle core now.
Stability
Alongside all the work on the search interfaces, their has been enormous work on the Beagle Daemon as well. Reliability upgrades and bug fixes have been done to nearly every part of the application. Special thanks go to Jon Trowbridge and Joe Shaw for there work, however, it is in part due to the excellent bug reports from the community that lead to these problems getting fixed. In addition, Joe Shaw has worked with others to add Firefox v1.5 support.
Project
Localization
Since localization support has been added to Beagle, numerous contributors have pitched in. In fact, Beagle now supports 27 languages! Still, if you find something that does not look right please help out by submitting a patch for a localization fix.
Wiki Cleanups
Big thanks to David Coeurjolly and Joe Shaw for their work in cleaning up the wiki after several malicious attacks. The wiki has been upgraded and locked down to provide further protection.
New Maintainer
At the end of 2005 it was announced that Jon Trowbridge, the Beagle maintainer since its inception, will be leaving Novell and handing the rains of the project to Joe Shaw. Jon has been a wonderful maintainer, guiding the project thus far with remarkable skill. His code has created the base of the Beagle application that we all know and love. Finally it is Jon’s overwhelming support of the open source philosophy that will aid him at his new job at Google.
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]
Posted
over 4 years
ago
Today is my last day at Novell, and it turns out that they don’t forward e-mail. So as of the end of today, mail to trow@novell.com will bounce. If you are e-mailing me, please be sure to use another address.
Chicago: December 8, 2005
It all melted.
Posted
over 4 years
ago
Thanks to my recent good fortune, a rare, coveted job is available on Novell’s Linux Desktop Team.
