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.