Months passed in silence and now you publish two news in a couple of minutes!? yep, tonight I just want to go over internet and write something here… Wink It’s time to talk about my second level thesis…

Kat

A couple of months passed since I started seeking something interesting to challenge with. I found kat, an open-source information retrieval program for KDE. If you don’t know what’s an information retrieval program you’ve just to think about a local google. It’s simply a program that let you search through your local files like google. Other information retrieval programs are beagle and google desktop. I started to study kat’s code and I also discovered that its mantainer is a nice italian guy. Unfortunately kat have some ugly problems and Roberto (the manteiner) can’t fix them because now he’s really busy. I was going to investigate over these problems for fixing them when I discovered a similar project: strigi.

Strigi

strigi is a really young project created by Jos van den Oever. It’s written in C++ using STL and other external libraries. It runs as a daemon listening over a socket. In this way you’ve just to write your custom gui using your favorite language, nice isn’t it? I’ve contacted Jos and I began to send patches and add new features to strigi, committing them straight into kde subversion repository (cool, I’m a bit excited about it :) ). Recently I added the support for the linux kernel inotify interface, an essential component for strigi.

I really prefer strigi over kat because:

• it works
• it can be run under different window manager
• in the near future it’ll run also under different OS (windows by now, maybe I’ll port it to macos)
• it’s highly under development
  

You can find more informations about strigi here.