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:

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.
 

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist is out!
2. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API
3. Zeitgeist Hackfest (II)

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

By the way, if you’re coming too and are interested in Zeitgeist, don’t forget to poke me (or Seif)!

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist since UDS
2. Zeitgeist is out!

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: fosdem, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, zeitgeist

While several sources have already propagated the good news, what doesn’t seem to be so widely known is how easy it is to get the Activity Journal running on Ubuntu. Because it is!

Installation on Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install gnome-activity-journal

Now go to Applications -> Utility -> Activity Journal and enjoy the sweetness!

Installation on other systems

Our Personal Package Archive also has packages for Ubuntu Jaunty which you can add the usual way (by adding it to System -> Administration -> Software Sources or editing your sources.list), and the same packages as for Ubuntu work for Debian Sid (to which Zeitgeist 0.3.2 and the GNOME Activity Journal will be uploaded shortly).

There may be packages for other distributions available; if you can’t find any for yours, you can do the installation by hand:

[For Zeitgeist] – Build dependencies: intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.3/0.3.2/+download/zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd zeitgeist-0.3.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

[For the GNOME Activity Journal] – Build dependencies: Python (2.5+), Python-DistUtils-Extra, intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/gnome-activity-journal/0.3/0.3.2/+download/gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

But, what is the GNOME Activity Journal?

The GNOME Activity Journal is a tool for easily browsing and finding files, contacts and other resources on your computer. Using Zeitgeist, it keeps a chronological journal of your activity and supports tagging and bookmarking (using the new Tracker 0.7) and establishing relationships between resources.

While this first release only supports basic browsing of file activities, the underlying infrastructure can do much more and you can expect the missing functionality to become available in future releases.

Related posts:

1. Another GNOME Shell post: what do you think about the window list?
2. GNOME Do – 0.8 Alpha and Docky
3. Updated Voxforge packages in Ubuntu

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

From the engine side we are implementing a new database and API which does a clean cut between what is event logging and what is repository functionality. What this means for Zeitgeist is that we won’t do annotations anymore and that the basic information Zeitgeist has about items will be about those at the time of the event – for anything else there is Tracker (I tried out the new version from git yesterday and it really rocks, it’s nothing like 0.6).

We are also implementing focus tracking and the algorithms for the fancy stuff (contextual relevancy over time, focus time of documents/applications, etc).

Blackboards saved us a lot of time. In the image: Seif Lotfy, Ivan Frade (Tracker) and Markus Korn.

The User Interface team also has some quite nice design ideas. For the non-developers out there, there’ll be something (alpha-quality!) to try out soon.

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist Hackfest
2. Zeitgeist is out!
3. Zeitgeist since UDS

2 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, Programari lliure, zeitgeist

Just a quick note to mention that tomorrow I’m leaving for Bolzano for a week, for the Zeitgeist Hackfest. I’m really looking forward to meeting all the team there!

My initial idea for this post was to write about some of the upcoming changes in the engine, as we’ve been discussing quite some improvements lately, but I’ll better leave that for after the hackfest as we’ll have a chance to go over all them again and clarify any missing chunks :). For now I’ll just say that the API will probably change quite a lot, and while I’m at it leave you with a link to a recent Status Report sent to GNOME (there’s also one for GNOME Shell, in case you care).

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist Hackfest (II)
2. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API
3. Zeitgeist Data-Source Registry

3 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, Programari lliure, zeitgeist

Here is the full changelog:

- Added compatibility with Python version 2.5.
- Removed the Storm dependency, obtaining general performance improvements.
- Removed the need for a patched PyGTK.
- Made the GtkRecentlyUser logger more robust (fixes an infinit loop on some
systems).
- Improved performance of DeleteItems and UpdateItems.
- Fixed a problem with the contents of the EventsChanged signal.
- Fixed InsertEvents to enforce "mimetype" as a required value.
- Fixed a bug where the sorting_asc=True in FindEvents would be ignored if used
together with mode="mostused" (LP: #404947).
- Highly improved caching.
- Added a "--quit" option to zeitgeist-daemon to stop any running daemon.
- General code improvements, new test cases and other minor fixes.


