Category Archives: Planet Ubuntu

Case of the missing duck

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In reference to Jean-François Fortin Tam and Luis de Bethencourt blog posts, I would like to post my side of the story.

The night before the incident (where the duck got lost), I was contacted by Vivia past midnight, after an awesome meal with the Collaborans. She asked me to contact JeFF and Rene if I see them and tell them to give the duck to Veronique.

Unfortunately by the time I met them, it was at the airport. At the canteen were discussing how to return the duck to Vivia (their intentions were good).

Later we met up with some Canonical folks and Emmanuelle Bassi while waiting for our plane. We were having some lengthy discussion and the duck was insightful as usual. I can’t remember who made a joke of frying him, but we found it very offensive but nevertheless the duck was still cheerful.

We then were on our way to board the plane, when suddenly we realized the duck was not amongst us. It was too late to go back. The only 2 who did not board the plane were Robert Ancell (Canonical) and Emmanuelle Bassi (GNOME Board & Mozilla)

Here is a a sketch of how it looks, sadly all ducks look the same to me.

The duck is very very missed…
Please help us find him

GNOME Clocks… almost there, help needed

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GNOME Clocks has been in the works for 3 months now almost.  It is an implementation of the designs prepared by the GNOME Designers (see https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Clock)

Together with Allan Day, we are mentoring the awesome Emily Gonyer for her SoC project as well as our free time superhero Eslam Mostafa. One of the nice (non-techie) things about GNOME Clocks is that it allowed us (the mentors) to identify patterns of healthy communication between designers and developers (I will be preparing a post about this soon).

The project is in a more or less good development state… Here are some screenshots of the current status.

Clocks view

Alarm view

Timer & Stopwatch views

We have been hanging around #gnome-clocks for a bit to make the development environment protective and focused for our new devs. Now I think we can move forward. You can find the code at http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-clocks

It is all written in python so it should be easy to just jump in and contribute to a “core app” for GNOME. We need some help with our bugs and most help with autofoo and hosting on jhbuild. So if you are up for it you can find me or allan on #gnome-design & #gnome-clocks and files bugs at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=product:%22clocks%22+

Have a nice weekend :D

Zeitgeist: Playing with Berkeley DB

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While doing some scaling optimization the Zeitgeist team decided to give Berkeley DB a try. But porting from SQLite to Berkeley is not easy. However thanks to the Berkeley SQL API porting one can use the SQLite queries. All we did was change the Makefile and add a new vapi (which is a straight copy of the sqlite3.vapi but with dbsql.h as a referenced header instead of sqlite3.h).

The results are not good though. But maybe its because we need to optimize the queries a bit more. Nevertheless you will find the code on freedesktop under the branchname berkeley tonight.

If you like a challenge, try to optimize the Berkeley optimization yourself, but be aware this is not for beginners and it may break you DB.

To build it make sure you get Berkeley db (on Debian and Ubuntu):

  • sudo apt-get install libdb-sql-dev
Get the latest Zeitgeist trunk code and create a new branch:
Download the following patch and apply (make sure you replace path to patch):
  • git am –signoff < /path/to/patch

Download the following vapi and place it into:

  • cp /path/to/vapi /usr/share/vala/vapi/dbsql.vapi
Configure and compile Zeitgeist:

  • sh autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/ –disable-fts && make

Now run it and make sure you are NOT using the default datapath:

  • ZEITGEIST_DATA_PATH=/home/seif/.local/share/zeitgeist-bdb/ src/zeitgeist-daemon –replace –log-level=debug –no-datahub

you will find a generate_events.py script in the zeitgeist tools folder as well as other benchmarking scripts. Feel free to poke around.

Zeitgeist in GNOME

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Words can not express how happy the Zeitgeist team is to see our little project with the Empathy and Folks developers merged into GNOME and finally bring some neat Zeitgeist features to the user.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to Zeitgeist, Folks and Empathy, including Collabora, Intel, Canonical and RedHat for their code and design contributions. I think the new design is very clean – check out Guillaume Desmottes blog post for screenshots.

