Search Results: "Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals"

21 July 2012

Siegfried Gevatter: A gentle introduction to Zeitgeist s Python API

In this post I ll make a quick introduction by example on how to use Zeitgeist s Python API for good and profit. If you re interested in using Zeitgeist from C instead, see the libzeitgeist examples; to use it with C++/Qt, Trever s a web browser in 4 steps may be of interest. First things first In case you re not familiar with Zeitgeist, it may prove helpful to first read Mikkel s introduction to Zeitgeist post. If that s too much to read, just should know that Zeitgeist is an event log. Like the history in your browser, it keeps track of what websites you open at which point in time. It also keeps track of when you close them, and of what browser you used, since it s a system-wide service. Furthermore, it does the same for files, conversations, e-mails, and anything else you want to insert into it. So Zeitgeist is a database of events, and an event can be pretty much anything. But what does it look like? It s main attributes are the following:

timestamp when did the event happen (milliseconds since Unix epoch)
interpretation what sort of event is it (eg. opened, closed)
manifestation why did it happen (user activity, notification )
actor which is the primary application involved
origin where did it come from (eg. website where you clicked the link that opened this page)

Additionally, each event has one or more subjects, which have the following attributes:

uri
current_uri updated URI if it changed since the event
interpretation abstract type (document, image, video )
manifestation how it is stored (file, remote object, website)
origin parent folder for files, domain name for websites
mimetype
text a title for the event (eg. filename, website title )
storage identifier for the storage medium of the subject (eg. local, online, pendrive X)

Retrieving recent data Okay, so let s say you want to know the last song you ve listened to (if you have a Zeitgeist-enabled music player). It s a simple as:

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_events_received(events):
    if events:
        song = events[0]
        print "Last song: %s" % song.subjects[0].uri
    else:
        print "You haven't listened to any songs."
 
template = Event.new_for_values(subject_interpretation=Interpretation.AUDIO)
zeitgeist.find_events_for_template(template, on_events_received, num_events=1)
 
# Start a mainloop - note: the Qt mainloop also works
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

This may need some explaining. We start by importing the Zeitgeist client and some associated data structures (such as Event and Interpretation), and create an instance of the client. The ZeitgeistClient class is a wrapper around Zeitgeist s D-Bus API which not only makes it much nicer to use, but also makes it easy to install monitors (as we will see later) and provides convenient functionality such as automatic reconnection if the connection to the engine is lost. To query for the most recent song, we just need to create a template with the restrictions we want to impose and submit it to Zeitgeist using the find_events_for_template call. If you haven t read Mikkel s post yet, please do so, as it introduces the structure of events and subjects (in short: an event has a timestamp, some other properties, and one or more subjects representing the resources -files, websites, people - involved in the event). The Python API is inherently asynchronous (if for some reason you need a synchronous API, you may still use the lower level ZeitgeistDBusInterface class), so we need to define a callback function to handle the results we receive from the Zeitgeist engine. Finally, we need to create a main loop so the asynchronous functions can run.

Now this was a pretty simple example. Let s make it more interesting. One song isn t much, so let s get the 5 most recent songs. Also, now we want both songs and videos. The first part is pretty easy, we just need to change the num_events parameter. For the second extension, we have to change the event template. In fact, now we need two different event templates and the find_events_for_templates function, which takes an arbitrary number of event templates and ORs them. The result is as follows:

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_events_received(events):
    for event in events:
        print "- %s" % event.subjects[0].uri
 
tmpl1 = Event.new_for_values(subject_interpretation=Interpretation.AUDIO)
tmpl2 = Event.new_for_values(subject_interpretation=Interpretation.VIDEO)
zeitgeist.find_events_for_templates([tmpl1, tmpl2],
                                    on_events_received, num_events=5)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

This will work, but unless you re lucky you re likely to get some duplicate line. Why is this? Well, other than that you may have used the same file twice, don t forget that what you are requesting are actually events. If you ve started playing a given song, you probably also stopped playing it, so that s actually two of them (an AccessEvent and a LeaveEvent). Since this isn t what we want, we ll change the query a bit:

zeitgeist.find_events_for_templates(
    [tmpl1, tmpl2],
    on_events_received,
    num_events=5,
    result_type=ResultType.MostRecentSubjects,
    storage_state=StorageState.Available)

