NatanYellin.com

After over nine months of hacking, Zeitgeist 0.2 has been released into the wild. Head on over to Launchpad or Siegfried’s blog for the nitty gritty.

It’s worth pointing out that this release is aimed at developers only and includes the Zeitgeist Engine and DataHub. For the rest of you, the Zeitgeist team has been working long nights on a slick new GUI. We’re not quite there yet, but very, very soon we’ll have something good for end users as well!

A big congratulations goes out to the entire team which made this happen. Rock on!

I’m jumping onto the meme a little bit late. I go offline for 24 hours and when I come back at least half of Planet GNOME has blue banners.

However, what disturbed me most about Stallman’s speech wasn’t the rabid rant against Mono and it wasn’t even the fact that he showed his incapability to understand the other side. What troubled me a lot more was his sexist attitude and his total lack of political correctness.

It’s easy to deal with Stallman’s opinion on Mono- you simply let the BoycottNovell group scream as loudly as they can and go about your own way without listening. However, the other issues are a lot harder to deal with: For many people, Stallman represents the open source community. Outsiders judge us based on what he says.

I was happy to see that at least one member of the GNOME Advisory Board stood up against it, and does seem like Stallman wont be invited to speak again in the future. However, why is it that no one else thought it worth their time to address the issue? Focusing on Mono might be more practical in the short term, but if we want to increase the number of women in open source software, it’s not enough to simply avoid echoing Stallman’s comments. We need to stand up and make it clear that this is something that wont be tolerated.

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

I’m not young or naive enough to think that this is ever going to reach meme status, but I wont simply shut up and ignore it. Shame on you, Stallman.

I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer.

(From Nick via Luis via David)

Here’s a quick screencast of what Markus has been working on: He’s mounted a date-based FUSE filesystem using Zeitgeist and recently added html index pages for each day in the calendar.

For example, all documents that were opened on July 10th, 2009 would be in the virtual directory zeitgeist/2009/07/10.

Update: If you’re on Planet GNOME then you can watch the video here.

A friend sent me this private message on Facebook today:

Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated, there have been many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow. Records show that the reason is that there are too many non-active Facebook members and, on the other side, too many new Facebook members.

We will be sending this message around to see if members are active or not. If you are active please send to at least 15 other users using Copy+ Paste to show that you are still active. *Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks will be deleted without hesitation to create more space.*

Send this message to all your friends and to show me that you’re still active and you will not be deleted.

Founder of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg

I wonder how many people have fallen for this.

Edit: Now that I think of it, the spam most likely isn’t targeted at hackers. My email address was probably found on Ohloh and the spam bot may just be programmed to automatically include a link to the site which it found the email on.

Ugh. More spam has been getting through Gmail’s filters lately. Here’s the latest email to land in my inbox:

Hi dear,
how are you today? My name is kate, I just went Through your profile on this website (www.ohloh.net) I have no options than letting you Know that I am interested in having you as a friend, Pls write me back, I believe we can move on from here i still have more to let you know about me but that will be after i have know who you are thanks for ur understanding. I am waiting for your reply have a nice day.
From kate stay Bless.

Has anyone else had Gmail’s filters fail lately?

Quick introduction for new Planet GNOME readers: I’m a high school student in Ra’anana, Israel and have been involved in GNOME ever since GHOP 2007. After attending the GNOME UI hackfest this past October, I cofounded Zeitgeist and have been working on various new user interfaces since then. Those of you who attended the GNOME Boston Summit may also remember me from my lightning talk on problems with developer documentation.

A few weeks ago I blogged about the following mockup:

Edit: Added link to full size mockup.

I’m delighted to announce that it’s no longer just an idea! I’ve already started coding an early prototype called “Feedgeist” and the code will be on launchpad by the end of the week.

We’re planning on building sharing and collaboration features into Feedgeist. I’ll post a few more mockups on that soon.

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

Read the rest »

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