P.S: Stay tuned for our next release (release within 2 weeks) which will log telepathy interaction events out of the box (as part of the datahub). If you want to start logging now check out our standalone logger from the datasources repo on freedesktop.

 

Zeitgeist scalability & efficiency bootcamp results

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As Trever blogged yesterday, the Zeigeist team has been busy with tweaking the DB and the engine. During that process tools and benchmarks have been developed to make the tweaking and testing more interesting. Trever will be blogging about that tomorrow so make sure to check his blog.

Our end goal is  trying to scale the engine to be able to handle a few billion events just as fast as it can handle a few hundred thousand. While we are not there yet we managed to have some pretty nice stable results for the first iteration. A lot of results show more than 100% speed enhancement. In other words a lot of queries from our standard benchmarks now consume more than 50% less time to execute. Here are some graphs of our benchmarks.

Green indicates the 0.9 release

Yellow indicates the new trunk

Most notable performance enhancement is querying Zeitgeist with a specified timeframe (from data x to date y).

 

Same queries with an open timeframe also improved

 

We also have a copy of the Synapse queries benchmarked

The queries here are typical queries used to extract info from Zeitgeist. So right now the team is really happy with the initial results. For Synapse on my local DB (over a year old), all my synapse queries perform under 0.08 seconds. We still can get more out of this. The trick here was improving our indexes and our sql query generator.

Next month we will be going through another iteration.

 

 

On first interactions with open source communities…

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I think it is safe to assume that as an open source project, striving to grow our community, we should make first interactions of new contributors with us a pleasant one.
So when commenting on a new contribution or attempt, we should try to either say something positive or don’t say anything.

  • If the contribution is  not useful then sugar coat you criticism. Because while the contribution might be bad, the person who did the contribution showed initiative to help out. We need to harvest this momentum and help integrate the person into the community.
  • If the contribution is useful then praise the developer. Making him feel useful. I learned from Lydia Pintscher to not only praise good contributors, but grant them autonomy to play around. This would allow them to master their craft, which will lead to them feeling like they have a purpose to stay.

What do you think?

Zeitgeist: Hello Freedesktop.org

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For as long as Zeitgeist has existed it has been hosted on Launchpad. We made use of almost every Launchpad feature and grew to love Bazaar. The tight integration between Bazaar and Launchpad should be a taken as a grand example to the community, and the the team hacking on Launchpad and Bazaar has been always very responsive, supportive and above all incredibly approachable. The Zeitgeist team hosted all of its projects on Launchpad which made our development process very agile. I really need to thank the Launchpad team for hosting the project from its inception.

During the course of the last 3 and half years, Launchpad served us well and allowed us to handle:

  • ca. 748 unique bugs reported
  • ca. 231 merges
  • ca. 53 code contributions

We hope that many other great projects will find a valuable home on Launchpad. Without Launchpad, Zeitgeist would have not reached the level it has now.

But time changes and projects grow. The Zeitgeist team has a stable developer base of minimum 7 people putting several hours a week into Zeitgeist development and deployment. With these efforts comes the need of a vendor neutral platform hosted and serviced in a way that serves the interest of the project best.

Due to the deployment efforts being made to get Zeitgeist integrated with applications, our developers got more and more exposed to git. A stream of developers expressed their desire to work with us, however they were very uncomfortable or unfamiliar with bazaar and Launchpad, due to the popularity of git. That is something we do not understand in the core team, but still something we respect and will act on.

We couldn’t find a good direct replacement for Launchpad honestly, but since Bugzilla is something like the defacto standard for most people we decided to host Zeitgeist on Freedesktop.org (I must admit in-patch commenting in Bugzilla is sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet).