By requesting the most recent subjects, vs. the most recent events, we can filter out events with duplicate URI. See the ResultType documentation for other modes you can use. Note particularly the MostPopularSubjects result type. I also used the chance to introduce the storage_state parameter. This one will filter out events for files Zeitgeist knows aren t available (this mostly means online resources won t be shown if you don t have a network connnection; there s also support for handling external storage media, but because of problems with GIO this is currently disabled). Last but not least, the find_events_for_* methods also accept a timerange parameter. It defaults to TimeRange.until_now(), but you may change it to TimeRange.always() (if for some reason you re working with events in the future) or to any other time range of your choice. Here it s important to note that Zeitgeist s timestamps use millisecond precision.

For more advanced queries, you can use more complex combinations of events and subject templates. The rule to keep in mind here is that events are OR d and subjects are ANDed. Additionally, some field (actor, origin, mimetype, uri and current_uri) may be prefixed with an exclamation mark ( ! ) for NOT, or you may append an asterisc ( * ) to them for prefix search. You can even combine the two operators together. Here s an example of a template you could build:

subj1 = Subject.new_for_values(interpretation=Interpretation.SOURCE_CODE,
                               uri="file:///home/rainct/Development/*")
subj2 = Subject.new_for_values(uri="!file:///home/rainct/Development/zeitgeist/*")
tmpl1 = Event.new_for_values(interpretation=Interpretation.MODIFY_EVENT,
                             subjects=[subj1, subj2])
templates = [tmpl1]

In my case, this template would fetch a list of the source code files I modified most recently but excluding those related to the Zeitgeist project. Working with big sets of data In case you re trying to do something crazy, you may end up with a Zeitgeist query complaining that it exceeded the memory limit. You re not supposed to do that. Instead, we provide some methods for working with large collections of events.

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_events_received(events):
    for event in events:
        print '- %s' % event.subjects[0].uri
 
def on_ids_received(event_ids):
    print 'A total of %d source code files were found.' % len(event_ids)
    print 'Fetching the first 100...'
    zeitgeist.get_events(event_ids[:100], on_events_received)
 
tmpl = Event.new_for_values(subject_interpretation=Interpretation.SOURCE_CODE)
zeitgeist.find_event_ids_for_templates(
    [tmpl],
    on_ids_received,
    num_events=10000, # you can use 0 for "all events", but do you really need to?
    timerange=TimeRange.from_seconds_ago(3600*24*30*3),
    result_type=ResultType.MostPopularSubjects)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

And there you have the source code files you worked with during the last 3 months, ordered from most to least popular (popularity is measured counting the number of events; for more precision, maybe you could limit the results to events with interpretation AccessEvent). Why do we provide this mechanism instead of querying with a simple offset? Well, this avoids problems when the log changes (events are inserted or deleted). Have you ever been exploring the latest posts in some website, and as you change to the next page some of the results from the previous page show up again (because new posts have been added in the meantime)? With Zeitgeist this won t happen. Receiving information in real time At this point you re an expert at requesting all sorts of data from Zeitgeist, but now you want to show a list of the last kitten images you ve viewed, updated in real time. Don t worry, Zeitgeist can provide for this:

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_insert(time_range, events):
    # do awesome stuff with the events here
    print events
 
def on_delete(time_range, event_ids):
    # a previously inserted event was deleted
    print event_ids
 
templates = [Event.new_for_values(subject_uri='file:///home/user/kittens/*',
                                  subject_interpretation=Interpretation.IMAGE)]
zeitgeist.install_monitor(TimeRange.always(), templates, on_insert, on_delete)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

It s important to note that on_delete won t be called when an image is deleted (that d be a newly inserted event with interpretation=DELETE_EVENT); rather, it s called when a previously inserted event is deleted (for example, using the forget recent history option in Activity Log Manager). In case you re curious: for best performance, this doesn t actually use D-Bus signals. Instead, this little call will setup a D-Bus object behind the scenes and register it with the Zeitgeist engine, so it can notify said object when (and only when) an event of its interest is registered. To stop receiving notifications for a template, you ll need the save the object returned by the install_monitor call:

m = zeitgeist.install_monitor(TimeRange.always(), templates, on_insert, on_delete)
zeitgeist.remove_monitor(m)

