Month: February 2010

The Euro skeptics and pro Europeans are finally united in an opinion!

We both agree that Nigel Farage is a complete moron.

Perhaps we should put a damp rag like the one he mentions in his mouth next time he opens it?

Nigel Farage, you’re an disgrace to yourself. The European parliament is no place for personal attacks, and you aren’t fit to carry the title Member of the European Parliament. Please keep the honour to yourself and resign.

Every sensible person outside of the U.K. thinks you should. Even the Euro skeptics do. You’re an embarrassment for your country and its culture, so I hope for the people in the U.K. that they’ll kick you out of politics.

I fear you’re just playing the populist card, and that you’ll even get votes for this from other morons.

Working hard

I don’t decide about Tracker‘s release. The team of course does.

But when you look at our roadmap you notice one remaining ‘big feature’. That’s coping with modest ontology changes.

Right now if we’d make even a small ontology change all of our users would have to recreate their databases. We also don’t support restoring a backup of your metadata over a modified ontology.

This is about to change. This week I started working in a branch on supporting class and property ontology additions.

I finished it today and it appears to be working. The patches obviously need a thorough review by the other team members, and then testing of course. I invite all the contributors and people who have been testing Tracker 0.7’s releases to tryout the branch. It only supports additions, so don’t try to change properties or classes, or remove them. You can only add new ones. You might have noticed the nao:deprecated property in the ontology files? That’s what we do with deleted properties.

Anyway

Meanwhile are Martyn and Carlos working on a bugfix in the miner about duplicate entries for file resources and on a timeout for the extractor so that extraction of large or complicated documents doesn’t block the entire filesystem miner.

Jürg is working on timezone storage for xsd:dateTime fields and last few days he implemented limited support for named graphs.

By the looks of it, one would almost believe that Tracker’s first new stable release is almost ready!

Please don’t rewrite softwares (that are) written in .NET

This (super) cool .NET developer and good friend came to me at the FOSDEM bar to tell me he was confused about why during the Tracker presentation I was asking people to replace F-Spot and Banshee.

I hope I didn’t say it like that, I would never intent to say that. But I’ll review the video of the presentation as soon as Rob publishes it.

Anyway, to ensure everybody understood correctly what I did wanted to say (whether or not I did, is another question):

The call was to inspire people to reimplement or to provide different implementations of F-Spot’s and Banshee’s data backends, so that they would use an RDF store like tracker-store instead of each app its own metadata database.

I think I also mentioned Rhythmbox in the same sentence because the last thing I would want is to turn this into a .NET vs. anti-.NET debate. It just happens to be that the best GNOME softwares for photo and music management are written in .NET (and that has a good reason).

People who know me also know that I think those anti-.NET people are disruptive ignorable people. I also actively and willingly ignore them (and they should know this). I’m actually a big fan of the Mono platform.

I’ll try to ensure that I don’t create this confusion during presentations anymore.

SMASHED at FOSDEM?

This is to let Rob Taylor and David Schlesinger know that they better start organizing S.M.A.S.H.E.D.