Beagle

Sorry for the downtime this afternoon, had some php problems, luckily, sorting them out seemed to fix some other underlying issue, and the site is far more responsive. I hope no planets or readers got spammed in my attempts to fix everything!

So the past few weeks have seen me getting more and more frustrated with the performance lockups in Feisty. As a developer who’s been running it for several months now, I can say I’m very tolerant and never upset, just try my best to help, mostly by ... [More] just finding my own solution. So cruft and buildup is inevitable, lots of random libraries compiled out of the packaging system to get something working last minute, and I know my kernel is a wreck, as its seen more than a few major upgrades. However, when I started to read benchmarks where Feisty was taking a significant beating in startup times, I started to get concerned. I agree with the reasoning that dropping the heavily optimized kernels was a good idea, I had stopped using them a bit before, due to my own stability problems. Anyways, this prompted me to make good use of my 500 GB external drive, and I am backing up everything as I speak, then doing an all-out optimization of my system with no regards to consequence (just for some numbers/fun ) and then installing the beta fresh (on a LVM’ed hard drive). I hope to have something of a comprehensive optimization guide for Ubuntu after this, but whats most likely going to happen is I get ansey for the new Feisty and LVM However, as I started my quest for a meaner and leaner Gnome/Ubuntu harmony, I trudged through the debates on prelinks, preloads, and readaheads (do what you will, nothing fantastic either way for me). But the first thing that truly changed my day to day desktop experience and in an incredibly positive way was Swiftfox. Its nothing revolutionary in terms of ideas, its just done well. Swiftfox really isn’t even a separate distribution of Firefox, its almost the exact same code, just with highly optimized releases for each processor. My initial thoughts were that it was going to be worthless, and maybe for your processor, it is, but with the Core Duo, its a world of difference. At first I assumed it was placebo, or something else I had done, but when my benchmarks showed no real differences anywhere else, Swiftfox outpaced Firefox, by a lot. Just for fun, I have a few links below for rough web rendering performance benchmarks, make of them what you will, but let me say, drop your composting manager first, both beryl and compiz hated me when I tried, its too many rapid refreshes. http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php http://www.24fun.com/downloadcenter/benchjs/benchjs.html Feel free to share your times, either way, I’m interested to know if this was a ‘My Firefox was so messed up’ or if Swiftfox is truly that awesome nerd inside that drives the speed of software. Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, swiftfox, ubuntu, gnome, linux, optimize, speed Powered by ScribeFire. [Less]

Last week I checked in code to Beagle which lets application developers set additional metadata on already indexed files, which I first mentioned a couple of weeks ago. My hope is that applications like F-Spot (with its tags) will use these APIs to ... [More] proactively index their metadata, in addition to the “old fashioned” way of Beagle pulling that information when first building its indexes. It’s pretty easy to do this from C#, C, and Python. Here’s a C# example: // Create an indexable object; these describe a document in Beagle Indexable indexable = new Indexable ("file:///home/joe/test.txt"); indexable.Type = IndexableType.PropertyChange; indexable.AddProperty (Property.NewKeyword ("mynamespace:is_awesome", "yes")); // Create a message to send to the daemon with this information. // The source tells it what index the existing "/home/joe/test.txt" document lives. IndexingServiceRequest req = new IndexingServiceRequest (); req.Source = "Files"; req.Add (indexable); // Send it (synchronously with this API) req.Send (); C is a little uglier, but still pretty easy: BeagleIndexable *indexable; BeagleProperty *prop; BeagleClient *client; BeagleIndexingServiceRequest *request; /* Create the indexable */ indexable = beagle_indexable_new ("file:///home/joe/test.txt"); beagle_indexable_set_type (indexable, BEAGLE_INDEXABLE_TYPE_PROPERTY_CHANGE); /* Add a property */ prop = beagle_property_new (BEAGLE_PROPERTY_TYPE_KEYWORD, "mynamespace:is_awesome", "yes"); beagle_indexable_add_property (indexable, prop); /* Create the request message */ request = beagle_indexing_service_request_new (); beagle_indexing_service_request_set_source (request, "Files"); beagle_indexing_service_request_add (request, indexable); /* Create a client connection to the daemon, and send the message */ client = beagle_client_new (NULL); beagle_client_send_request (client, BEAGLE_REQUEST (request), NULL); /* Bleh, a non-garbage collected language */ beagle_indexable_free (indexable); /* ...other object cleanup here... */ Python is easy too, and is based on the C API, so it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it would work. [Less]

