The Deed Is Done

A successful (so far) WordPress upgrade. Version 2.3 seems cool enough, If you spot a problem, please let me know!

Edit: It appears that I may have spoken too soon… Some fickle behavior from plugins that used to like categories,  but I guess that was to be expected. =/

Relationships in the Desktop – Relational Desktop Search and Beagle

I’ve been working on and off on a writeup concerning the use of Beagle to build an intelligent ‘rank’ for desktop entities. Or, in short, a Ranking system (not unlike Page Rank or the like) to organize desktop search results by far more than just keyword/date. I know the writing sucks, and its not 100% complete yet. In addition, I don’t have much in terms of code to share (yet).

To summarize (for those lazybones out there) I’m thinking of utilizing fairly universal and constant relationships (Creator, Creation Date, Modification Date(s), Parent/Source, and maybe others) to recurse deep into desktop relationships. By adding relevancy to the root hit for every child it has (logarithmically decreased by recurse iteration) we can have far more accurate desktop search results when querying a simple keyword/phrase. In addition, the children of a hit could often be considered hits themselves, if found in enough ‘root’ hits.

Its a loose and patchy idea, and miles from a realistic implementation, however, thanks to the awesomeness of Lucene, comparing 2 in-index documents for textual relevancy (based on Term Frequency) is not impossible. (I have not considered the performance elements of these comparisons yet, they may be too slow to be realistic without serious optimization)

Anyways, I’m working on it in Google Docs, so you can check out the full document here. I’ll post once I’ve finished my research/planning etc.

Please, share your thoughts! This is in the ‘major brainfart’ stage, so its open to whatever from anyone, I want to hear ideas!

Technorati Tags: beagle, desktop search, lucene, search rank, gnome, mono

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Port of Mirage to Windows

So, while I’m at work, I tend to have some sort of music going on in the background, since I don’t have my whole personal library available (at least, not yet), I’ve become a member of the streaming radio revolution. The obvious choices (for personalized stations, and music you actually want to listen too) are Pandora and Last.fm. I’ve really grown to like both services (although I have a slight preference for last.fm at the moment) the main issue for me is that I have 5,000 songs sitting on my hard drive, all artists I like, so why can’t I get the same awesome intelligent matching among those tracks?

Mirage is an implementation of a Masters thesis on music analysis, the proof of concept code was written in C# (under mono) and targeted at Linux, specifically the Banshee music player. When at home, I love Banshee, I’ve done my fair share of development work on it, and always have a fresh svn checkout of it to see whats new. However, work is on a Windows machine, and I want this cool nifty awesomeness their as well. As a result, I have embarked upon a port of the Mirage library, as well as the creation of an iTunes plugin to make this code useful

Since I figured some other people might be interested in this I made a project at Google Code.  There’s not much their yet, just some clumsy stabs at working with Visual Studio (I’m using the 2008 Beta 2… its ‘free’ as in Beer). Anyways, I’ve jotted down some erratic thoughts as to possible goals/design choices.

The current installer should run fine if you have iTunes installed, and parse mp3 and aac files fine. (sorry 32 bit only at the moment) However, I really need to do some more investigation before I’ll know if I’m passing the right data into the library.

Anyways, its cool and all kinds of fun to start using COM If anyone has experience with windows ports and wants to lend a hand or some advice, its all more than welcome.

Technorati Tags: c#, music analysis, smart playlist, iTunes, last.fm , pandora, mono, mirage

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Updated Beagle Packages for Gutsy Available

Beagle support in Ubuntu has been less than stellar up until this point (across all releases), and unfortunately, the best that we can really hope for in the immediate future is acceptable. This is mostly because only a few of Beagle’s developers are running Ubuntu, and accurately reproducing common errors is difficult. To top this all off, the defacto Ubuntu contact at this point is me, and I haven’t had the available time to really track down some of the more difficult bugs.

However, this problem reached an all time low when the beagle source package stopped building in Gutsy. This spurred us into action (our urgency increasing as we realized how close Gutsy was to shipping) and as a result there exist updated Ubuntu Gutsy packages (based upon the new 0.2.18 bugfix release of Beagle) available for testing. Thanks to Launchpads new super-awesome Personal Package Archive system, you only need to add the following sources, or download from the corresponding link. (NOTE! the versioning of these debs will not force an update if they are accepted into main, you will need to reinstall should they be accepted at their current version number!)

deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main 

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main 

Please report bugs with these packages either to Beagle in launchpad or the dashboard-hackers mailing list. The more feedback we get in the next few days the better the chance that Ubuntu Gutsy will ship a solid Beagle.  

 

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, beagle, desktop search, mono, C#, launchpad, debian, ppa, gutsy, gnome