joe shaw

I haven’t posted about the Beagle happenings lately, so here’s a rundown:

• Bera has written KAddressbook and KNotes backends, based on the ICal parser Fredrik wrote a little while back. We now have support for most of the Kontact suite. Bera says that KOrganizer (calendar) support will follow soon.
• Kevin has written a backend and filter for Don Scorgie’s awesome Labyrinth mind-mapper tool, so they show up as notes alongside your Tomboy notes.
• About a month ago, I updated and rewrote some technical documentation about Beagle. In particular, there are now tutorials on how to write Backends and Filters with lots of sample code, and a broader architecture overview document.
• Lately I’ve been spending time at optimizing Beagle in various ways. In particular, I’ve been working on improving search speed, and the first fruits of my labor are in CVS. In the past, searches for very common items could take a long time to return matches, even with a conservative cap of (say) 100 results. Now in almost all cases, the results come back blazingly fast.

  To give an example of this, with about 500,000 emails indexed a search for “gnome” would cause 153,142 matches to be found by the low-level indexer and take an abhorrent 25 seconds to process those results and return the 100 most recent. With my optimizations, that has dropped to .02 seconds. Wow. In reality, few searches have that dramatic a change, but the optimization should help everyone.

  In addition, I’ve backported a few optimization patches from the development branch of Lucene which improve search time.

• We had a Beagle BOF at the Boston GNOME Summit and had some great discussions with people there. I posted a summary of the hackfest to the GNOME devel-announce-list. Bastien hacked up a Totem video filter, which should give us even better coverage than our existing MPlayer filter. Fredrik also began the process of merging the two network search codebases from our Summer of Code projects. Hopefully he will be able to land that on a branch fairly soon.
• And of course, the usual, less glamorous bug fixes. Bera fixed one particular nasty one in the PowerPoint filter. I think the PPT filter is in pretty good shape now. It was the source of a number of 100% CPU issues, and a lot of people were helpful enough to file bugs and attach problematic files. Supporting proprietary file formats is always tricky.

Yeah! It’s been a good few weeks. I am planning on doing a Beagle release this week so everyone can enjoy the new hotness.

Also, I’ll be at the Mono Summit next week, if anyone wants to chat about Beagle or developing applications in Mono.

Update: Fixed the broken KNotes and KAddressbook links.