Additionally, it also adds the possibility to use a list of strings (instead of just a single string) as value for the “uri” and “name” filters; if used, the condition between the different values in the list is OR (so you can do, for example, "name": [u"%ubuntu%", u"%debian%"] to get all those items with either “ubuntu” or “debian” in their name).

Go get it here! (Note: Zeitgeist by itself doesn’t provide any user interface and shouldn’t be relevant to end users. However, a GTK+ interface depending on it should be available soon, followed by GNOME Shell and other products which will also use it.)

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist since UDS
2. Zeitgeist is out!
3. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API

2 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

Installation

If you use Ubuntu you can grab packages from Zeitgeits’s PPA, else get the tarball and install it (# make; make install). Once installed, start “zeitgeist-daemon” and leave it running in the background (at first it may be busy for some time going through all of your Firefox history, but after that you shouldn’t notice it).

Zeitgeist comes with a public Python module providing some convenience functions. This module makes it very easy to play with Zeitgeist from an interactive Python instance, which is something I recommend you to do while reading this post. Thanks to it, you can get access to Zeitgeist’s D-Bus interface simply doing: from zeitgeist import dbusutils; iface = dbusutils.DBusInterface().

API Examples

For brevity, I’m only going to show some examples, but not explain what every parameter used in the call stands for. You’ll need to look at the DBus API documentation to completely understand them.

Also, I’m using Python for the examples, but the same works with very little modifications in any other language (as long as it has D-Bus bindings).

iface.GetItems([u'file:///home/rainct/todo'])
Returns a dictionary with basic information about the “todo” file in my home directory; uri, text (usually the filename), mimetype, tags, whether it’s bookmarked or not, etc. The values for some keys, like “timestamp”, are empty because they are only relevant for events, which are items put into a timeline (yes, this is a bit confusing, in future versions of Zeitgeist we will clearly differentiation between events and items).

iface.FindEvents(time.time() - 24*3600, time.time(), 5, False, 'event', [])
Returns the five last events (or less, if less than five events where logged within the last twenty-four hours). If you opened the same file twice, it will have two events; to avoid this change 'event' to 'item'.

iface.FindEvents(0, 0, 10, True, 'event', [])
Returns the ten first events ever registered with Zeitgeist which happened first (the sorting is always done by timestamp, not by insertion order).

iface.FindEvents(0, 0, 2, False, 'mostused', [])
Returns the last two events for to the items (URIs) which are used the most often.

iface.FindEvents(0, 0, 0, False, 'item', [{'tags': [u'zeitgeist'], 'bookmarked': True}])
Returns all events (when there are more than one with the same URI, only the most recent of them because of the 'item' parameter) which are bookmarked and have the tag “zeitgeist”.

iface.FindEvents(0, 0, 0, False, 'item', [{'tags': [u'zeitgeist']}, {'mimetypes': ['text/x-python'], 'bookmarked': True}])
Returns all events (when there are more than one with the same URI, only the most recent of them because of the 'item' parameter) which are bookmarked and have the tag “zeitgeist”.

iface.FindEvents(0, 0, 0, False, 'item', [{'tags': [u'zeitgeist', 'engine']}, {'mimetypes': ['text/x-python'], 'bookmarked': True}])
Returns all events (without duplicated URIs) which either have the tags “zeitgeist” and “engine” or, alternatively, are Python files (determined by their mimetype) and are bookmarked.

iface.CountEvents(0, 0, 'item', [{'tags': [u'zeitgeist', 'engine']}, {'mimetypes': ['text/x-python'], 'bookmarked': True}])
Same as above, but returning only the amount of results that the previous call would yield.

iface.FindApplications(time.time() - 3600*24*30, 0, [{'mimetypes': ['text/x-python']}])
Returns the path to the .desktop files of all applications which were used to manipulate Python files within the last 30 days (eg., in my case: [u'/usr/share/applications/geany.desktop', u'/usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop' ]).

iface.GetTags(0, 0, 5, u'a%')
Returns the five most used tags which start with “a” (case insensitive) in a list of tuples containing both the tag name and the amount of times it was used.

iface.GetLastInsertionDate(u'/usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop')
Returns the timestamp of the last event related to Gedit.

iface.connect('EventsChanged', callback_function); import gobject; gobject.MainLoop.run()
Calls callback_function every time a new event is inserted into the database or an existing one is modified. The callback function receives a list containing in the first place a string representing the type of change (“added”, “modified”, “deleted”) and in second place a list containing the affected events (or, in case of deletion, only a list with the deleted URIs).