Pro Tip: You can use the Zeitgeist Explorer GUI to quickly try out different queries (note: it s still work in progress, so much funcionality is missing, but it does work somewhat). Contextual awesomeness: finding related events By now you re familiar with retrieving events and keeping them up to date. Now it s time for a little secret:

import time
from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_related_received(uris):
    print 'Related URIs:'
    for uri in uris:
        print ' - %s' % uri
 
query_templates = [Event.new_for_values(
    subject_interpretation=Interpretation.SOURCE_CODE,
    subject_uri='file:///home/rainct/Development/zeitgeist/*',
    subject_mimetype="text/x-vala")]
 
result_templates = [Event.new_for_values(
    subject_interpretation=Interpretation.WEBSITE,
    subject_manifestation=Manifestation.WEB_DATA_OBJECT)]
 
now = time.time()*1000
zeitgeist.find_related_uris_for_events(
    query_templates,
    on_related_received,
    time_range=TimeRange(now - 1000*3600*24*30*6, now),
    result_event_templates=result_templates,
    num_events=10)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

This little query example will return up to 10 websites I used at the same time as the Vala files inside my Zeitgeist directory, considering only data from the last 6 months. Nice, huh? This is an experimental feature, and it doesn t work well when operating on big inputs, so it s usually better to use the find_related_uris_for_uris variant (which replaces the first query_templates parameter with a list of URIs). Advanced searching: the FTS extension Some people think prefix searches aren t good enough for them, and this is why the Zeitgeist engine ships by default with a FTS (Full Text Search) extension. Using the methods provided by this extension you can perform more advanced queries against subjects current_uri and text properties (unlike the name may suggest, the FTS extension doesn t index the content of the files, but just the information in the event). This is exposed as zeitgeist_index_search in libzeitgeist (the C library), but unfortunately isn t currently available in the Python API. If you still need it, you ll have to fallback to pretty much using the D-Bus interface (you still get reconnection support, though). Here s an example:

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
index = zeitgeist._iface.get_extension('Index', 'index/activity')
 
query            = 'hello' # search query
time_range       = TimeRange.always()
event_templates  = []
offset           = 0
num_events       = 10
result_type      = 100 # magic number for "relevancy" (ResultType.* also work)
 
def on_reply(events, num_estimated_matches):
    print 'Got %d out of ~%d results.' % (len(events), num_estimated_matches)
    events = map(Event, events)
    for event in events:
        print ' - %s' % event.subjects[0].uri
 
def on_error(exception):
    print 'Error from FTS:', exception
 
index.Search(query, time_range, event_templates,
             offset, num_events, result_type,
             reply_handler=on_reply, error_handler=on_error)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

The most interesting thing here is the query parameter. Quoting from the C documentation:

The default boolean operator is AND. Thus the query foo bar will
be interpreted as foo AND bar. To exclude a term from the result
set prepend it with a minus sign - eg foo -bar. Phrase queries
can be done by double quoting the string "foo is a bar". You can
truncate terms by appending a *.
There are a few keys you can prefix to a term or phrase to search
within a specific set of metadata. They are used like key:value.
The keys name and title search strictly within the text field of
the event subjects. The key app searches within the application
name or description that is found in the actor attribute of the
events. Lastly you can use the site key to search within the
domain name of the subject URIs.
You can also control the results with the boolean operators AND
and OR and you may use brackets, ( and ), to control the operator
precedence.

Modifying the log So far we ve only queried Zeitgeist for information, let s get a bit more active. You can delete events from Zeitgeist with the following query:

from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_deleted(timerange):
    print 'Deleted events going from %s to %s' % (timerange[0], timerange[1])
 
event_ids = [50] # put the IDs of the events you want to delete here
 
zeitgeist.delete_events(event_ids, on_deleted)
 
# Start a mainloop
from gi.repository import GLib
GLib.MainLoop().run()

The confirmation callback will receive a timerange going from the first to the last event. If no events were deleted (because they didn t exist), you ll get (-1, -1).

