Category: condescending

Het Internet Der Crap

Ik heb in Belgische bedrijven al bugs gefiled waarbij een buffer afkomstig van een Angular HTTP POST sessie gewoon met memcpy in een stack buffer van 1024 bytes gekopieerd wordt, met uiteraard strlen op de origin buffer als size_t n parameter. Daar kwam zelfs ruzie van want de geniale programmeur vond dat dat geen bug was, omdat je de admin credentials nodig had om te reproduceren. Het probleem was dat ook zonder in te loggen de buffer tot aan de memcpy kon geraken.

Het is ook geen uitzondering om wanneer je met de strings tool op de binaries op vele routers losgaat, je gewoonweg backdoors en hardcoded passwords krijgt. Je komt programmeurs tegen die dat er gewoon ingestopt hebben. Dat vinden ze normaal. Ruwe anti-security arrogantie. En ze zijn nog trots op hun onprofessionalisme ook.

Deze tijd is dan ook niet de tijd van het Internet Der Dingen, maar wel van Het Internet Der Crap. Gemaakt door prutsers. Zelfs de backdoors zijn prutswerk.

Het is zeer erg gesteld. Ik voel me beschaamd om vele van mijn collega’s en wens mij te distantiëren.

Ik heb nog eens m’n steentje bijgedrage

Heb dit geyoutubed gisterenavond toen m’n duikclub was komen vlees op een rooster en gloeiende koolen verbranden. Oh met den Hans Teeuwen en de Theo Maassen zijn we ook aan’t lachen geweest. Na één uur de Geubels vond ik dat we ook eens andere komieken moeten laten zien aan de wereld. Duikers zijn een leutige bende. Een beetje zoals ons, neurdjes. Ik raad alle andere computermannekens aan om ook te gaan duiken. Toffe mensen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi1XwrPwz1k

Dit is niet de eerste keer dat ik dit filmpje blog. Maar ik zou graag meer Astronomers willen tegenkomen zodat we misschien effectief die planeet hier kunnen opkopen. En dan een gigantisch ruimteschip maken. Samen! Brand new world order 2.0. Or, shut the fuck up.

Daarnet nog een goed idee besproken met diene dat is blijven crashen. Ik wil hier in Rillaar toch ooit eens een zwembad zetten. Misschien moet ik er ééntje maken in de vorm van een schotel? Dan kunnen de duikers bij mij komen oefenen.

Hey guys

Have you guys stopped debating systemd like a bunch of morons already? Because I’ve been keeping myself away from the debate a bit: the amount of idiot was just too large for my mind.People who know me also know that quite a bit of idiot fits into it.

I remember when I was younger, somewhere in the beginning of the century, that we first debated ORBit-2, then Bonobo, then software foolishly written with it like Evolution, Mono (and the idea of rewriting Evolution in C#. But first we needed a development environment MonoDevelop to write it in – oh the gnomes). XFree86 and then the X.Org fork. Then Scaffolding and Anjuta. Beagle and Tracker (oh the gnomes). Rhythmbox versus Banshee (oh the gnomes). Desktop settings in gconf, then all sorts of gnome services, then having a shared mainloop implementation with Qt.

Then god knows what. Dconf, udev, gio, hal, FS monitoring: a lot of things that were silently but actually often bigger impact changes than systemd is because much much more real code had to be rewritten, not just badly written init.d-scripts. The Linux eco-system has reinvented itself several times without most people having noticed it.

Then finally D-Bus came. And yes, evil Lennart was there too. He was also one of those young guys working on stuff. I think evil evil pulseaudio by that time (thank god Lennart replaced the old utter crap we had with it). You know, working on stuff.

