Month: January 2010

FWD: [Tracker] tracker-miner-rss 0.3

This is the kind of stuff that needs a forward on the planets:

From: Roberto -MadBob- Guido

This is just an update about tracker-miner-rss effort, already mentioned in this list some time ago.

Website, SVN, Last release (0.3)

Since 0.2 we (Michele and me) have just dropped dependency from rss-glib due some limitation found, and created our own Glib-oriented feeds handling library, libgrss, starting from the code of Liferea and adding nice stuffs such as a PubSub subscriber implementation. At the moment it is shipped with tracker-miner-rss itself, in the future may be splitted so to easy usage by other developers.

Next will come integration with libchamplain to describe geographic points found in geo-rss enabled feeds, integration with libedataserver to better handle “person” rappresentation (suggestions for a better PIM-like shared library with useful objects?), and perhaps a first full-featured feed reader using Tracker as backend.

Enjoy :-)

Roberto is doing a demo on FSter at FOSDEM during our presentation. My role in the presentation will be light this year. I decided to give most of the talk away to Rob Taylor and Roberto. I will probably demo Debarshi Ray‘s Solang and if time permits his work on the Nautilus integration. Regretfully Debarshi can’t come and so he asked me to do the demo.

Solang, a photo manager

For the last few weeks has Debarshi Ray contributed to Tracker’s Nautilus plugin and worked on Solang, a photo manager that will start using Tracker’s SPARQL capability to get a language to query for metadata about the photos and the photos themselves.

Debarshi explains it all very well himself on his own blog.

We’ll probably do a lightening demo during our Tracker presentation at FOSDEM about how Solang did this integration. We’re also planning to demo the code of a few other applications that are working on integrating with Tracker’s store.

Somebody should port Solang to the next version of Maemo!

The role of media in the USA

Two posts ago I wrote that something like The Real news is quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media.

Today I found an interesting double interview on AlJazeeraEnglish by Riz Khan titled Has the mainstream media in the US replaced serious coverage with “junk news” and tabloidism?

Part 3, Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iran

Brzezinski

In the third segment of The Real News‘ interview with Dr. Brzezinski, Paul Jay asks him about Israel’s threat to bomb Iranian Nuclear facilities and the American strategy towards Iran.

Brzezinski talks about how this might force the U.S. out of the region in the short term, how it would affect the price of oil, how the U.S. would be militarily involved and how the U.S. would be alone in this. And what the fundamental consequences for Israel would be.

You can find all three parts of the interview and their transcripts here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Politics, skimming facebook

It’s Sunday so I skim Facebook a bit. I came across Lefty’s link to a 100 quotes every geek should know blog. Artwork like humor often represents a philosophy. I think this first quote on that blog is a very good meme, also for foundation boards:

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
— Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Brzezinski interview on the Afghan war

I’ve been watching The Real News for some time now. It claims to be “the real news” but the reality is that it’s fairly left-wing pro-unions most of the times. Most of their documentaries and interviews are very interesting, though. Nor do they make it difficult to filter out their own bias. It’s quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media to have something like The Real News.

This week they are interviewing Brzezinski. People who know Brzezinski, know that that’s a huge interview for them. Watch part one of the interview. Knowing The Real News, part two will probably be released in a week.

Youtube video