Related posts:

1. Here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1!
2. Zeitgeist is out!
3. Zeitgeist Data-Source Registry

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

«««
With great joy and excitement, the Zeitgeist Team is proud to announce Zeitgeist 0.2 codename: okidoki), the first public release of the ultimate service for event logging (yes, there was no 0.1 announcement, we are too cool for that).

Zeitgeist is an “Event Logging Framework” that provides cross application awareness of the desktop’s activities.

You worked on a file, but you cannot remember where you saved it? You visited a web page about basketball three days ago, but you cannot find the URL in your browser’s history? No problem, this is where Zeitgeist enters the scene. It knows a lot about your activities and has a feature rich D-Bus API which allows GUI applications like gnome-zeitgeist, zeitgeistfs and others to present you your activities in a readable way.

Highlights of the 0.2 release:
* SQLite backend for central information storage.
* D-Bus API with support for storing and retrieving the data (with lots of filtering options!).
* Support for logging items and events from GtkRecentManager,
Firefox, Tomboy, Evolution and Twitter. Plus plugins for Epiphany and Bazaar!

All this has been possible thanks to (in alphabetical order):
Markus Korn, Mikkel Kamstrup, Natan Yellin, Seif Lotfy and Siegfried-Angel Gevatter!

Installing Zeitgeist

To install Zeitgeist just download the tarball, extract it, and then run:
$ make
# make install
If you are using Ubuntu it’s recommended that you install the packages from our PPA. Finally, you can start the daemon, like this:
$ zeitgeist-daemon
»»»

Related posts:

1. Here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1!
2. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API
3. Zeitgeist since UDS

13 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

As planned, we split the project into the engine (Zeitgeist) and the default graphical user interface (GNOME Activity Journal), but during this time we also dropped our old database to start with a completely new structure which is way more flexible and uses less disk space than our previous one.

Not so positively, some team members wanted to try out an ORM (Storm), which from the start one I thought was a bad idea (it’s not that I can’t see the convenience for using one in certain projects, but for Zeitgeist, an engine mainly constituted by a little set of rather complex queries, I don’t really see how it can help us). Doing this -at the same time as the switch the the new database model- ended up as a pretty demotivating experience, and while we got it working at the end the result was an engine which worked slow (even with caching) and used lots of resources, so we’ve decided to go back to plain SQL.

Right now we still have a mix (we’ll probably finish quicking out the remaining Storm parts within the next weeks), but I already changed the main information request methods to SQL, thus reducing common operations from requiring up to thousands of queries to doing only a single one, doubling the speed while reducing memory usage. I hope to get further performance improvements while converting the remaining parts (for example, inserting data currently takes way more time than I’d like).

We also cleaned up the D-Bus API (it was pretty much of a mess before, just enough for the GUI to work) and added more functionality to it. However, it may still undergo substantial changes in future versions once we start making more use of the added flexibility the new database gives us (for example, for the 0.2 release we’ll probably split up tags into “user defined tags” and “automatically assigned tags”). Unrelated to this, Markus has started working at making it possible to configure and enable/disable loggers, so there’s also some cool stuff coming from this front (but nothing visible yet).

Just some random notes… You can read more about Zeitgeist at Seif’s blog, in his recent blog post “Some Zeitgeist news“, and if you have any comment you can come find us in #gnome-zeitgeist on GIMPnet . I’m now going back to work: after all, today we’re going to release Zeitgeist 0.1 (development preview)!

Related posts:

1. Here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1!
2. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API
3. Zeitgeist is out!

One comment
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist