Category Archives: Planet FLOSS India

Software Programming/Engineering: General Dos and Don’ts

Commit Messages

Make sure you put a commit message which makes sense. It is true that a good commit message might be difficult to come up with, but please avoid messages like “Fixed bug” or “Rendering”. Which bug did you fix? What is the bug number? What is the bug about? What rendering? What did you do with rendering? Did you fix it? Did you add rendering capability? Did you remove rendering capability?

It is a good practice to add a line of commit message title, followed by a single blank line and then an optional detailed description of the change which might not be obvious. If you made a commit which alters the working or behavior of the component, you might want to explain why you took that decision in the description section of the commit message

Check In Early, Check In Often

Jeff Atwood has an excellent post on this recommendation. My personal motto is to check-in when I am done for the day and pull in the changes when I start working for the day. I have a friend whose motto was “Every morning, you wake up and do ‘svn up’, even if you haven’t brushed your teeth”.

Keep the change-set manageable

Avoid any such scenario where your commit diff is 2000 lines unless you are nuking a component or any special scenarios. If the component you are working on enters the source tree in a single commit with 4000 lines of diff after 5 days, then STOP. THINK. Is this really the correct way? Can you do it in a better way?

If your single diff contains truck load of different features with 25 files affected, then it is a exercise in frustration for anyone who is attempting to review it. Try breaking it down such that you are able to follow “Check In Early, Check In Often”.

Learning to resolve merge conflicts

To be honest, after working on git for long time, I am still have a sigh face when I encounter a merge conflict. It isn’t always easy to fix it, but don’t forget that merge conflicts do happen and you will need to deal with it even if you collaborate on a piece of software in a very smart manner.

Get your code reviewed

No one’s code is perfect. At times, we are insecure of our coding abilities and become overly protective of our code quality. It took me time to learn that code reviews are not just about improving quality of the code, but it is a great opportunity to learn. Even if you don’t have a better programmer around, get it reviewed by your peers whom you consider at par with you.

Try reviewing code, that helps too – you learn better ways of implementing features and ideas.

If someone criticizes your code, resist from taking it personally. Usually the person criticizing your code has got nothing against you.

Start Questioning

You don’t need to catch your team lead by the neck and demand the answer for choosing this method. Question yourself! If the lead of a project has chosen to use MVC pattern or decided to use Smarty as the templating engine, then don’t just take it for granted. Think over it. Try again! Why does this problem needs a MVC solution? Why does this needs to be implemented in Rails?

A spark of inquisitiveness goes a long way.

Privacy and Activity Manager (Zeitgeist) Release

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We all love privacy and we take it seriously. Most of the people whom I have met are pretty much vigilant about their data and which makes complete sense to have a tool which can you can use to fine tune your privacy settings. Till now most of our experience with Privacy Settings are related to Facebook which makes me feel like

Layman control center?

If you are a Zeitgeist user, it is pretty expected to expect a Privacy application. Yes, we have it. Today we are releasing it. The first release was a hastily assembled up together application using pygtk (gtk2) which served it’s purpose well for the time being.

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Soon it was decided in Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando that Activity Log Manager will be included in Ubuntu Precise to provide greater privacy controls to user. We improved the looks based on the design provided by the Canonical Design Team.

The interface was kept as simple as possible. This first release lacks a few things as of now and some more UI polish is pending including localization support. Both of them will land sooner.

It has been integrated in Gnome Control Panel (which works only on Ubuntu). In distributions where it cannot integrate in Control Panel, it runs as a standalone application.

Here is how it looks

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Blacklisting Applications

Files and Folder blacklisting

Activity Log Manager History tab with Icon

Activity Log Manager History tab with the Icon

The Zeitgeist Team worked on it and ported the application to gtk3 and vala in a few weeks which was a pleasure (and I finally learnt vala. Finally!)

Geeky Juice:

The release is named “Friendly Dolphin” 0.9.0 and can be downloaded from here.

This application would be made available in Ubuntu Precise soon.

If you are building it yourself and want Control Center integration, then pass –with-ccpanel to the configure script.