And now for the interesting part. If your application involves resources (files, websites, contacts, etc.) of any sort, you ll probably want to let Zeitgeist know that you re using them. It s time that you write a data-source! We start by registering the data-source. Here we go:

import time
from gi.repository import GLib
from zeitgeist.client import ZeitgeistClient
from zeitgeist.datamodel import *
 
zeitgeist = ZeitgeistClient()
 
def on_status_changed_callback(enabled):
    """ This method will be called whenever someone enables or disables
        the data-source. """
    if enabled:
        print 'Data-source enabled and ready to send events!'
    else:
        print 'Data-source disabled; don\'t send event, they\'ll be ignored.'
 
def register():
    # Always use the same unique_id. Name and description can change
    # freely.
    unique_id = 'com.example.your.data.source'
    name = 'user visible name (may be translated)'
    description = 'user visible description (may be translated)'
 
    # Describe what sort of events will be inserted (optional)
    subject_template = Subject()
    subject_template.interpretation = Interpretation.PLAIN_TEXT_DOCUMENT
    subject_template.manifestation = Manifestation.FILE_DATA_OBJECT
    templates = []
    for interp in (Interpretation.ACCESS_EVENT, Interpretation.LEAVE_EVENT):
        event_template = Event()
        event_template.interpretation = interp
        event_template.manifestation = Manifestation.USER_ACTIVITY
        event_template.append_subject(subject_template)
        templates.append(event_template)
 
    zeitgeist.register_data_source(unique_id, name, description, templates,
                                   on_status_changed_callback)

Once that s done (and if it is enabled), we are free to send our events:

def log(title, uri, opened):
    subject = Subject.new_for_values(
        uri=uri,
        interpretation=Interpretation.PLAIN_TEXT_DOCUMENT,
        manifestation=Manifestation.FILE_DATA_OBJECT,
        origin=GLib.path_get_dirname(uri),
        mimetype='text/plain',
        text=title)
    event = Event.new_for_values(
        timestamp=time.time()*1000,
        manifestation=Manifestation.USER_ACTIVITY,
        actor='application://your_application_name.desktop',
        subjects=[subject])
    if opened:
        event.interpretation = Interpretation.ACCESS_EVENT
    else:
        event.interpretation = Interpretation.LEAVE_EVENT
 
    def on_id_received(event_ids):
        print 'Logged %s (%d) with event id %d.' % (title, opened, event_ids[0])
 
    zeitgeist.insert_events([event], on_id_received)
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    register()
 
    log('test.txt', 'file:///tmp/test.txt', opened=True)
    log('another_file.txt', 'file:///tmp/another_file.txt', opened=True)
    log('another_file.txt', 'file:///tmp/another_file.txt', opened=False)
    log('test.txt', 'file:///tmp/test.txt', opened=False)
 
    # Start a mainloop
    GLib.MainLoop().run()

If you don t know what interpretation and manifestation your subject should have, you can use the following utility methods:

from zeitgeist.mimetypes import *
 
print get_interpretation_for_mimetype('text/plain')
print get_manifestation_for_uri('file:///tmp/test.txt')

Event better, with Zeitgeist 0.9 you can just leave the subject (but not event!) interpretation and manifestation fields empty, and they ll be guessed the same way as if you used those utility methods. Pro Tip: You can examine all registered data-sources and toggle whether they are enabled or not using the zeitgeist-data-sources-gtk.py tool. Conclusion Wow, I m impressed if you ve got this far. By now you should have quite a good idea on how to use the Zeitgeist API, and I m looking forward to seeing what you do with it in your next awesome project. If you have any problem with Zeitgeist, feel free to visit us on IRC (#zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net), or join our mailing list. We ll also be at GUADEC next week, so if you re there make sure to say hi! In case you missed them, here are some useful links:

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Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2012. Permalink License Post tags: gnome, zeitgeist

