Seilo @ Geeky Ogre

For the next month or two i need a little part time job to pay the bills. I decided to actually apply for little non hacking part time jobs (since no1 really cares about python in the industry), at various gas stations, libraries as well as flipping burgers.
So today I got a phone call:

X: Can I speak to Mister Seif Lotfy?

Me: I am right here!

X: Hello Mr. Lotfy, I am Mr. X, you applied for a part time job at our gas station right?

Me: Yes sir!

X: Do you have time for an interview this week or at the weekend?

Me: I can make it on Saturday or Sunday but not during the week!

X: S0 how is Saturday 4 AM? Could you make it?

Me: Uhm……… sure why not?

X: So Saturday 4 AM it is. Please get your CV with you if possible and a motivation letter?

Me: Sure thing Mr. X.

X: OK! See you then.

*click*

Me: Bye…. Shit he hung up.

So is it just me or was there something or many things really really wrong about that phone call:

• Since when do you interview for a job at a gas station (Maybe it is because of my ethnicity)
• 4 AM!!!!! REALLY????????????????????????????????
• WTF will you do with my CV. There is nothing there that qualifies me to stand behind the cash machine or so. Do you need a CV for that?
• Motivaiton letter? Now that is just classic! I really need to write a motivation letter for other purposes. Maybe I can tweak it to submit the same letter at the gas station.

Whatever happens it can only get better from here

Here we go some further improvements to let out the steam of the day.

palette2

hoping to convince Jason smith to use it in Docky2, this is a shitty dirty hack (since i suck at mocking up).

Palette

A few hours well spent with Jason Smith form Docky fame ended up with:

We worked on an alternative view that we will allow toggling between with the journal view… here a sneak peak

More hacking on the GNOME Activity Journal during the openSuSE conference hack sessions with some of the Zeitgeist guys (also working with UX team from canonical and Jason Smith) got it looking like that.

It will be possible to change between this “Mail view” and the standard “Journal View” since this was just a rearrangement of widgets. Also we will add the option of using Tracker search thanks to Ivan Frade and the rest.

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We are preparing for the 0.3 release of the engine now. Things are shaping up and this release will be really really powerful. It consists of 6 blueprints:

• Monitoring Document Focus (needs merging and reviewing): We can log the focus of the documents and calculate how long these documents were focused.
• Data Context Relevancy (needs merging and reviewing): Using the Focus Monitor we generate accurate context relevancy graphs. So based on how one switches between documents we generate contextual relationships between them.
• Event – Document separation (heavy development): Allows us to have a more flexible API and rely on Tracker for metadata and document storage. Using our storage is still possible though thanks to Markus Korn’s exchangeable backend module.
• Symbolic access of data models (needs love and is a quick hack): We will use the content- and source types defined in Nepomuk throughout Zeitgeist, never using string constants defined inside each logger class. HELLO KDE AND CROSS-DESKTOP
• Events RDF Ontology (Drafting) : We will introduce a whole new ontology based on “Happenings” to extend the possibilities of the semantic desktop.
• Revamp parts of the Zeitgeist API (good progress): With all this happening we need some new methods to provide more awesomeness.

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Other news would be “TALKS” about integrating in KDE, since we are moving to the Nepomuk ontology.

Good night internet

Thanks to Daniel Siegel, Stormy, Vincent Untz (who messed up my honor in a humiliating Mario Kart defeat)  and the GNOME Board we got a little Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolzano together with  two other hackfests (Sugarlabs and GFOSS) going on at the same time.

Tomeu Vizoso from Sugarlabs suggested:

Users of Sugar have been using something not too different from
Zeitgeist for some years now and some people think that Zeitgeist could benefit from our experience, and Sugar could benefit from using parts of Zeitgeist at some point in the future.

Thus I’m proposing that we reserve some hours near the start of the event to exchange ideas and perhaps find ways to work together.

So this will be definitely a discussion to follow.

The hackfest will be from the 9th – 12th of November and will allow the core team and the newly assembled UI team to meet for the first time.

Main topics of the the hackfest will be:

• Fixing engine bugs from the 0.3 release due 1st of November (0.3 will be the main release for integration with GNOME Apps)
• Delivering a well thought through design and implementation of the “GNOME Activity Journal” (This session will be lead by Federico)
• Using Tracker for metadata storage (not events).
• Integrating advanced features of the engine such as data relevancy  and context relevancy into GNOME Shell. ( This feature is kick ass)

I will be taking most of October off to prepare for the hackfest as well as hack on some sweetness with the awesome guys from Collabora using Telepathy+Zeitgeist+Tracker.

Here are some new pictures of the current in devlopment GNOME Activity Journal (GNOME Zeitgeist)

Still more to happen and more little design flaws to be removed.