./configure --with-ccpanel

This would work on all the Linux distributions which derive from Ubuntu and don’t change the gnome-control-center packaging since this integration relies on a Ubuntu specific patch for control center.

Please log any bugs which you come across. To make sure that we are able to help you, please provide detailed explanation of what led to the issue. You can file your bugs here

Ubuntu Power Users reorganization – An advice to our new roletaker

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Jono founded Ubuntu Power Users group a few months back. Since then lot many things were discussed but due to being a bit late in the cycle.

Power Users Group got a fresh new start and it was advised to hand over the bigger responsibilities to James Gifford. If any of you don’t know him, he a a very young yet highly energetic community member and an active member on AskUbuntu.

James, every initiative has it’s high and low in activity. When Power Users was started there was many good discussions but now it looks like the team really needs a strong leadership. Do not be demoralized if you find that you are the only person who is working under power-users banner. There might be other people interested in contributing, but they might not feel like contributing when they find themselves alone. It is always more encouraging and consoling to find that the project you are contributing to has an active leader and your work is actually going to make a significant impact. When there is a leader who is working tirelessly, I feel more confident because even if I am not able to contribute, still there is someone who is making sure that my work will reach the wider audience.

Being a leader is tough. Being a maintainer of a software project is also very tough. It is sometimes easier to be a person who just commits code than being a maintainer. You have to make sure that all the nuts and bolts are assembled together in the correct order. Contributors might only make separate pieces, but you have the responsibly to assemble them together and make a working product. Sometimes you even have to make sure that your assembled piece works properly when it itself has to act like a nut to an even bigger piece of software.

I admit having the feeling of “Why? Why am I the only person who is working on it? Does it mean no one else is interested?”. The answer is that probably many other people might be interested, but they are just too busy in another piece of software or community which they maintain. They might be not getting enough time to contribute to the project in which I or you work.

That said, James please make sure that atleast Ubuntu Tweak is included in Ubuntu archives starting Precise. The Ubuntu developers had their own valid share of criticisms for this product, hence it is time to address the issues. I can help you in support and documentation part (on AskUbuntu).

Best of Luck

Zeitgeist User Survey 2011 Fall Results

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Hello everyone,

As I announced earlier we had opened User Survey for Zeitgeist for general feedback and assessment of our own work. It was also to help us understand what are the user requirements.

After 5 days, we have received 261 responses. Instead of going in details and boring you, I would like to keep the post as short as possible and provide detailed analysis in the next post.

Our survey contained questions related to general Zeitgeist questions, Activity Journal, Activity Log Manager, Datasources and Community aspects. Users were also asked about their distro of choice and optional name, age and Country.

Distribution demographics

The biggest share of responders were using Ubuntu – 136. 30 of them were using derivatives. I am also happy to see Fedora and Gentoo in the list.

The other 10 distros included Mandriva, Chakra, Kubuntu (which could be part of Ubuntu and it’s derivatives)

How did you come to know about Zeitgeist

Online blog/news-outlet and Planet make up a huge percent of users. It is evident that people do follow these two very closely. Notice that total does not add up to 100% as just hearing the name might not be sufficient for someone to figure out what it is.

How much do you know about Zeitgeist

Pretty much obvious conclusion. The user know what it is but most of them are not geeky. Looks like those 6 “I hacked on the codebase” was selected by contributors.

Do you know what is Zeitgeist Datasources

One half of my brain says “Teach them what it is” and the other side says “No. Not everyone is very interested in being force taught”. Guess what? I take the central stand and will publish a short article on what all components of Zeitgeist do.

Which of these Datasources do you use?

This is a VERY VERY important chart. This tells us the adoption of datasources esp when datasources are not present in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE (AFAIK for last two). I think they are present in Gentoo and Arch.

I am really humbled that so many people like Firefox datasource even though it had suffered so much with regular xulrunner API breakage. With our new datasource which uses js-ctypes, all the API headache is gone. Gedit. Banshee and Chrome too score pretty high

Which datasources would you like to see in the near future?