6 January 2012

Mirco Bauer: Smuxi 0.8.9 "One Giant Leap" Release

Smuxi - IRC Client

Just in time for 2012 I am very pleased to announce Smuxi 0.8.9 codenamed "One Giant Leap". During the development 56 bug reports and 33 feature requests in 593 commits were worked on making this release a major milestone of the Smuxi project. At the Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) in Berlin I was doing the final development sprint to get 0.8.9 done, which was a very intensive and refreshing experience. Here are the highlights of this release: Development Builds / Rolling Releases After the 0.8 release it became clear that a continious and short development -> test cycle is important to keep the project going quickly. At some point I have received requests if the project is dead while it was more active than ever. The lack of new releases (for about 15 months) lead to this wrong impression. Thus Smuxi can be obtained from development builds now. This includes daily builds for Debian (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid), Ubuntu (Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Oneiric, Precise) and Windows. Thanks goes to Hannes Tismer for providing the Windows autobuilder and to Canonical for the PPA autobuilder. We invite everyone to use these daily builds to keep track of the latest development of Smuxi. Issues and regressions are fixed in a very short period (usually the same day). Thanks to our users who ran development builds and reported issues which led to many bug fixes prior to this release. On the other hand one of my New Year's resolutions are to "release early, release often"

So there should be no nerd left behind...

Mac OS X support With the help of Steven McGrath (Steve[cug]) who created the initial Mac OS X installer for Smuxi we now have official support for Mac OS X. The download page contains the instructions how to obtain and install Smuxi on Mac OS X. This makes the 4th platform where Smuxi can be used on besides Windows, Linux and *BSD. For now Smuxi 0.8.9 doesn't feel as native as it could as it relies on the GTK+ port. We are looking into enhancing the experience though, just stay tuned. Chat History on Disk (Beta) The most exciting feature in this release I think are the "persistent message buffers". With this feature I could solve one of the biggest drawbacks IRC ever had: IRC does not retain any messages you have sent or received. All messages are only relayed to all users. The issue is that if you close your IRC client or even just leave a channel, all your received messages are gone. One workaround in most clients was to create text log files which then contains the chat history, but it is annoying and not user-friendly to open some text file somewhere from your disk to read the history outside of your IRC client. Now with Smuxi 0.8.9 you no longer have this issue, all chat history gets automatically written and read to a message database when you start Smuxi, join channels or open queries! As this feature is not fully stable yet it is not enabled by default. If you want to try it go to: File -> Preferences -> Interface and change "Persistency Type" from "Volatile" to "Persistent", hit OK and restart Smuxi. Now all messages are saved into the database and will automatically be shown. Click here for a screencast of this feature Jabber / XMPP Support (Beta) You probably have friends not on IRC and Twitter, say on Jabber, gTalk or Facebook? This is where the new XMPP engine of Smuxi comes into play. You can send and receive messages to/from them now! The implementation is far from complete, though. It has no buddy list for example and needs only to be treated as a technical preview of what will be coming in future Smuxi releases. Click here for a screencast of this feature

Text Interface (Alpha) This is the first release that contains a text frontend based on the STFL library. STFL is a library that uses ncurses to draw text based user interface using a markup language (like Glade for GTK+). This frontend is in early alpha state and lacks a lot of interface features and likes to crash. It is still included to attract potential developers who want to enhance this frontend. The frontend can be enabled by passing --enable-frontend-stfl to the configure script and then by executing smuxi-frontend-stfl. NetworkManager Support Everyone with a laptop knows how annoying it can be to suspend and resume when network based applications suddenly go crazy because they have lost the connection and either spew errors or take forever to get back in shape. Smuxi will now detect the network state right away with the help of the new Network Manager support. It automatically reconnects when needed right away for you. Next Generation Internet Support You can now connect to IRC servers using the IPv6 protocol Enhanced Find Group Chat Support Users had real issues to find out how to search for channels, thus Bianca Mix added a neat feature. The /list command will now simply open the Find Group Chat dialog for you. This way everyone used to IRC will find it in no time. Searching for channels on freenode wasn't working correctly, this is now fixed. Smuxi also supports the SAFELIST feature of the IRC protocol now which allows to retrieve a full channel list and do client side search which makes consecutive searches much faster. Enhanced Windows Experience For a long time you could not use Smuxi with the latest GTK# version of 2.12.10 on Windows. The issue was that Smuxi relied on SVG support which 2.12.10 no longer had. Smuxi is no longer using SVG instead it uses pre-scaled PNG images thus it works just fine with GTK# 2.12.10 on Windows now. At the same time the issue that the maximized state of the main window was left when restoring from task bar is fixed with GTK# 2.12.10.