A follow up to my earlier post. In my post last week I complained about how linux had no real torrent client that could go toe to toe with utorrent. Over the last week or so, I have been trying to follow up on all the awesome comments and suggestions ... [More] that I got from readers. I found an answer. Deluge is a Bittorrent client written in python and using libtorrent as a backend. Now, the release in Ubuntu Universe, and even its most recent 0.5 release were nothing to write home about, but the current SVN of Deluge shows serious promise. While I do *NOT* encourage users to try the SVN, as it is under active development (and I don’t want to force the project maintainer to answer a million questions about rapidly changing code) , I do feel that Deluge’s next release could match utorrent, or even surpass it! I found that while Deluge was taking a little longer to bootstrap less populated torrents, and the plugin/preference selection leaves something to be desired, Deluge is making huge progress in the speed area. Once I got torrents rolling, I found that Deluge was averaging about the same up and down as utorrent had been, and without the memory overhead of wine! In short, I thank everyone for their awesome feedback, and thanks Deluge for stepping up and filling the niche for a full-featured and fast native linux client! On a somewhat unrelated note, please consider filling out my survey on OpenID use if you haven’t already! [Less]

Miguel de Icaza has asked for some simple link help in getting Lame Blog some better Google results. I dunno if this helps at all, I don’t have a great Page Rank (I think its a 4 at the moment) so maybe its hurting, but the planets I get syndicated to do way better, so hopefully it helps.

Hey, so the 10 of you that actually visit my blog and don’t read it through a planet, you may have noticed me having some fun today. I decided that my blog was going to support OpenID, despite my hosting provider not having the needed math libraries ... [More] , so my apologies if logins aren’t as speedy as you would like. However, dependencies and the like were not the hard part of the process at all, the OpenID Wordpress Plugin doesn’t really integrate into the site unless your running Kubrik or a derivative. Luckily, there’s an easy enough solution, the OpenID API is pretty easy, and it didn’t take much to get everything (including Comments, and logging in via that link!) more or less running smoothly. On that note, don’t hesitate to nag, I hope its something people actually want to use. Its in that spirit that I have this little poll, no obligation, I was just thinking about pushing for Gnome to consider the MoinMoin plugin on live.gnome.org. Ajax Polls and Planets do not like each other! Please participate in the poll here. My last fun tidbit for the evening is actually really useful, if anyone runs a Wordpress blog, they know that its not the fastest or lightest thing in the world. But, most likely they have heard of wp-cache2, and have reached a comfortable compromise. One thing that really sucks about wp-cache2, is you can’t compress pages and use it, which means were missing out on the biggest web speedup there is. I realized this evening that you can totally utilize php’s native compression, and completely bypass the issue. If you add the following to your .htacces in the wordpress folder, your looking at a significant speedup, at least, I noticed one. php_flag zlib.output_compression on php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2 I believe the compression levels are 1-5, but don’t quote me, I’m using 2 for the moment, and I’m happy, I might do some more tweaking later though. [Less]

I love Linux, I use it all the time, my windows partition is constantly being ntfsresize’d to make room for some new (and completely pointless) project. So please believe me when I say, I mean no offense to anyone who has worked on a project I might ... [More] cite here, its just me venting a general frustration. Why is it that uTorrent is such a great bittorrent client? Even under wine, it outstrips every other client I have found for download and upload speeds, but whats more, its still running in a smaller memory footprint! Now, I’m not someone who claims that every line of open source code is holy, and that if code is developed openly it is by nature incredible, its just aggravating how often I find myself turning to wine. Now, for some things (aka the DirectX unit in my game design class )  you just know your going to use something, be it Vmware, qemu, wine, or (god forbid) actually booting into windows. but Bittorrent is ours. Its an open creation through and through, its open source, an open standard, and an important element of the open source communities infrastructure. In fact, the distribution of Linux ISO’s is one of the few mainstream legal uses….. *sigh* I know its a pointless rant, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that the open source world would hold the key to the fastest, lightest, and most reliable bittorrent client? I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking the open source clients, they’re solid, generally reliable, and never a major pain to use, but no one really offers what utorrent does. Its a silly and pointless ramble, and I’m open to thoughts, questions, or ideas, so fire away Oh, and one last thing, can I just give Wine some incredible, huge, and mad props for the past few months have been big, and the hardwork shows, many thanks. [Less]

