Last Monday I submitted lot of changes into Strigi’s trunk. I’ve heavily refactored some classes in order to obtain a more flexible file system notification infrastructure. Thanks to this work now it will be easier to add support for new file system notification facilities. For example, in order to add File Alteration Monitor (aka FAM) support I had to write only 576 loc (including license and documentation stuff). So, by now, Strigi supports the following file system monitoring facilities:

Maybe someone has already experimented this situation: You’re hacking on your local working copy and you want to keep it up-to-date but, since you have some uncommitted changes, git-svn rebase cannot be executed I was just thinking to write something about_ _this problem when I read a post on digikam blog. In this post Marcel proposes a workaround using a bash function. In fact there’s a “cleaner” solution, if you’re interested read the last part of my git-svn howto.

Last Saturday Linux day 2007 took place. Linux Day is an Italian manifestation that promotes Linux and FOSS. During this day different organizations (mostly Linux User Groups) arrange events with speeches, installation parties and more. Since lot of people requested it, I gave a speech about KDE 4 during the Linux day organized by my LUG (BGLug). The presentation covers the main changes and features introduced by KDE 4. I took inspiration from Troy’s “Road to KDE 4” articles (I like them really much).

In these days I’ve heard lot of rumors around Git. After reading some manual/tutorial/guide I discovered that it can be really useful, especially if you spend lot of time coding off-line (that’s my situation). This is a really small howto that describes how to work on a project versioned with svn (maybe taken from KDE repository ;) ) using git. What’re the advantages? Since Git is a distributed revision control system (while svn is a centralized one) you can perform commits, brances, merges,… on your local working dir without being connected to internet.

As I said in this previous post, Strigi’s Xesam support was half-done since XesamUserSearchLanguage wasn’t yet handled. Well, this is no longer true… ;) In these weeks I’ve been working on XesamUserSearchLanguage support. Ehm… to be honest, I’ve been fighting with Bison. But in the end I tamed the beast and now Xesam support in Strigi is full. IMHO XesamUserSearchLanguage can be considered more important than XesamQueryLanguage since common users will write queries in this way.

Yesterday morning I was quite arrived at work when Laura (my gf) called me. Something went wrong in our bathroom and water was everywhere. She closed the main water tap and I took the first train for home (yes, since I’m an outlier I take the train two times per day). Once arrived at home I performed some hacking on the guilty washing machine, checked some pipes and than took the next train for office.

Last day just after I hit the “submit” button a doubt came into my mind: “did I say everything ?” Well, the answer is “No!” In fact I forgot to tell you one of the most important things: how to have some fun with Strigi and Xesam! Actually the only way to perform XesamQueryLanguage queries with Strigi is through the strigicmd program. Strigicmd is a command-line tool shipped with Strigi. It can perform different actions like:

Since last Thursday Strigi gained XesamQueryLanguage support. This means that now is possible to process queries formulated using this syntax. But why is this important? If you aren’t able to answer the previous question probably you don’t know what is Xesam. Here’s a short definition taken from the official site: Xesam is an umbrella project with the purpose of providing unified apis and specs for desktop search- and metadata services.

Yesterday a colleague pointed me to the Simpson the movie website. One of the coolest things of it is the possibility to create your own Simpson avatar. How to resist?! :) After some clicks I made this beautiful avatar: {% img /images/avatar_simpson.jpg %} Isn’t it amazing? :D

In the last days I got an exponential grow of spam messages into the guestbook. Since drupal’s guestbook module has some problems with spam- prevention components, I’ve disabled anonymous posting. I’ll enable it again as soon as possible. BTW: I don’t know who will care about this limitation ;)