D-Bus’s debate began a bit like systemd’s debate: Everybody had feelings about their own IPC system being better because of this and that (most of which where really bad copies of xmms’s remote control infrastructure). It turned out that KDE got it mostly right with DCOP, so D-Bus copied a lot from it. It also opened a lot of IPC author’s eyes that message based IPC, uniform activation of services, introspection and a uniform way of defining the interface are all goddamned important things. Also other things, like tools for monitoring and debugging plus libraries for all goddamn popular programming environments and most importantly for IPC their mainloops, appeared to be really important. The uniformity between Qt/KDE and Gtk+/GNOME application’s IPC systems was quite a nice thing and a real enabler: suddenly the two worlds’ softwares could talk with each other. Without it, Tracker could not have happened on the N900 and N9. Or how do you think qt/qsparql talks with it?

Nowadays everybody who isn’t insane or has a really, really, really good reason (like awesome latency or something, although kdbus solves that too), and with exception of all Belgian Linux programmers (who for inexplicable reasons all want their own personal IPC – and then endlessly work on bridges to all other Belgian Linux programmer’s IPC systems), won’t write his own IPC system. They’ll just use D-Bus and get it over with (or they initially bridge to D-Bus, and refactor their own code away over time).

But anyway.

The D-Bus debate was among software developers. And sometimes teh morons joined. But they didn’t understand what the heck we where doing. It was easy to just keep the debate mostly technical. Besides, we had some (for them) really difficult to understand stuff to reply like “you have file descriptor passing for that”, “study it and come back”. Those who came back are now all expert D-Bus users (I btw think and/or remember that evil Lennart worked on FD passing in D-Bus).

Good times. Lot’s of debates.

But the systemd debate, not the software, the debate, is only moron.

Recently I’ve seen some people actually looking into it and learning it. And then reporting about what they learned. That’s not really moron of course. But then their blogs get morons in the comments. Morons all over the place.

Why aren’t they on their fantastic *BSD or Devuan or something already?

ps. Lennart, if you read this (I don’t think so): I don’t think you are evil. You’re super nice and fluffy. Thanks for all the fish!

Doet doet doen; soms doet het doen

Het verschil tussen doe en doet. Actief versus passief en-of omgekeerd (hoe beiden omkeerbaar zijn). (Ik vind het) Heerlijk hoe ons dialect heerlijk is. Dank aan m’n cultuur.

De dierentuin: geboortebeperking versus slachten

Michel Vandenbosch versus Dirk Draulans: ben ooit zo’n 15 jaar vegetariër geweest om vandaag tevreden te zijn over dit goed voorbereid en mooi gebalanceerd debat. Mijn dank aan de redactie van Terzake.

Ik was het eens met beide heren. Daarom was dit een waardig filosofische discussie: geboortebeperking versus het aan de leeuwen voeden van overbodige dieren plus het nut en de zin van goed gerunde dierenparken. Dat nut is me duidelijk: educatie voor de dwaze mens (z’n kinders, in de hoop dat de opvolging minder dwaas zal zijn)

Hoewel ik het eens was met beide ben ik momenteel zelf meer voor het aan de leeuwen voeden van overbodige dieren dan dat ik voor geboortebeperking van wel of niet bedreigde diersoorten ben. Dat leek me, met groot respect voor Vandenbosch’s, Draulans’ standpunt te zijn. Ethisch snapte ik Vandenbosch ook: is het niet beter om aan geboortebeperking te doen teneinde het leed van een slachting te vermijden?

Ik kies voor het standpunt van Draulans omdat dit het meeste de echte wereld nabootst. Ik vind het ook zeer goed dat het dierenpark de slachting van de giraffe aan de kinderen toonde. Want dit is de werkelijkheid. Onze kinderen moeten de werkelijkheid zien. We moeten met ons verstand de werkelijkheid nabootsen. Geen eufemisme zoals het doden van een giraffe een euthanasie noemen. Laten we onze kinders opvoeden met de werkelijkheid.

