Zeitgeist…

As of late (in between exams, and what not…) I’ve been hacking on Zeitgeist.

There’s a lot to say about this project, both technically and otherwise! Let’s start with the latter: Zeitgeist has what probably is the friendliest set of developers I have ever met. Whether it be on IRC or in person (I had the pleasure of meeting Seif while at UDS), you will always find someone ready to help. Technically, the code base is rich and well-organised (the fact that it’s mostly written in Python helps)!

I’ve been at it for a couple of weeks now, and have managed to get a number of bug fixes and feature implementations upstream. Currently, I’m working on:

1. Random bug fixing;
2. Introducing an aggregate API;
3. Improving sqlite memory usage;
4. Designing part of the history-manager UI;
5. Allowing the user to crawl files in their home directory, generating events.

I’m quite excited about the last point. The feature will be incorporated into the history-manager, and fits a crystal clear use-case: a user who is running Zeitgeist for the first time, might, to experience the full-functionality of the project, want to insert events into Zeitgeist based on the mtime of certain files. Regarding improving sqlite memory usage, I’m looking at one of two different methods:

1. Re-starting the connection after a certain number of execute() counts;
2. Exposing a bit more of the C sqlite API into Python, namely pcache methods.

All in all, I think 0.9 is shaping up to be an awesome release… thanks to everyone who has worked on Zeitgeist so far, it’s great to be helping out!

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