We needed to wait until we finished the 0.9 release of Zeitgeist as well as narrow down the bugs to be less then 10 to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Now that Zeitgeist 0.9 is released, all our development will take place on Freedesktop.org and will be mirrored to launchpad, this means no code will be pushed directly to Launchpad, but rather Launchpad will pull from the git repositories. There the Zeitgeist Ubuntu guys (including me) will be syncing bugs and keeping everything intact. So bugs reported in Launchpad will be ported to FDO. But not the other way around.

We did not turn our backs on Launchpad, its just time for us to remove any barriers to getting the widest adoption of and contributions to Zeitgeist

On the road toward Zeigeist 1.0, FDO will be a great home for the project and we look forward to many great new contributions.

So please feel free to have a look at:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/zeitgeist/

P.S: I would like to thank Trever Fisher and Manish Sinha for their efforts porting the code base.

Zeitgeist 0.9 and more…

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Since the Zeitgeist team is kinda recovering from last month, and no one really feels like blogging, I am here to sum up what has been up the last 2 months. (Also I think a blog post from my side is long overdue)

Privacy Manager

A lot of users are scared of “logging”, and since Zeitgeist is considered an event logger, we ended up having some users trying to disable Zeitgeist all in all breaking Unity searching and so on.
Fact is, if you want searching to be sorted properly, the search provider needs to know what files you recently or frequently used. Also some people want to have some of their stuff logged and others things not (blacklisting folders).
Activity Log Manager which we already had developed in python last year has been ported to Vala. This nifty tool allows you to blacklist application, folders, mime-types from being logged as well as the option to delete parts of your log. The port to Vala happened so we can patch it into the Settings Manager to give it an more integrated feel with the System in Ubuntu and Dawati.
It has received very good reviews and there are some very interesting new development efforts/ideas in the make (right now one in a state of flux which I hope I can get out of soon).

Here are some screenshots of the current stand of ALM

(dialog for deleting history)

(dialog for blacklisting folders and file types)

(dialog for blacklisting applications)

Zeitgeist 0.9

Last year we started porting Zeitgeist from python to Vala. Mostly for the sake of easier deployment as well as improving startup time. As a side effect also memory consumption decreased and during the development more optimizations have been made.
It was a very intense operation sponsored by Collabora and Canonical as well as the awesome unpaid Zeitgeist developers.
So a big thanks goes to Collabora, Canonical, Michal Hruby, Siegfried Gevatter, Manish Sinha, Mikkel Kamstrup, Trever Fischer, Stefano Candori, Moritz Neeb, as well as everyone else who tested Zeitgeist, provided bug reports or contributed in any other way.

We released some alphas and a beta. But now the real deal is out. We still have some nice optimization in the queue that we will release with the next Zeitgeist version. So don’t hesitate to try it out.

GNOME Shell face-lift extension

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I decided to prototype an extensions based on Jimmac’s mockups. I still need to fix some minor issues and add animations. It is not perfect yet and is a bit different from the original design:

  • Applications Icon is on the top of the bar instead of the bottom (seemed more comfortable for me)
  • Searchbar is centered (I think it was Hylke Bons who told me to do that a while back)

but I am still working on it and hopefully can upload it to extensions.gnome.org soon, so we can get feedback! I will leave you with some screenshots and a video for now…

One year Zeitgeist sponsorship by Collabora

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This month Collabora has been sponsering zeitgeist for one year, here is the story about how that came to be and what happened during that year.

How I got in contact with Collabora?

I met Rob McQueen, Phillippe Khalaf, Sjoerd and some from the Telepathy team during Gran Canaria Desktop summit. I needed help with an idea (Teamgeist) and a couple of months later I was introduced to Youness Alaoui (until this day I consider a very good and close friend) as well as Sumana Harihareswara (from whom I learned a lot about organizing).

How I got sponsored?