Maalwarkstrodon

It’s a mythical beast that speaks in pornographic subplots and maintains direct communication with your girlfriends every wants and desires so as better to inform you on how to best please her. It has the feet of bonzi buddy, the torso of that man who uses 1 weird trick to perfect his abs, and the arms of the scientists that hate her. Most impressively, Maalwarkstrodon has a skull made from a Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, and Propecia alloy. This beast of malware belches sexy singles from former east-bloc soviet satellite states and is cloaked in the finest fashions from paris and milan, imported directly from Fujian china.

Maalwarkstrodon is incapable of offering any less than the best deals at 80% to 90% off, and will not rest until your 2 million dollar per month work-at-home career comes to fruition and the spoils of all true nigerian royalty are delivered unto those most deserving of a kings riches.

Maalwarkstrodon will also win the malware arms race.

It’s not the despair, Laura.

I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise ‘

De Fabeltjeskrant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIWy8taP1rE

Want daarin staat precies vermeld, hoe het met de dieren is gesteld.

Please remove me from planet-gnome

Please remove me from planet-gnome: I’m nothing but trouble.

I want to create a new era for GNOME. The last few years at GNOME have created only desperation.

You guys invested heavily in Woman outreach programs and it didn’t create any meaningful innovation

You invested in …, oh right, you only invested in woman outreach programs.

I’m sorry, I wanted to make a list. But there is none. You could have invested in gnome-shell?

But also gnome-shell is by now being rightfully replaced by MATE. After several years, gnome-shell just doesn’t work.

I always understood that I’m the underdog of GNOME: the guy who the group wants to hate. That’s ok for me. Having worked on the core component of Tracker, tracker-store, you all rely on my code anyway. Please do me a great favor and rid yourself of my code: make the Tracker for gnome-shell: system() calling grep and find in a textbox which appears only if you figured out that you need to press a button with a gear icon. Perhaps always store all of the user’s documents in a public cloud storage and let google.com solve it half an hour later? Given the direction GNOME-desktop is taking; it isn’t an insane suggestion.

I need to speak up. Last time I tried using GEdit I had to fallback to using Pluma Text Editor to get any stuff done.

The so-called GNOME desktop is in an unusable state.

Voorzien

Nu de rest van het land nog

Stroomgenerator

RE: Scudraketten

Wanneer Isabel Albers iets schrijft ben ik aandachtig: wij moeten investeren in infrastructuur.

Dit creëert welvaart, distribueert efficiënt het geld en investeert in onze kinderen hun toekomst: iets wat nodig is; en waar we voor staan.

De besparingsinspanningen kunnen we beperken wat betreft investeringen in infrastructuur; we moeten ze des te meer doorvoeren wat betreft andere overheidsuitgaven.

Misschien moeten we bepaalde scudraketten lanceren? Een scudraket op de overheidsomvang zou geen slecht doen.

Een week mediastorm meemaken over hoe hard we snoeien in bepaalde overheidssectoren: laten we dat hard en ten gronde doen.

Laten we tegelijk investeren in de Belgische infrastructuur. Laten we veel investeren.

Rusland

De cultuur die heerst, leeft,  ploert en zweet op het grondgebied van Rusland zal niet verdwijnen. Zelfs niet na een nucleaire aanval tenzij die echt verschrikkelijk wreedaardig is. En dan zou ik ons verdommen dat we dat gedaan hebben zoals ik hoor te doen. Wij, Europeanen, moeten daar mee leven zoals zij met ons moeten leven.

Let’s make things better

Matthew gets that developers need good equipment.

Glade, Scaffolding (DevStudio), Scintilla & GtkSourceView, Devhelp, gnome-build and Anjuta also got it earlier.

I think with GNOME’s focus on this and a bit less on woman outreach programs; this year we could make a difference.

Luckily our code is that good that it can be reused for what is relevant today.

It’s all about what we focus on.

Can we please now go back at making software?

ps. I’ve been diving in Croatia. Trogir. It was fantastic. I have some new reserves in my mental system.

ps. Although we’re very different I have a lot of respect for your point of view, Matthew.