Beagle has once again been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program. The GSoC program is a wonderful way to expose people to the beauty of the open source development model and bring new blood into software projects. For our part, we’ve set ... [More] up a page on the wiki describing how to apply and listing ideas for potential applicants. The application process is not very long this year, so you only have until March 24th to apply. Get cracking! [Less]

Google Docs as a Blog Editor As a user of writely.com far before that whole Google purchase, I was tentative about the move, but also excited (as Google generally seems to have the whole Web-App thing down cold.) during the general crazy nature of ... [More] school and a wireless card that had horrible linux support until 2.6.20 (many a thanks to the fellows over at the bcm43xx project ) a web based solution wasn’t really practical, but given a recent group project where collaboration was a big thing, I gave it another try, and as a collaborative outline/scratch sheet, it was fantastic. Given the scientific nature of the project, and the massive amount of math to be displayed/edited for the final report, OpenOffice.org had that honor, but Google Docs won some points with me for general usability. After noticing the Collaborate button, next came Publish. The ability to post to a blog seemed pretty nifty, and Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor constantly gives me headaches, as it never seems to display properly with my theme (maybe I just use a crappy theme, but I’ve shoved way to many of my own hacks in there, and its probably not gonna change super-soon). Recently Flock has been my blogger of choice given its other awesome blog-conducive features, and generally awesome layout, but its still based on Firefox 1.5, and as such suffers from a spell check that I have to run to use, which is a silly, but major pain for a horrid speller like me. I think a 2.0 based version is soon, but its enough for me to hold flock off as a primary browser, and as such, it loses potential as a blogging editor. Unfortunately pretty much every other open source blog editor is either lacking in features (like tagging/pingbacks/accurate rendering of HTML) or so buggy that its not worth the trouble. So here I am, slamming out a quickie blog post in Google Docs, composition has gone great, its easy to use, surprisingly robust, especially in some areas (like key bindings) where I didn’t expect a webapp to do such a nice job. In addition, while I was setting up my blog, I learned that Google Docs supports categories (not the easiest system, as you do have to leave the editor to tag the document, but it can happen, so that’s cool.) So far my two main issues with most editors have been met with a simple grace I’ve almost come to expect from Google. Now the fun part, I’m going to post this to see how Google does with the formatting component, so if you see this, and their is nothing below, I’m just writing, give me a few minutes, and I’ll catch up. Update: Wow, not a half bad job! It seems to do fine, and supports my theme well (I guess the Planets are another test, but I’m not gonna wait for them ). All said and done, Google did a nice job it seems. I know I didn’t try anything wild, but here are two sweet screenshots, one in Google Docs, and one on my Blog, since it all seemed to go nicely. So see for yourself. One thing I feel Google kinda screwed themselves up on, is that I was forced to upload these photos to Google, I gladly would have hosted them or pawned them off on Flickr, but Google had no (visible to me at least) way of doing that through the interface (which is kinda the point). So they just added some pain to their servers, and whats worse, I’m way to lazy to thumbnail my own screenshots. (sorry!) I always just take that small size from Flickr…. Anyways, formatting issues anywhere else, or generally noticed, please post a comment, I promise I listen, and to all 10 people who read this, I would prefer if you could actually read it without hurting yourself. [Less]

Hey, So I felt like giving Planet Beagle some random-junk-on-the-side-of-my-blog love, so this little guy was created, make of him what you will, but know I’m no artist. However, a small problem, we have no SVG’s or any other source-type format of ... [More] the new Beagle Logo, we still ship the old one in our tarball, if someone knows where one is, I’d like to do some general random art/junk creation. So yeah, I know its a little big, feel free to do whatever, but I completely didn’t think about the whole saving as a small raster, can’t edit much thing… so just know I’m sorry, and feel free to improve or recreate as you see fit. Code to use on your own page: <a href="http://planetbeagle.org" title="Planet Beagle" target="_blank"><img src="http://kubasik.net/photos/beagle-planet.png" title="Planet Beagle" alt="Planet Beagle" /> </a> p.s. If anyone knows what these are actually called, I would totally benefit from knowing there real name. [Less]