Screenshot of Fixed-Sys vs Consolas font

Smuxi used by default the FixedSys font on Windows to give it the typical IRC look most people are used to. Since Windows Vista there is a better console-like font available called Consolas. Smuxi will now use the Consolas font instead on Windows Vista or later. Another important enhancement is that Smuxi no longer has issues with multiple GTK+ installs on the same computer, which was getting more common with more popular ported GTK+ applications such as GIMP or Pidgin. SSL for IRC fixed IRC with SSL was only working with the default port of 6697. Thanks to Jo Shields now any port can be used with SSL. Crash Related Issues Desktop notifications could crash Smuxi in case of errors related to the notification system or an absent notification daemon. There was a chance that the crash dialog simply disappeared which made reporting bugs more difficult no longer happens. Rapid use of ctrl+w, /window close (Jimmie Elvenmark) and opening the Find Group Chat dialog on the Smuxi tab do no longer crash. Also number-only network names, /network switch freenode and GTK+ install without SVG support no longer lead into a crash. Enhanced Notice Handling Notices will no longer open query tabs for you instead it will show them on tabs you share with the person who sent it with the server tab as fallback. This also avoids ChanServ, NickServ and spammy IRCop tabs. Twitter fixes Twitter made some changes to their API which broke the Twitter support of Smuxi 0.8. This was taken care of and also a few other issues were solved allowing Smuxi 0.8.9 to work smoothly with Twitter again. Extended Keybindings Smuxi allows now to use the ctrl+tab / ctrl+shift+tab and ctrl+n / ctrl+p keys to switch tabs. The keybindings still work even with a hidden menu bar now. Smuxi Server specific highlights More interactive and much faster synchronization When connecting to a smuxi-server you had to wait till Smuxi finished the synchronization before you could use the interface. Also you could not tell how far the synchronization was and just had to wait till it was completed. With Smuxi 0.8.9 the connect just takes a few seconds and all chats are synchronized in the background with a progress bar so you can use the interface from the first moment on and know how far it is. The speed how much it takes to synchronize all chats also reduced drastictly by 400%! Click here for a screencast of this feature More background communication When using a smuxi-server the interface sometimes had load times like when opening the preferences or when using the nickname completion (Andrew Kannan). These operations are done in the background and no longer blocks the interface. Also when the communication is lost to the smuxi-server the frontend will now automatically reconnect to it in the background. Low Bandwidth Mode When it comes to mobile internet connectivity such as UMTS/HSDPA, Edge and GRPS it can be a real pain to connect to the smuxi-server as it has to transfer all the messages over that. If you just want to ask someone you know then you don't need any old messages to do that. With the "Low Bandwidth Mode" you can now connect to the smuxi-server without loading old messages which makes the connect very quick. You find this option in the engine connect dialog. Stable Protocol Initially I didn't plan to make the protocol of Smuxi stable before the 0.9 release, but as it turned out the 0.8 protocol was good enough to still use it and for that reason Smuxi 0.8.9 is still compatible with 0.8. The 0.8 protocol will see no breakages, instead the next protocol will be on-top or opt-in of the current one. This means future Smuxi versions stay compatible with it. Shutdown Command You can now shutdown the smuxi-server if you like using the /shutdown command. It it safe to use the command, it will do a clean shutdown sequence for you. For example it makes sure all messages are written to disk in the case of enabled persistent message buffers. If you have your smuxi-server daemon monitored (e.g. with runit) it can also automatically be restarted and upgraded this way. Built-in SSH Keyfile Support It is no longer needed to fiddle with the .ssh/config file or pagent to get SSH key authorization working. You can now simply tell Smuxi which SSH keyfile you want to use to connect to your smuxi-server. Updated Translations

Catalan (Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals)
Danish (Joe Hansen)
Finnish (Kalle Kaitala)
French (Cl ment Bourgeois)
German (Bianca Mix)
Italian (Vincenzo Campanella)
Portuguese (Americo Monteiro)
Spanish (Castilian) (Ricardo A. Hermosilla Carrillo)