 

Dnsmasq’s code quality

Had to adapt dnsmasq’s code today. My god, that tiny application has a shitty code quality. I now feel bad knowing that so many systems are depending on this stuff.

Why do you need Tracker?

(Or why our project’s name wasn’t wrong after all)

First and foremost, because the Internet isn’t available everywhere all the times. To put it simple: 3G (and 4G) suck. The latency is a joke in even the most modern countries, even at the center of their capital cities. Reliable availability of The Internet simply doesn’t exist for most people. Not even after a decade of promises and billion dollar investments from advertising firms like Google. Balloons that bring The Internet everywhere? Yeah, sure.

I invite you to try a serious Google maps use-case in a Swiss tunnel. The kind of use-case the nineties Microsoft Automap Streets & Tips – like software easily managed for planning vacations and trips across Europe decades ago (without The Internet). Or how about reading the newspapers on the airplane? Technology of pre the year 1700 could do it. Today Google’s tablets & glasses can’t, because I have no reliable Internet (the flight-attendant will reliably give me a newspaper, though – go ahead, try it Sergey). And if Google installed 3G routers in those tunnels, airplanes, forests, all third world countries, seas and the truly remote areas of the planet , I could still come up with a lot more places. Everybody can. By the time the Googles of today are finished, we’ll all travel to Mars with latencies of up to an hour while Google’s data still only travels at the speed of light (that, or fix quantum entanglement to be workable and more importantly: scalable to billions of users).

It’s great that sometimes we can use Google maps, sure. But if I can’t rely on it always and everywhere, it means that in embedded: it doesn’t exist. I want my Boeing 747’s landing software to work (oh and when we land on Mars, too). Always. I want software to land us safely. Same for my car’s ABS, the subway and train’s breaking systems. I’ll probably be dead when those services don’t operate when I need them. During those moments I don’t care about Google fans and their Google HTML5 religion. Screw HTML5, JavaScript, WebSocket and 3G and thank you interrupt based real time kernels that open my airbag, stop the tram and land the airplane.

For the car industry it’s probably cheaper to provide a storage hardware upgrade when the car must be serviced, than it would be to sell your company’s soul to privacy invading Cloud  hosting services. Because in future I would like you to provide Facebook-like services in my car, as reliable as my airbag works. Without the Internet being everywhere. I want you to deliver it to me when I’m visiting Mars. And my kids … who knows what they’ll want?!

Your embedded technology needs to provide graph data about the users’ activity to services that your business wants to share the data with. I’ll illustrate this with This-is-Possible-Today use cases:

– The fridge contains no more milk. While walking the street watching his smartphone, the user opens a recipe for a meal that requires milk. When the user is at the supermarket the technology that will in future be installed on supermarket shopping carts (or his glasses) needs to show the recipe, its ingredients and highlight the fact that the fridge doesn’t contain one of the required ingredients (milk, sugar, butter). And if the user allows this, advertise different brands of milk, sugar and butter based on who paid most plus his wife’s buying habits.

– Your kid talked with a school friend on Facebook about an amusement park (De Efteling! Phantasialand!). Your wife decides that because it’s good weather this weekend, the family should (will) go to an amusement park (yes, she’s the boss. And that’s fine: you own the car – don’t worry, she’ll drive the way back so you can have your weekend nap). So the entire family gets in the (your) car and you ask your son: what amusement park shall I drive to?! Your kid opens the infotainment system at the back seat of the car and sees what he has been interested in last few weeks. After privacy authorization (or not) you as the driver of the car sees the list on the dashboard infotainment system. You select it and the navigation software of the (your) car navigates to it. What a dad! Meanwhile your front passenger seat’s infotainment system goes to the ticket ordering website of the amusement park. What a mom! Advertising related to amusement parks and ticket vending is shown. Of course! Phantasialand!

