Software I’m loving right now
I thought I'd pimp some software that I'm really digging right now:
Beagle is one of a handful (F-Spot and Tomboy, which I'll discuss later, are others) of Mono applications that were written to show off how cool Mono is.
I first saw a working copy of it when Robert Love (a very cool kernel hacker, if that's possible ;) demoed it at LCA this year. It was part of the GNOME mini-conference that ran before LCA officially started. The system utilizes ionotify, which from my understanding causes an interrupt (or something similar) when disk access is made, indicating something might have changed. When I receive a new email, or have an instant message with someone it causes something somewhere to alert Beagle. This means I open Beagle, search for "yoyoma" and it returns the results. I then get an email from someone with "yoyoma" in it and it will rock up in my Beagle search results. Instantly. That is cool.
Next up we have monopod. I like this a lot, but I don't like how it forces you to download all the available files for an RSS feed. What am I talking about? Well, an RSS feed will normally have between 10 and 30 seperate podcasts in a single RSS feed, and if it's a feed you regularly listen to then you've probably heard the stream from August 2004 and don't want to download it. The good news is that Edd plans on adding this feature in the near future, so I won't be submitting feature request bugs.
Last up is Tomboy. This little treat lets you store sticky notes. "That's not overly amazing" I hear you all thinking but it is. How often do you make a short list of things that you want to do? I know I do it all the time. This lets me organize my notes in a semi-logical fashion, and logic is good.
The downside (for all you Windows loooosers) is that you need to be running Linux for each of these apps, though I might be talking shite and they may well compile with the .Net framework. Which would make complete sense. I think I am talking shite. No, I think my good friend Jay-Dub is talking shite.
Luckily with these, if they don’t work under the .NET Framework then the applications are borked :)
Yeah once I had written that I realised how stupid it was ;)
Unless, and I’m scraping here, there’s extensions that are specific to Linux, like ionotify. The code might well compile under NT but if there’s Mono extensions that inherently rely on say the Linux EXT3 filesystems’ feature then I’m smart again.
That’s true, I thougth the same thing.
However .NET does support file system events, if I was developing somethng for Mono I think I’d like to use them for the sake of demo.
I think the Beagle idea is really cool, it’s like teh new desktop search apps out but more on teh ball I guess :) You don’t have to wait for the indexer to kick in when you’re not using the computer.
I think my next project though is to get to know Python and hopefully set the task of developing a rudimentary Bit Torrent client. Shoudl be fun.
It just makes me unhappy that Azureus is the only real option and it struggles to stay under control with 512M :( On Windows anyway :)
Well, I fully agree with your comment. :)
BTW: I visited your blog earlier today and I just wanted to congratulate you on a well presented, and informative resource .
It’s not often that I come across a web site that offers a wealth of quality. ;-)