The first draft of my GNOME Journal article on Zeitgeist is below. Criticism and comments are welcome.

Read the complete article »

I’ve been thinking about the proper way to handle fulltext searches in Zeitgeist. (E.g. searching through a file’s content instead of just searching for files by name.)

I think the best solution is to fall back to Tracker and other search engines for all text searches. This is especially important if we index things like GMail emails where we can’t possibly handle all searches ourselves without downloading and indexing all emails. (Instead, we would just index each email’s title and sender. If the user performs a search, we would use GMail’s API to find results on the fly.)

On that note, I’m planning on adding Google Documents and Flickr support. This probably wont happen until later this week or the beginning of next week

I’m sitting at the Coffee Bean with a large Ice Mocha. Things that I’ve been working on include:

1. The GNOME Journal article on Zeitgeist which is due today.
2. An improved version of the mockup which I posted last night. (The new mockup is still only on paper.)
3. I discussed this bug with Ketil.
4. I’ve been thinking about how to handle fulltext searches in Zeitgeist. I’ll post about that later.
5. I’ve bought the domain name natanyellin.com last week. I’m going to start redirecting theesylum.com to natanyellin.com later this week.

Time to get back to work. One large Ice Mocha down and one salad to go.

I came up with a quick mockup for Zeitgeist last night. (Yes, it’s bare, hand drawn, and full of squiggly lines that are supposed to be straight.)

Comments are welcome. If enough people find it interesting, I might write some code for it this week.

Zeitgeist Mockup

Tehran is dark, cold tonight, I can hear screams. scary #iranelection

– A tweet from mohamadreza one hour ago

I’ve been reading the news about the Iranian elections with growing angst. I find a few things particularly disturbing.

Unrest in Iran

1. Where is the mainstream media’s coverage of what’s going on in Iran? CNN has one minor article with 3 pictures on the topic. The article makes the entire situation seem like a small incident which will blow over by tomorrow. 
2. Cell phone networks seem to have been down following the election, and social networking sites like Facebook were blocked. The entire thing reeks of foul play.

Thanks to Behdad for posting the first real news I saw about the elections. Your post grabbed my eye when it hit Planet GNOME.

During the last two weeks I took my English, computers, and math matriculation exams. I have the physics exam this Thursday and then I’ll just be left with history and Hebrew lang for another two weeks.

Sorry for disappearing up until now, but I’ll be back online as soon as exams are finished. In the meantime, be sure to read RainCT’s summary of the Zeitgeist presentation at UDS

UbuntuOne just went live.

You can get a beta invite at http://ubuntuone.com/

Today I participated in the CodeGuru Extreme contest at the Weizmann Institute and took 2nd place.

Congratulations to all of the other winners!

Seif has done some very neat work on Zeitgeist lately. I’ve been away from coding in order to take care of personal work, but here are a few of the items on my TODO list:

1. Implicit tagging of files/documents- There are endless mountains of information on the user’s computer and on the web that can give us hints about a user’s files. I’d like to use some of this information in order to automatically sort and tag files. (E.g. Popular Delicious tags can be used to automatically label a user’s bookmarks.)

2. Automatic grouping of documents based on tags and the time they were accessed.

3. A new database design.

4. Better Open File dialogs- I’d like to display file suggestions to users based on their past file history and the list of currently open files.

Two months ago, I began working on GNOME Zeitgeist with Seif Lotfy. We were frustrated about usability problems with the current GNOME desktop, and we had several ideas about how we wanted to fix them. Under guidance from Thorsten Prante and Federico Mena-Quintero, we began programming a Python prototype.

Over time, we experimented with different interface designs as well as the underlying architecture. We played around with the journal-like interface that Federico suggested, added support for tagging,  and switched to a sqlite database.

Right now, we have a basic architecture in place. From here, we’re going to move on to more interesting elements. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to do some work with Seif on implicit tagging and user contexts. Both the backend and frontend have major rewrites planned.

If you have any ideas for Zeitgeist, feel free to drop either Seif or myself an email.