That is why you need Tracker’s Nepomuk based storage with its SPARQL querying and updating capability.

It lets your embedded appliance do what Facebook does. But in a light way, isolated (or not) from the rest of the world. You decide what happens with the data and who receives it. Allowing you to provide a trust relationship with your customers and consumers. You are the industry providing those cars, fridges and TV sets.

As a BMW driver myself, I would stop buying BMW cars as soon as I learn that BMW sells my driving habits (or whatever) to Google or Facebook (or the NSA). Today I’d trust BMW to integrate those habits into the infotainment system of my next car. IF I can trust BMW. I think that in future it’ll be the difference between succeeding and failing as a industry.

With Tracker you get the use-cases and features. But it’s not for free: you must hire brains instead of paying Google or Facebook’s marketing boys. This comes as a surprise? It has always been that way in tech: Brains and hard work, innovate. Ask Wernher von Braun. They landed on the wrong planet, but in the sixties and seventies his rockets got us to the moon.

A car is a car. A fridge is a fridge. A TV set is a TV set. They shouldn’t be Google’s or Facebook’s data mining devices. Besides, why would you give the data away? Your appliances collected it, not theirs. Talk with your customers fairly and openly on how it can and how it can’t be used.

As managers at these industries it’s up to you to solve the crisis of social features vs. privacy mining.

Kind regards, from one of the guys who developed such technology for Nokia’s N9.

Morals? Forbidding stuff?

It isn’t freedom to have to choose for Richard Stallman’s world view. It isn’t ‘freedom’ to be called immoral just because you choose another ethic. It isn’t freedom when a single person or group with a single view on morality tries to forbid you something based on just their point of view.

For example, Stallman has repeatedly said about Trusted Computing (which he in a childish way apparently calls Treacherous Computing) that it ‘should be illegal’ (that’s a quote from official FSF and GNU pages). I also recall Stallman trying to forbid blog posts about proprietary software (it was about VMWare) on planet-gnome (original thread here).

Richard Stallman and some of his followers don’t seem to understand that it isn’t necessarily moral to impose your world view, about morality, on everybody else by claiming, for example, that the other’s view ‘should be illegal’ or ‘is immoral’ (these are terms that he and some of his followers frequently use).

Firstly something should be only illegal when all procedures for making a new law in a country have been followed. In most democratic countries that means getting a majority in parliament but also getting advise from your country’s judges and from experts in the field who’ll be affected by your new law. So not just by listening and following a guy like Richard Stallman blindly. This is why I was very much against a rule for planet-gnome to forbid posts about proprietary software that uses GNOME: nor the majority of GNOME foundation members nor all experts in the field who’d be affected by that new law nor all the maintainers of planet-gnome (its judges) followed Richard’s opinion.

In this new situation it also isn’t only Richard Stallman who should be blindly followed. Ubuntu needs to take into account all stakeholders and not just Stallman and his followers.

Secondly is morality defined by a person’s own views and for a huge part by that person’s culture. ‘How we ought to live’ is (also) a question at the individual level. Not per definition answered by Richard Stallman alone. Although, sure, it can be one’s choice to strictly copy Richard’s morals. Morality is not necessarily a single option nor is it necessarily written in a single book.

For me it’s not fine when your morality includes enforcing others to copy exactly your morals. To put it in a way that Richard’s strict followers might understand: for me morality isn’t like the GPL; agreeing to some of Stallman’s morals does not mean having to puristic copy them all.

The ever growing journal problem

Current upstream situation

In Tracker‘s RDF store we journal all inserts and deletes. When we replay the journal, we replay every event that ever happened. That way you end up in precisely the same situation as when the last journal entry was appended. We use the journal also for making a backup. At restore we remove the SQLite database, put your backup file where the journal belongs, and replay it.

We also use the journal to cope with ontology changes. When an ontology change takes place for which we have no support using SQLite’s limited ALTER, we replay the journal over a new SQLite database schema. While we replay we ignore errors; some ontology changes can cause loss of data (ie. removal of a property or class).