Collabora saw Zeitgeist as a promising technology and observed the development for a while. They wanted to leverage it in GNOME more. After I tried to do some work on GNOME Shell last year, I was approached by them and they offered to sponsor my work, integrating Zeitgeist into GNOME as well as work on Zeitgeist. They also put two of their developers, Abner Silva and JP Whiting, to work on the Zeitgeist Qt bindings for a while.

What I did during the year?

I mainly get sponsored for working on Zeitgeist and related stuff for GNOME and KDE  (development, bug fixing and specs definition). Some of the things I worked on were:

  • Zeitgeist extensions for GNOME Shell: The purpose of the extensions is to integrate some Zeitgeist experience into GNOME Shell. The experience comes in form of three extensions (you can grab the source from here)
  • Jumplists: Displays the recently/most used files used with the apps  displayed in GNOME Shell. The extension has been uploaded to extensions.gnome.org

  • Journal: Zeitgeist based activity-history journal as a gnome-shell overview tab. It allows you to access you files via GNOME Shell and sorts them for you in chronological order. The extension has been uploaded to extensions.gnome.org

 

  • Search: Makes the Shell search via Zeitgeist and and categorize the results better. I will upload it to the extensions website when the highlighting issue is fixed.

  • Activity Log Manager: Due to popular demand we needed to hack on a privacy tool. Along side Manish Sinha, JP Lacerda, Stefano Candori and Siegfried Gevatter, we developed ALM. It is a graphical user interface which lets you easily control what gets logged by Zeitgeist. It supports setting up blacklists according to several criteria (such as application or file types), temporarily stopping all logging as well as deleting recent events. ALM will be seeing deeper integration into Ubuntu and hopefully GNOME too soon. You can grab the code from here.
   
  • Gedit Dashboard: Michal Hruby’s idea during the hackfest has become reality, after Hylke Bons and I spent almost a month working on it from scratch. The idea was to have a “Google Chrome”-like dashboard for gedit as well as a quick search. The patient and kind Gedit folks helped me clean up the code and now its part of gedit-plugins. This is my favorite plugin for gedit now. You can get it from http://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit-plugins.

  • libqzeitgeist (now maintained by the amazing Trever Fischer): libqzeitgeist was developed by Abner Silva and JP Whiting. It allows easier development for KDE apps. It is used in Trever’s plugin for KDE Activity Manager to push events directly into Zeitgeist. Trever is now maintaining the library and added QML support. You can find the work here.
  • Zeitgeist Engine: Of course since all the previous work is powered by Zeitgeist we had to work on getting Zeitgeist better and better. They sponsored my development and maintenance with the team for the 0.7 and 0.8 series and  backed up our GNOME sponsored hack-fest. The biggest accomplishment was done when we ported Zeitgeist to Vala, resulting in less memory consumption and much better start-up times.
  • Epiphany Zeitgeist History (under development): I am working on patching Epiphany to use Zeitgeist as it main storage for History and “Frecency Search”. The Epiphany guys already have a history rewrite branch in which I am sneaking in some code to replace their SQLite back-end. In the end its less code then what they have :P
  • Gtk-RecentManager (worked on designing the API with Federico, Siegfried and Michal Hruby): One of the tasks that emerged during the Desktop Summit was replacing the Gtk.RecentManager logic (which has some flaws). We started designing and discussing the issues at hand on LGO. Implementation is now being done by Siegfried and Federico.

What is next?

Collabora currently also sponsors Siegfried Gevatter for his work on Zeitgeist since last March. I will be trying to do some more GNOME related work. Currently I am trying to work on prototypes for the GNOME Design team to help them evaluate their designs. I will also be experimenting with some internal Zeitgeist algorithms stuff soon. I don’t really know what is next. But I hope we can go further into integrating more with GNOME applications and becoming a blessed GNOME module.

Fun fact?

I used GAJ to write down my Zeitgeist development hours for Collabora. Pretty helpful tool. I can tell how long a file was open and how many times I modified it.