I never thought Thunderbird would come out as first. My expectations were with Gnome-0shell which is actually second.

Good news is that Thunderbird datasource is in progress. Mark Jtully is working on it. Gnome-shell would is also in progress.

Since other were 76, I would like to name a few, though I would prefer a separate post for this. The number 76 has led me to make up my mind for a special treatment.

Let me list a few:

Novacut

Jason. Is that you? If yes, then contact me on IRC

git-repos

Personally my favourite too

Pidgin

Work in progress

Empathy

Telepathy plugin already present

Clementine

Even I am excited about it

KDE

Work in progress. Stay tuned for the next blog post

Heard about Activity Log Manager

Activity Log Manager is Administrative tool for Zeitgeist. You can temporarily stop logging, blacklisting certain applications from logging information, blacklisting certain mimetypes, clearing all history between time range etc. It is a handy tool. A new version is going to be out soon.

It is really sad that half of the people never heard about it. Looks like we failed at spreading the word. By the way there has only been a single release.

How much are you involved with the community?

40% of the people are users. “Nor am I interested” is not a harsh phrase. It simply means “I use so many applications and it is not possible for me to be involved in each and every community”.

15% of the respondents are eager to join the community. Probably you all can help us in testing. This is where most of the manpower is needed.

In case you have problems, where do you ask your questions?

Two-third of the people do prefer forums. Mailing lists and IRC still trump over Q&A sites. I think many people have answered this not only for problems but also for general questions.

In case you are an Ubuntu user, you can ask your question on Ask Ubuntu and tag the question with zeitgeist tag.

Are your problems related to Zeitgeist solved?

Did I tell you that this chart has boosted my morale? 70% of the people didn’t have problems with Zeitgeist. I now really guess that these people were asking general questions or discussing about zeitgeist and replied to the above question.

Whatever be the case, we still have 10% unsatisfied users from the samplespace. 10% is a significant number. Hope we can bring it down by the next survey.

Few interesting comments we received

More focus on the related items of Zeitgeist

Looks like we really lacking here. Thanks for reminding

The ability to put zeitgeist in private-mode

It is already present in Activity Log Manager

I’m a software developer and do lots of testing every day. I need a way of blocking activity from my development/testing trees

There is a “Logging Active” toggle button in Activity Log Manager

It[Activity Journal] needs to be abstracted into Unity

Isn’t it already? Probably the implementation is different. There is no journal view in Unity

It doesnt show all my files

You need more datasources. In other words we need to provide more datasources which you need to install.

It’s [Activity Journal] good, but shouldn’t we be providing this information through the UIs made available by the host OS?

It is somewhat done for Unity. Next up in Shell and Plasma. In any case none of them show the Journal view as Activity Journal

I really like being able to see what I did, and when I did it. The thumbnails for code snippets, videos, and pictures are also rather nice. Congrats on making a easy-to-use computer journal

All I can do is smile

Please integrate it into Gnome Shell if it light enough.

This is also my personal wish. It might take some time

It would be nice if these datsource plugins are included by default without the user having to do it manually. This way it just works.

This has to be done at distro level. This is something even I would love to see

A ppa would be nice.

A you wish, but remember there can be dragons

Releasing Zeitgeist Datasources 0.8.0

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One behalf of Zeitgeist Team I am happy to release zeitgeist-datasources 0.8.0

Zeitgeist Datasources are a collection of extensions/ addons/plugins which log the activities of the user and insert it in the zeitgeist engine which can be later used for lot of useful tasks. These extensions insert lots of extra events apart from the ones logged by zeitgeist-datahub
http://wiki.zeitgeist-project.com/Getting_Started

The extensions present are

Eye of GNOME
gedit
Totem
Rhythmbox
Tomboy
Chrome
Emacs
Firefox 4.0
Geany
Telepathy
Vim
XChat
Bazaar

Get the release tarball from here
https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datasources/0.8/0.8.0

Few of the extensions require Zeitgeist 0.8.0 to build.
https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.8/0.8.0

