Goodbye Planet GNOME
I have been a Planet GNOME blogger for almost three years now. Every post has been a pleasure. I learned some truly odd and interesting things, like how to strangely pass parameter in C and how the kernel reads shebangs.
For over two years PGO has put up with my oddities, like buying AskJeevesMom.com and writing poems about Mars, and discussing interplanetary CDNs. I never received warnings to stay on topic or to get my act together, but I can’t say I never feared it. All those fears were unfounded. The GNOME community is the most friendly and welcoming online community I know. #gnome-hackers was my home as a teenager and I don’t think I heard a dirty word once. The GNOME community simply rocks.
Knowing that my posts end up on PGO has always made blogging seem like a bold and glorious undertaking, though I felt a midget among giants. My posts end up on the same page where HP blogs and Mark Shuttleworth announces and incredible kernel hackers post all sorts of things I don’t understand, but maybe one day will.
Tonight I’m saying goodbye because in three weeks my blog will be removed from PGO and I support that decision.
You see, my blog was once about GNOME and Linux. When I was added to PGO in 2009, I was a new and passionate GNOME user who blogged about Zeitgeist. Today I use OS X and occasionally GNOME 2. I used to be passionate about FOSS, but nowadays I’m a student and I’m just happy if I eat two meals a day, preferably with a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice, assuming that isn’t over-budget, but of course it always is.
It has been a pleasure. If you want to follow me, subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed, or follow @aantn or nyellin on reddit, or plus me, or even just email me and ask me to send emails back occasionally (aantny at gmail). Do people still use RSS? I still use email. You can even send me an old fashioned letter with a cookie inside, but you’ll have to email me for my address and I can’t promise to eat the cookie. Okay, I wont eat it. But I’ll stay in touch and hopefully some of you will too.
GNOME Zeitgeist is NOT a file manager
Disclaimer: Due to time constraints, I am not an active Zeitgeist developer right now. Seif Lotfy is the man.
GNOME Zeitgeist is a file manager application for the GNOME desktop environment. Instead of providing direct access to the hierarchical file system like most file managers, GNOME Zeitgeist mainly classifies files according to metadata. This includes time and date of previous accesses, location of use (using GPS positioning), file type, tagging and more. In addition to local files, GNOME Zeitgeist also organizes web browsing history, email and other data sources.
What’s wrong? Zeitgeist is not a file manager. The GNOME Activity Journal can be used to replace a file manager and do file manager-like things, but Zeitgeist is more than that. Check the official Zeitgeist website for details.
If you are a Linux user, how do you use Zeitgeist?
Snowy Database Schema
For GCI (Google Code In) I’m working on Snowy, the Django-based application to view and synchronize Tomboy notes online. My task is to add support for multiple OpenID accounts.
To get started, I used django_extensions to generate a graph of the database schema.
Zeitgeist and Fulltext Searches
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
About Me
20 year old undergrad in CS & Physics, co-founder of Freeversation, faux CEO of Politician Market, and former software developer at Check Point.
I am interested in social startups, information security, and robotics. Read more about me
Contact
Email aantny [at] gmail [dot] com. If it's interesting, I can code it.