A small resume of my FOSDEM experience…

Friday evening

Departure from Italy. The plane landed in Charlesroi airport, where we (me and Laura) take a bus for Bruxelles. Once in the city it was so late that there was no public transport, so we had to take a cab in order to reach our hotel.

Saturday

Small tour in Bruxelles. As we thought Bruxelles is a beautiful city with lot of things to see, in fact there are too many things to see for a 2 day trip! In the late morning we reached FOSDEM at the ULB university.

After a long tour across the different stands I found the KDE guys and especially Jos. I met him at the Nepomuk talk. Here I discovered that since Sebastian Trueg (author of the famous K3B burning program) was ill, Jos has taken his place. It has been a really interesting talk, that “warmed” people making them more curious about Strigi. Then it was my time. Everything went right and in the end there were many questions.

The day ended with another small walk in Bruxelles and a dinner in one typical restaurant.

Sunday

We went to FOSDEM for the last time to see Jos talk. As usual Jos made a great job and all the people liked it. After a small talk with him about some technical aspects of Strigi, we leave FOSDEM and we went for another small tour in Bruxelles.

In the early afternoon we had to take the bus for the Charlesroi airport. We came back home at 10pm with some bottles of good Belgian beer ;)

In the end

It has been a great experience, I’ll try to came back to FOSDEM the next year!

You can find my presentation in the papers section.

Short abstract:

Strigi desktop integration: how to access Strigi features.

Strigi, the fastest and smallest desktop search engine, provides fast searches and good metadata extraction capabilities. It will be used by the next KDE, but it can be easily integrated in other programs.

Long abstract:

Modern humans are using more and more data every day. Keeping data organized is becoming insufficient, so finding and filtering documents have become key tasks in modern operating systems. The traditional unix tools find, grep and locate do no longer suffice for a number of reasons: The amounts of data have grown more than data access speeds, many document formats are too complex to handle by simple tools and relations between different types of data are becoming more important for a convenient user experience. Strigi introduces a new way of looking at metadata and file formats that enables the creation of very efficient tools for improving the way users handle their data. It does so by using simple C++ code with very few dependencies.

Strigi’s features can be easily integrated by other programs using two different interfaces: socket and DBus. The last one can be considered the best choice since there are lot of DBus bindings that make possible to interact with Strigi using different programming languages. DBus inter-process communication system will be used by KDE4 and is actually used by Gnome. Moreover, DBus bindings exists for lot of programming languages. Thanks to this Strigi can be easily integrated in different window manager and inside programs written in languages different from C++.

KDE developers can also take advantage from Strigi’s JStreams: a set of classes for fast access to archive files. In fact Strigi defines a dedicated KIO Slave for JStreams, this can be easily used by other programs, making archives access faster.

This presentation will show how the current Strigi clients interact with the daemon, how to communicate with Strigi and, most important of all, how other projects can benefit too accessing Strigi.

I just tried out Avant Window Navigator for the first time, after seeing Neil’s latest blog entry. It’s pretty slick, and worth trying if you have xgl/aiglx/whatever. I also wrote a Banshee plugin which makes the current track cover appear in the dock.

You can get the plugin here. Just drop the dll into ~/.gnome2/banshee/plugins.

Contiue to investigate the layout behavior when the text doesn't snap to grid.

For East Asian text, not more than one Asian character is displayed within a signle cell. The space between two Asian characters is (grid width - font height)

For Western text, The space between two Western characters is (grid width - font height)/2.

The following diagram illustrates this algorithm in brief.



Certainly, it just specifies what happens if grid width is greater than font height.

"Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" --- This is what a large internet company says about their free mail accounts.

But actually what does happen when all space is actually used up? Since I am subscribed to some high volume mailing lists with my mail account from this large internet company it happened to me already sometimes that the account was almost full. To prevent trouble I just deleted some old mails whenever this occurred to happen. Then a colleague told me that what I am doing does not make any sense because he claimed to know that the account can just be filled up further and further, even more than 100%. That sounded strange to me but seemed to be actually an interesting question.

So this is what I did when this happened again for my account last weekend: Nothing. I just waited to see what will happen. Actually he was true in the sense that nothing happened. But not about the results. Actually I suddenly got much less mail to that account. This seemed to be somewhat suspicious to me and I sent a test mail from another mail account to my own mail account from this large internet company. The mail was sent without an error. The mail never reached my mail account from this large internet company. Neither the sender nor the receiver got any error message. The mail was just silently dropped. This is definitely not the error handling you expect from a mail provider.

So, what can we learn from this test:

1. Never trust your colleagues if they tell you some strange and fantastic stories.

2. Never use free mail accounts when you have to rely on receiving your mails.

3. Never expect people to do proper error handling for a case they are proud that it will never be needed. Titanic told this already in history.