Launchpad project Page

Datasources: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datasources
Zeitgeist: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist
Libzeitgeist: https://launchpad.net/libzeitgeist
Zeitgeist Datahub: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datahub
Zeitgeist Sharp – https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp

More info about Zeitgeist

Website: http://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://wiki.zeitgeist-project.com
List: http://lists.zeitgeist-project.com

Package for Ubuntu would be available on Zeitgeist PPA. I have built it in my PPA, it needs to be tested and then copied to the Zeitgeist PPA. If you have added the PPA, then you should get the update

Android Camp Bangalore

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I got up in the morning only to find there was no electricity. Not sure if this is somewhat related to April Fool prank, but was enough to piss me off. Checked my watch – 9:30AM and the unconference is supposed to start in half an hour! I needed to get ready and travel more than 18 kms. The next one and an half hour involved running all around the house to get ready, gulping down breakfast, hunting for buses and then finally messing up with an autorickshaw driver when he started using his random number generator for determining the fare.

Finally I managed to reach the place by 11AM. The event AndroidCamp was of an un-conference style. Upon entering the first bad news I got was that I missed a session on Arduino which went excellent.

The rest of the first half session were pretty boring except one from Kashif Razzaqui. His talk was on his experience when developing apps using cross-platforms development tools like Titamium and PhoneGap. He nearly blasted off on the technologies which I think all the geeks love to do. I can see from everyone’s face that they were really enjoying his session. He pointed out how developing anything with Titanium is a total PITA. He did use some funny and amusing quotes like

Those Apple fanboys have to use objective C which cannot be even called a programming language

If Java and XML gives you a hardon, then something is really wrong.

Not sure if both of the quotes is exact as he said, but the audience did chuckle and smile at these jokes. No one at the event did a “Well Actually”

Then Kiran told us that the food van had got lost and the driver is circling the neighborhood searching for the venue. How not, even we all had so much of problems locating the venue. During that time Kashif put up a video of Android during Google IO.

After the lunch when all of us are supposed to sleep, two sessions caught everyone’s excitement. Since I was in the “Geek” room I missed the Firmware and Rooting talk in “Suits” room. Later two sessions happened in Suits room – “Android-scripting” and “Android Rants”.

The session android-scripting was taken by Sajjad ‘geohacker’ Anwar. He is the person who works on OpenStreetMap, writes python code and contributes to Ubuntu Accessibility. He explained how and when scripting can be useful using python than writing Java code. People put up points about speed, performance of this idea, all of which was answered by him. Good job.

The next session was about “Android Rants, The reluctant skeptics” by Supreeth which was basically a session to tell what all issues you have with Android. Some of the topics discussed were

Battery
Upgrades
Fragmentation
iOS and Apple as a competitor
WP7 as a competitor

I think this was the topic where people took part with utmost interest. Comments came from all the sides of the room. Supreeth had to stop them many times to make sure that the discussion did not turn unruly or offt-topic. I don’t think any aspect of mobile ecosystem was left out during this talk which includes Android, Google, Motorola, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Nook, Windows Phone 7, Nokia, Palm, HP and every other entity even remotely associated with mobile phones.

The last session was the Feedback session. This was the session where everyone ended up speaking even though I thought that only a few people might express their opinion. The thing most requested was keeping such events on weekends as getting day-off is really tough for most of the people especially when it is Friday.

All the day I kept a track of the April Fool pranks starting from cyanogen quitting Android to GNOME3 getting delayed to Google Motion. On returning home, I stumbled across one excellent-brilliant-kickass article I am Jef Spaleta by Jono Bacon. This was the day! Lastly if you didn’t notice even WordPress has a small prank (for wordpress.com hosted blogs)

VCS Wars: I have my own place

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Till date I have used many version control systems with widely ranging usage periods. There are a few which I would like to try out in the future, but that would happen when I start caring more about my VCS than the code.