This journal has a few problems:

  • First the obvious space problem: when you insert a lot of data and later remove it all; instead of consuming no space at all it consumes twice the amount of space for an empty database. Unless you remove the journal, you can’t get it back. It’s all textual data so even when trying really, really hard wont you consume gigabytes that way. Nowadays are typical hard drives several hundreds of gigabytes in size. But yes, it’s definitely not nice.
  • Second problem is less obvious, but far worse: your privacy. When you delete data you expect it to be gone. Especially when a lot of desktop interaction involves inserting or deleting data with Tracker. For example recently visited websites. When a user wants to permanently remove his browser history, he doesn’t want us to keep a copy of the insert and the delete of that information. With some effort it’s still retrievable. That’s not only bad, it’s a defect!

This was indeed not acceptable for Nokia’s N9. We decided to come up with an ad-hoc solution which we plan to someday replace with a permanent solution. I’ll discuss the permanent solution last.

The ad-hoc solution for the N9

For the N9 we decided to add a compile option to disable our own journal and instead use SQLite’s synchronous journaling. In this mode SQLite guarantees safe writes using fsync.

Before we didn’t use synchronous journaling of SQLite and had it replaced with our own journal for earlier features (backup, ontology change coping) but also, more importantly, because the N9’s storage hardware has a high latency on fsync: we wanted to take full control by using our own journal. Also because at first we were told it wouldn’t be possible to force-shutdown the device, and then this suddenly was again possible in some ways: we needed high performance plus we don’t want to lose your data, ever.

The storage space issue was less severe: the device’s storage capacity is huge compared to the significance of that problem. However, we did not want the privacy issue so I managed to get ourselves the right priorities for this problem before any launch of the N9.

The performance was significantly worse with SQLite’s synchronous journaling, so we implemented manual checkpointing in a background thread for our usage of SQLite. With this we have more control over when fsync happens on SQLite’s WAL journal. After some tuning we got comparable performance figures even with our high latency storage hardware.

We of course replaced the backup / restore to just use a copy of the SQLite database using SQLite’s backup API.

Above solution means that we lost an important feature: coping with certain ontology changes. It’s true that the N9 will not cope with just any ontology change, whereas upstream Tracker does cope with more kinds of ontology changes.

The solution for the N9 will be pragmatic: we won’t do any ontology changes, on any future release that is to be deployed on the phone, that we can’t cope with, unless the new ontology gets shipped alongside a new release of Tracker that is specifically adapted and tested to cope with that ontology change.

Planned permanent solution for upstream

The permanent solution will probably be one where the custom journal isn’t disabled and periodically gets truncated to have a first transaction that contains an entire copy of the SQLite database. This doesn’t completely solve the privacy issue, but we can provide an API to make the truncating happen at a specific time, wiping deleted information from the journal.

We delivered

Damned guys, we’re too shy about what we delivered. When the N900 was made public we flooded the planets with our blogs about it. And now?

I’m proud of the software on this device. It’s good. Look at what Engadget is writing about it! Amazing. We should all be proud! And yes, I know about the turbulence in Nokia-land. Deal with it, it’s part of our job. Para-commandos don’t complain that they might get shot. They just know. It’s called research and development! (I know, bad metaphor)

I don’t remember that many good reviews about even the N900, and that phone was by many of its owners seen as among the best they’ve ever owned. Now is the time to support Harmattan the same way we passionately worked on the N900 and its predecessor tablets (N810, N800 and 770). Even if the N9’s future is uncertain: who cares? It’s mostly open source! And not open source in the ‘Android way’. You know what I mean.

The N9 will be a good phone. The Harmattan software is awesome. Note that Tracker and QSparql are being used by many of its standard applications. We have always been allowed to develop Tracker the way it’s supposed to be done. Like many other similar projects: in upstream.