This year I’ll go to FOSDEM 2007 edition where I’ll give a presentation regarding Strigi.

FOSDEM stands for “Free Open Source Developers European Meeting”.

This is one of the most important happenings for the open-source scene in Europe. It takes place in Bruxelles, where for two days the university if full of talks, and stands of open-source projects.

Big projects have a DevRoom, a place reserved for talks related with them. And here I came… As Strigi is related with KDE me and Jos van Oever will give two presentations in the KDE DevRoom.

I’ll give a talk with the title: “Strigi desktop integration”. I’ll talk about the different interfaces you can use for playing with Strigi. These interfaces are really easy to use, this makes possible to integrate Strigi in different projects or write some cool front-end without any hassle. Finally I’ll talk about the technologies that reside into Strigi internals. Since they’re really useful, it can be smart to use them in different situations (also when information retrieval isn’t the main goal). Here you can get more detailed informations about my talk.

As usually lot of time passed since my last post on this site. Hundred of things happened in the meantime… Going in order:

1. I took my second level degree in Computer Engineering
2. I began to work in a IT company
3. I’m going to give a presentation of strigi to fosdem It’s really hard (and honestly I don’t have enough time) to give a detailed resume of all these facts. The graduation went really fine, my teacher and the other one in the examining session liked my work and I got a good score. Obviously that gave me a great satisfaction Laughing

The other great thing is that, exactly a month later my graduation, I found a good work in a IT company. In the meantime I got lot of job interviews, and I’ve been really lucky because I had lot of choices. The main office is located in Milan, a great city near Bergamo (where I live). Since I don’t like to live in Milan (for lot of reasons), I became an outlier. So every day I take a train, the subway and a tram in order to reach work. It isn’t so hard as you could thing… I’ve lot of time to spend reading and maybe coding Wink In the end, for the last point regarding strigi and fosdem, I’ll make a dedicated post.

I just checked the Office OpenXML file format and try to find the difference between the two types of text grid.

• linesAndChars (Line and Character Grid): Specifies that the parent section shall have both the additional line pitch and character pitch added to each line and character within it (as specified on the docGrid element (§2.6.5)) in order to maintain a specific number of lines per page and characters per line. When this value is set, the input specified via the user interface may be allowed in exact number of line/character pitch units.
• snapToChars (Character Grid Only) : Specifies that the parent section shall have both the additional line pitch and character pitch added to each line and character within it (as specified on the docGrid element (§2.6.5)) in order to maintain a specific number of lines per page and characters per line.When this value is set, the input specified via the user interface may be restricted to the number of lines per page and characters per line, with the consumer or producer translating this information based on the current font data to get the resulting line and character pitch values

OpenXML file format just specifies the difference of the user interface between these two types of text grid, while it doesn't piont out the difference of the layout behavior, especially for the layout behavior of Asian text and Webtern Text.

It seems that the author of the specification doen't know the essential difference between these two types of text grid. :-)
Currently, I am investigating the Document Grid specified in CSS3 mensioned by Florian.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#document-grid

Sometimes it's a strange thing with academic conferences and the publishing of the proceedings. First people pay money (the conference fee) to be allowed publishing something there. Then they pay again by ordering the proceedings for their local university libraries. Finally they blame the big conference organizers that everything is so expensive but they still insist on publishing at the most expensive conferences and reading only papers submitted there because they claim that they are on the highest academic level. Aren't they actually supporting these expensive conferences that way? They could just submit their papers to cheaper conferences and thus increase the quality level there.

After all I am not that sure at all that the quality of the most expensive conferences is necessarily the best. Those conferences suffer as well from bad quality assurance during the reviewer process. Currently I have again a paper lying on my desktop where I found two mathematical errors within a very short time. One of those errors is even fundamental for the algorithm thus doing it the way it is described in the paper simply does not give useful results. I wonder why we need a review process if such fundamental errors are not caught there? It seems all the reviewers involved in the process for this papers did not really understand that part of the paper and then just accepted it because they didn't want to confess that they don't understand it.

After all this paper has good contents in general but I would have expected the reviewers either to catch these errors (at least the fundamental one) or to confess that they don't understand the content and opt-out of the review process. --- Ok, I agree that this is another dream of an ideal world...

Investigated the behavior of "Text snaps to characters grid".
* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is ture, the Asian character is centered in the single cell, while the non Asian text is centered within as many cells as required.

* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is false, the Asian character is not centered in the single cell, but what is the behavior for the non Asian text?

Below is the screenshot from MS Word


Figure 1,Text snaps to character grid

Figure 2, Specify line and character grid

It seems that there is a special behavior for non Asian text when the text doesn't snap to the character grid.
Where can I get some clues?