The first VCS I used was SourceSafe for a very short duration, then Team Foundation. The real taste of VCS was from subversion. Then I moved to git and bzr and of late used Rational Clearcase

SourceSafe and Team Foundation

I got the pleasure of using SourceSafe once when I had to get a few files. I did it only two times as far as I remember. It was for getting some legacy code for reference as far as I can remember. Now as people who have to deal with it call it a PAIN, so I am lucky to have never dealt with it again.

Team Foundation this was my first real source control system on which I laid my hands on. I still remember the shelving capabilities and a few more features. Anyway not interested anymore.

Subversion

This was the first version control system which I used for learning. Even though it was centralized version control system, I still found it superior to TFS (probably I learnt what it was or I never tried our TFS properly). A reason why I was able to learn it was it was simpler than its brothers which were of distributed nature. Still branching is one thing which I was never able to understand properly using svn.

Last year 5 of subversion developers met and decided on the future of their baby. They came to the conclusion that by somehow putting themselves in DVCS planet would be useless. They have a place of their own. I still see subversion having the biggest foothold in corporate sector amongst all the open-source VCS/DVCS

Rational Clearcase

Probably the (or one of the) crappiest VCS/DVCS (no clue where it fits in) I have ever used till date. Just put some 20 files, each of 300 lines and hit Check-in, go for coffee, return and find that the check-in hasn’t completed. Okay fine, I exaggerated. Whatever be the case, Clearcase is alive just because it has IBM behind it and then know how to stuff their crap on enterprise sector. (Lotus Notes anyone?)

It is said that Clearcase handles binary files better than other VCS. I can find very limited use-cases for this feature. What is the advantage when it cannot handle regular text files properly?

Sadly, Clearcase also has a place of it’s own.

Mercurial

No experience till date. Used it once when I wanted the latest code of django-piston. It is used by Python (don’t contribute), Mozilla(don’t contribute there), OpenOffice (no interest in Office Suits). This sums up my experience of hg, so it’s better to keep my mouth shut on something I never used rather than quoting from external sources.

Git

Git is fast. Git is lovely. Git is wonderful. As people say “Git won the DVCS wars in 2008 and left every other DVCS high and dry”. It’s branching and merging awesomeness is unmatched. It is Fast. To me, git became so widespread due to many reasons and one of the very important one is – github. It was because of github, most of the people got a place to host their projects and share it with their friends. It is a social network for programmers.

So as powerful git is, it comes at a price. It is pretty tough to understand. If you never had any experience with any version control system, you might need to put in extra effort. The concept that multiple branches are contained in the same repository together and the concept of remotes had made me dizzy when I started using git. Till date I keep on telling people that git tracks changes and not files. This is apparently visible when you find your file in both the list of “Changes to be committed” and “Changed but not updated”.

I always held the opinion that git is a spaceship – Incredibly tough to control for people who don’t know what to do. Once you learn how to control it, its a pretty smooth journey.

So now asking the same question for git?Does it have it’s place. Yawn! Isn’t the answer obvious?

Bazaar

These days I am spending most of my time on Bazaar (next is Git as usual). The initial impressions are the it is slow (due to additional runtime costs?) It has it’s own share of problems like slowness etc which everyone talks about. You will find a lot of people using it as a punching bag. Google for it, it is useless to rehash the old thing again.

I am going to talk a bit on the good sides of Bazaar. First it has a lot of good UI tools. I mean Bazaar Explorer is really great when compared to any other Git UI tools. I know most power users like command-line, but I use Bazaar Explorer to commit as I keep a diff and commit window open side by side, look at the changes and write the commit messages. I think many more newcomers might find easier to adopt bazaar since it has better UI tools. For Git, gitk looks pathetic, giggle looks fine, but is still behind, only gitg is of the quality I expected. Still gitg can be improved a lot.

Second advantage that bazaar got is that it is easier to use. I have taught bazaar to a few of my friends and they were pretty quick to pick it up. I found that bzr adjusts better to my workflow. Since in bazaar every branch rests in a separate directory, I have found less head-banging amongst the developers.

I found that a lot of advantages of bazaar are tied with it’s launchpad integration. I have never used it outside launchpad. It would be great if someone using it on GNU Savannah might explain their experience.