As for short term future I can announce that we’re going to make Michael Meeks happy by finally solving the ever growing journal problem. Michael repeatedly and rightfully complained about this to us at conferences. Thanks Michael. I’ll write about how we’ll do it, soon. We have some ideas.

We have many other plans for long term future. But let’s for now work step by step. Our software, at least what goes to Harmattan, must be rock solid and very stable from now on. Introducing a serious regression would be a catastrophe.

I’m happy because with that growing journal – problem, I can finally focus on a tough coding problem again. I don’t like bugfixing-only periods. But yeah, I have enough experience to realize that sometimes this is needed.

And now, now we’re going to fight.

Synchronizing your application’s data with Tracker’s RDF store

A few months ago we added the implicit tracker:modified property to all resources. This property is an auto-increment. It used to be that the property was incremented on ~ each SQL update-query that happens. The value is stored per resource.Synchronization in water

We are now changing this to be per transaction. A transaction in Tracker is one set of SPARQL-Update INSERT or DELETE queries. You can do inserts and deletes about multiple resources in one such sentence (a sentence can contain multiple space delimited Update queries). An exception is everything related to ontology changes. These ontology changes get the first increment as their value for tracker:modified. This is also for ontology changes that happen after the initial ontology transaction (at the first start, is this first transaction made). The exception is made for supporting future ontology changes and the possibly needed data conversions.

The per-resource tracker:modified value is useful for application’s synchronization purposes: you can test your application’s stored tracker:modified value against the always increasing (w. exception at int. overflow) Tracker’s tracker:modified value to know whether or not your version is older.

The reason why we are changing this to per-transaction is because this way we can guarantee that the value will be restored after a journal replay and/or a backup’s restore without having to store it in either the journal nor the backup. This means that we now guarantee the value being restored without having to change either the backup’s format nor the journal’s format.

Having a persistent journal we actually make a simple copy of the journal to deliver you a backup in a fast file-copy. But let this deception be known only by the people who care about the implementation. Sssht!

We’re already rotating and compressing the rotated chunks for reducing the journal size. We’re working on not journaling data that is embedded in local files this week. A re-index of that local file will re-insert the data anyway. This will significantly reduce the size of the journal too.

All quiet on the Tracker front

It has been a long time since we wrote propaganda about the Tracker project. That has a lot to do with both the holiday-season and the fact that we’re preparing for a stable release. This means that we are increasingly reluctant to new features.All quiet on the Western Front

We still made quite some progress, though. We for example ported almost everything from dbus-glib and dbus-1 to GDBus and GVariant. This was quite a work; next few weeks will be used for cleaning up and regression fixing. Jürg decided that it was more easy to simply port ~ all of tracker-store to Vala than to port tracker-store’s dbus-glib and dbus-1 C code to GDBus. This should please contributors who will now have a much more easy to understand codebase.

Tracker’s tracker-store is mostly an IPC layer above libtracker-data plus the signaling mechanism. The public libtracker-sparql is a API layer above the same private libtracker-data that protects you from doing things that you should not do. Like trying to do writes without going over the IPC layer.

This week we’re working on transient properties and adding tracker:modified to the journal and backup file. The tracker:modified property is an auto-incremented value. It’s useful for synchronization purposes. Right now when you replay the journal or restore a backup, we reset the count. This means that in between journal replays and/or backup restores you wont have the same tracker:modified values for your resources. This is what we are changing. We plan to restore the tracker:modified value during journal replay and backup-restore.

Transient properties are properties that are reset after restart of tracker-store (per Desktop session), they aren’t backed up (and therefor not restored either) and they aren’t journaled. They are useful for for example presence status of a contact.

The nice guys and girls at the QSparql team are working on a simple cursor that doesn’t do any buffering nor uses any threads. This is useful for Qt applications that want maximum performance while reading the results of a query.

Last week we introduced and ported to our newest location ontology, SLO.