New Translations

Chinese Simp (Dean Lee)
Slovak (Tom Vadina)
Swedish (Jimmie Elvenmark)
partially Russian (Aleksandr P)
partially Turkish (Umut Albayrak)
partially Urdu (makki)

Contributors Contributors to this release are the following people:

Mirco Bauer (497 commits)
Tuukka Hastrup (10 commits)
Bianca Mix (10 commits, translations)
Cl ment Bourgeois (8 commits, translations)
Andrius Bentkus (5 commits)
Carlos Mart n Nieto (3 commits)
Jimmie Elvenmark (3 commits, translations)
Hannes Tismer (1 commit)
Jonathan Pryor (1 commit)
Jo Shields (1 commit)
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (translations)
Dean Lee (translations)
Aleksandr P (translations)
Americo Monteiro (translations)
Andrew Kannan (translations)
Joe Hansen (translations)
Kalle Kaitala (translations)
makki (translations)
Ricardo A. Hermosilla Carrillo (translations)
Tom Vadina (translations)
Umut Albayrak (translations)
Vincenzo Campanella (translations)

Thank you very much for your contributions to Smuxi! After reading this whole pile of text, head over here and grab this smexy stuff!

Posted Sun Jan 1 22:58:29 2012

21 November 2011

Siegfried Gevatter: Debian Games Team Meeting

This announcement was provided by Martin Erik Werner. I m reproducing it for Planet Ubuntu. The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join! It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26. The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you re new to the Team, say hi! Then we ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways? Next we ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more? Next up it s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done? Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET? Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games? Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there! Related posts:

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Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2011. Permalink License Post tags: Debian, games, packaging

31 December 2010

Debian News: New Debian Developers (December 2010)

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

Jonathan Wiltshire (jmw)
Michael Hanke (mih)
Sebastian Reichel (sre)
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (sgevatter)
K re Thor Olsen (kaare)
Didier Raboud (odyx)
Benjamin Drung (bdrung)

Congratulations!

The following developers have returned as Debian Developers after having retired at some time in the past:

Matt Zimmerman (mdz)
Jerome Marant (jerome)
Scott James Remnant (keybuk)

Welcome back!

25 September 2010

Siegfried Gevatter: Language Identification and it s state in Free Software

Working on a new feature for eSpeak GUI I started looking into language identification. Forcing users to manually choose the text s language is a botheration, so trying to guess it by checking which system dictionary contains the most words from the text or some other method would surely be beneficial. After a quick search I learned that it s much easier than this: it s possible to reliably determine the language based on statistic n-gram information. Ignoring the fact that now I officially hate Firefox, Chromium, OpenOffice.org and everyone else there for not implementing this and having me spend the day changing the spell-checker s language, I was left with the choice on how to use this in eSpeak GUI. The first option I found was TextCat, which is also the only library I ve found to be packaged for Debian. However, ignoring the fact that upstream isn t maintaining it any more (such a library shouldn t need too much maintainance, after all), the package declares incorrect dependencies (bug filled a month ago, no response yet) and the API is also pretty crappy (it requires a physical file indicating the location of the statistic models). Unrelated to that, I ve also found that the Catalan text samples it includes are incorrect, so the same may be true for other languages. I guess it d make sense to work on a new (and completely Unicode) language samples collection. I ve thought of using something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since this way all languages can have the same text, but being more of a legal thing it may be biased by some words being too repetitive. Looking for other alternatives to the TextCat library I ve only found the following:

TextCat (same name, different code): PHP licensed, so incompatible with GPL projects.
Mguesser (part of mnogosearch-mysql): it s a standalone executable and not a library.
SpamAssassin s TextCat.pm: also a standalone executable, this time written in Perl. Apparently they were using a fork of TextCat (the original library, not the PHP licensed one) before that.

So it looks like I ll have to start by getting a good collection of text samples I can use to generate the statistic data. Then I have several options on how to actually use it. As I see it, those are my possibilities:

Fixing libtextcat s packaging and just using that.
Taking it over as new upstream maintainer. Not my preferred option as I don t really feel like maintaining a C library at this point.
Trying to convince the maintainer of the new TextCat (with last commit January this year and a more sane API) to re-license it in a GPL-compatible way, packaging that and seeing how that one works (haven t tried it out yet).
Writing my own implementation in Python, maybe based upon this example or TextCat.pm.