We in Zeitgeist development use bazaar a lot since it is hosted on Launchpad. Me and Federico are the two people who know git pretty well (Federico is the champ). Since zeitgeist alone is nothing more than a white elephant, integration of zeitgeist in applications leads us to use git also when sending patches. There are cases when “I have many changes in the source but git diff isn’t showing anything”. Probably git has too much power and sometimes it can lead to panic. It takes time to learn and utilize the full power of git.

I still find bazaar to be a great DVCS for people who don’t have much experience using a Version control system or are not so much technical. The target audience can probably include artists too. This is why I say “Bazaar has it’s own place and trying to compete with git is useless“.

Conclusion

One of my close friend told me – DVCS is religion, never talk about it publicly. You invite wrath.

A bit of autotools bashing

A Re-Introduction to Zeitgeist

12 Replies

While the Zeitgeist team has assembled together at Aarhus, Denmark for their 2011 hackfest, I am sitting at home due to shortage of time for Visa application. This hasn’t stopped me from continuing my work and mythbusting is also a very much-needed action.

Recently I came across a post on Linux Insider in which the author has written up a post named GNOME Activity Journal: Not a Big History Buff.

Instead of screaming and accusing of spreading FUD (which isn’t a sure shot solution for every problem), I thought I might reply with the solution. Putting it nicely as a blog post might help everyone.

WARNING: This is a tl;dr post.

The post has many errors, some minor misnomer and few factual errors. I would like to clear and doubts and for some points – add more commentary.

1) Architecture and component description

The Activity Journal was first introduced as GNOME Zeitgeist. It is a tool for easily browsing and finding files on your computer. It keeps a chronological journal of all file activity and supports tagging and establishing relationships between groups of files.

Right now Gnome Activity Journal(also called simply as Activity Journal) is a separate component from Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is an umbrella term. The engine is the core component which logs events and exposes them via a DBus API. Activity Journal fetches this data from the Engine’s DBus API using the Python bindings.

Zeitgeist does not provide support for file tagging as Zeitgeist is not a file tracker. It is an event logger.

2) Logger or file search?

It is a history logger but not a true searching tool.

True. Use find command for searching files. You can search within the file if some event contains that file (like file was opened, close, modified). This functionality is provided by Zeitgeist fts extension. fts – Full text search.

3) Work of Activity Journal

Activity Journal is a tool for browsing and finding files on your computer.

Activity Journal is well.. an Activity Journal and not a file search tool.

4) Zeitgeist in GNOME3

The concept behind Zeitgeist is planned as an integral part of the upcoming release of the GNOME 3 shell.

Sadly, Zeitgeist is not a Gnome Project. Gnome-Activity-Journal was rejected in a meeting in May 2010 and was announced by Vincent Untz on Wed, 2nd June 2010. Since Activity Journal was rejected, so it did not make much sense to take in Zeitgeist engine too. Later, Seif asked whether we should apply again, but most of the team was not much interested as by that time Zeitgeist modules had not undergone any massive change which could got zeitgeist accepted in Gnome.

My take on re-application was “Don’t re-apply just for the sake of re-applying”

5) Zeitgeist and Gnome-shell

GNOME shell developers are touting this as one of the major changes in the new shell’s GUI

Citation needed!

Zeitgeist does have integration with Gnome Shell but still, any integration work takes time. Keep your fingers crossed.

6) Storage of events

The application stores your file access history in one central database for quick access. Any application can easily add its own data to the mix. But I found that not all programs are invited into this database.

Zeitgeist is written in Python and uses SQLite as database. This database is kept at $XDG_DATA_HOME/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite and can be opened with Sqliteman (at your own risk)

Yes, any application can add its own data to the daemon. These plugins in every applications are called dataproviders or datasources. Many of the dataproviders are present and most of them are packaged in Zeitgeist PPA. Rhythmbox and Banshee dataproviders are upstream.