Any other ideas, pointers to some library I may have missed or offers to collaborate are very welcome. Please also note that my intention in writing this post is not only to rant about there being no well-maintained ready-to-use library being available, but especially raising awareness on the topic of language identification. I d love to see this feature all around the desktop, just like (and in combination with) spell-checking, which is already omnipresent. Related posts:

11 comments
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags: language identification, Programari lliure, text categorization

28 February 2010

Siegfried Gevatter: Zeitgeist Data-Source Registry

This post is about an upcoming feature in Zeitgeist 0.3.3 and is so far only available in checkouts from trunk or our PPA. It is expected to be released within the next weeks. Some weeks ago I implemented a new feature in Zeitgeist and I figured I d drop some lines about it. I m talking about a data-source registry. You may be wondering, what the hell is that even, a data-source? . So Zeitgeist is a database, a global event log, but it doesn t do any magic indexing or monitoring by itself; the information it logs needs to come from somewhere be it applications sending it to Zeitgeist themselves, daemons, plugins for applications, etc. Any such entity is called a data-source . Having a register of all data-sources interacting with Zeitgeist provides some benefits, like for example:

Screenshot of tools/gtk/zeitgeist-data-sources-gtk.py

Prototype of a data-source management user-interface

Having a list of them. Lists are nice :).
Being able to disable data-sources from a centralized place instead of requiring each to write its own preferences dialogue.
Being able to set up a blacklist rule considering which data-source the information comes from as a condition (not implemented yet).

More details When they register, data-sources will need to provide the following information: an unique ID, a name (may be localized), a description (may be localized) and optionally a template specifying what sort of events it logs. Additionally, the last timestamp the data-source was seen by Zeitgeist, whether it is running right now and whether it is enabled will also be available. It is important to note that registration is not compulsory; while it is highly encouraged for data-sources to use it, is it still possible to anonymously insert information into Zeitgeist (for example from a shell script). The event template is also only informational, and will not be enforced by Zeitgeist at this time. Avoiding duplicates from GTK Recently Used You may know that zeitgeist-datahub provides basic support for applications which have no direct Zeitgeist support but do use GTK s RecentManager, which is not as detailed as we would like, but it is better than nothing. However, until now we had a problem: when applications had support for both, GTK s Recently Used and Zeitgeist (be it native or as an extension), it was possible for duplicate events to be inserted or other sorts of conflicts between both data-sources. Now that we have the information from the registry available, we ve been able to solve this modifying our Recently Used data-source to ignore any events concerning applications which already have another data-source logging the same types of events.

In case you don t care at all about what I m talking here and you just want to see fancy interfaces, go check this out. Related posts:

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Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags: gnome, Programari lliure, zeitgeist

29 January 2010

Siegfried Gevatter: Confession

My dear Ubuntu, I think the time has come that I make a confession. You may be wondering why I haven t spent much time with you those last months, and you have the right to know. The case is, I have another one. She s called Debian. No, it s not because of you. It s also not because of your parents; while they aren t perfect, they are great in many ways and I certainly don t want to run away from then. Just wait and let me explain this. You surely remember that I spent a week with her some time ago? Well, now that I want to join Debian s family, I decided that after all that wasn t much time to get to know here, so I gave her another chance, and with this second experience I fell in love with her unstable character. Ubuntu, you are really extraordinary, and I m still telling anyone who wants to listen about your wonders, but you just can t appease my desire for trying out new things as well as Debian does. Now, this doesn t mean we won t see each other anymore. I ll still take you with me whenever I travel, and I ll continue helping you with the household. In fact, all this wouldn t signify a big change at all, if it wasn t that at the same time I also decided to refocus most of my efforts on raising children, which is what really reduced the time I spent helping you. So, while currently I m not seeing you as much as before, I hope you all the best, and I ll still try to help you advance, be it indirectly (1, 2) or, while probably to a lesser degree, continuing with direct contributions. By the way, hello Planet Debian!

3 comments
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags:

Siegfried Gevatter: Confession

4 comments
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags: Debian, Programari lliure, Ubuntu