If you see that not all files are present in the database, you should understand that those applications are not pushing their information in the daemon. A plugin/extension/addin/addon is needed for that application whose work is to push the events to the daemon.

Thirdly, events in the daemon can also be pushed passively by zeitgeist-datahub which is a zeitgeist-extension and runs along with the daemon. It pushes data from GtkRecentManager to zeitgeist daemon. So all data which is available in GtkRecentManager is also present in zeitgeist daemon provided datahub is running along with the daemon (by default it does)

Zeitgeist is not magic. Some way or the other the event has to be logged. It is logged by many way or the other. Either by datahub or explicitly by extensions. We try out best to have extensions for every application, but still it would take some more time to come up with extensions for all major applications.

7) How events can be logged?

It is certainly a better option than looking through a file manager window filtered by date. But the journal app fails to track all of my files.

Reason is as explained. Try opening a file via command line – it doesn’t show up in zeitgeist daemon since datahub cannot find that event. Those files needs to be present in GtkRecentManager.

8 ) Dataproviders

For example, I use Note Case Manager to keep all my notes and gathered snippets of information. Activity Journal shows no record that I opened the Note Case database.

Then you need a plugin for Note Case Manager. I use Tomboy and you can see that it is tracked by the Tomboy dataprovider.

9) Not everything is logged

Also, the journal ignores files opened under Wine.

Yes. Wine is not supported. It is planned but not a very high priority as most people use Wine mostly for playing Games. We have limited manpower and endless list of action-items.

10) Where are events logged?

The tracking occurs even if you do not open the journal app.

Yes. This is because Journal is just a front end. The zeitgeist engine keeps on running even if you close the Journal. The events are not logged in Journal but in engine and journal fetches the data from the engine. Hope this makes it clear.

11) Activity Journal plug-ins

The Blacklist Manager lets you add and remove items from the Zeitgeist blacklist. It, too, appears to be worthless, as you cannot actually do anything with it.

The Blacklist API in its current form is sort of useless. I admit it as I have been assigned to work on it. We have still not reached on a grand consensus on the API since it is hard to come up with a good one. I was supposed to implement in this hackfest but could not attend.

12) Availability of Journal plug-ins

So far, it seems no other plug-ins are available to download and add. The journal’s interface has no menu option to import or create plug-ins.

True. If you can think of a functionality, please file a bug against gnome-activity-journal project on Launchpad and set it to Wishlist. We can implement them if feasible.

13) Extra Dataproviders for web usage

The skimpy online documentation suggests that the journal will also track Web sites visited.

(The link is broken). It can track the websites you visited if you install the Firefox or chrome dataprovider. Right now none of them are packaged as we found it a bit tough. We are progressing towards it.

14) Pinning

I never figured out exactly what pinning a file does.

Pinning a file makes it accessible for your “Today” since people work on the stuff within the last 2-3 days which people want to keep in view. It is useful to pin stuff so that if you are not using them, they will always be visible for you.

15) Current version of Activity Journal

However, a more developed version within the GNOME 3 Shell or an improved version beyond 0.5.0.1 for the current GNOME shell might add to this app’s importance in my computing routine.

Activity Journal 0.6 is out. Download it or install it from our Zeitgeist PPA.

16) Further clarification and Ubuntu Developer Week session

Me an Seif are taking a session on Rocking with Zeitgeist during Ubuntu Developer Week. Be there if you want to ask any questions. Note down the timings: Tuesday 1st March 19:00 UTC.

Dream desktop: Slowly moving closer and closer

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This is just the tip of the iceberg. Zeitgeist holds immense possibilities as I explain others

Using Zeitgeist you can keep a log of all the files you opened with exact times, create statistics, learn your workflow and make yourself more efficient. Zeitgeist does not log only files but any activity or event like receiving calls, dropping calls, starting a track in your favorite media player. The possibilities are immense. The sky is the limit

We have many more new dataproviders including XChat. If you have patience, wait for a release or if your hand is itching, you can get them from Zeitgeist PPA

In case you face a problem, ping us on #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net or ask the question on askubuntu.com with zeitgeist as the tag.

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