zeitgeist team mailing list archive

[Seif Lotfy <seif@xxxxxxxxx>]

Blueprint changed by Seif Lotfy:

Whiteboard changed:
  --- seif 2010-10-27 10:28pm ---
  Lets discuss this idea.
  Do we want it as a supported extension or do we want to have in the engine. Or do we want it as a community extension? How relevant is that to our current work? How could it help Unity and others?
+ 
  --- thekorn 2010-10-28 09:09 am ---
  I like the overall idea of making it easier to query for all open/active subjects at a given timestamp. Without commenting on the code you already have in the branch which is linked to this blueprint, I think we should develop the functionality as an external/community extension first. And once everything is polished, and working well enough we should decide whether we would like to have it as an (in-zeitgeist) extension or as part of the engine API.
+ 
  --- alexlauni 2010-11-09 10:23 am ---
  Being able to get relevancy info for what is happening *now* would be fantastic. It seems like this allows an amount of projection into what the user will be doing in the near future, which is obviously immensely powerful.
+ 
  --- seif 2010-11-16 11:12 ---
  I would very much like to have the opinions of kamstrup and rainct as well as mhr3 and manish
+ 
  --- kamstrup 2010-11-17 9:37 ---
  I'm sorry, but I think this proposal is far from thought through. There are *so* many things that can go wrong when you try to match up Access and Leave events. We have been over this countless times and I've never seen a robust solution. We can try and make up for these shortcomings with all sorts of elaborate heuristics (most of which will have horrible execution times) but I don't like that too much. This is the path of black magic.
  
  Also how do you propose "So when searching stuff can be sorted by
  relevancy to the current context of work." would work technically? This
  strikes me as something that is expensive either in CPU or memory unless
  we are extraordinarily clever about it. - Not saying it's impossible,
  but that I think it will take more than just some clever SQL (read:
  lowlevel bit fiddling to implement some auxiliary structures to adapt
  Xapian/sqlite's sorting routines).
  
  A more realistic, and robust, approach is probably to make a real
  snapshot of the whole environment and put it on a timeline. Then having
  some clever routines to look up "similar environment snapshots" and do
  some time shifting analysis etc.
  
  --- seif 2010-11-17 10:05 ---
   While I know this might go wrong a bit I still think its out best solution if we assume that we get open/close events from everything. 
  The problem I am trying to solve here is "what was open at a specific timestamp". This call can be solved in on SQL call with my with the extension I am working on.
  Now as for sorting by relevancy to the current context, all I do is call find_related_uris for all the uris i get from the extension which makes it another SQL call. I know its a bit expensive but I think its worth testing and playing with at least as an extension.
  
  --- kamstrup 2010-11-17 10:41 ---
  There is some access/open and close/leave confusion in your draft that took me a bit to figure out. I think what you need to do is on startup (or lazily when the first query arrives, to not hose login time) is to run UPDATE state SET leave_timestamp = -1 WHERE leave_timestamp IS NULL.
  
  This still doesn't fix the case for long running sessions where you
  don't get leave events. I know people who have uptimes for ~1year. Your
  scheme can potentially drift very far off in that case. I'm still
  challenging your basic assumption "assume that we get open/close events
  from everything". You can prove me wrong of course :-)
  
  WRT to sorting then you have a misguiding formulation in the draft. You
  don't mean "So when searching stuff can be sorted by relevancy to the
  current context of work.". You just mean that you can look stuff up
  which is relevant in the current context.
  
  Also there is also the unsolved problem of where you actually get the
  Access/Leave events from. And libwnck is not the answer here if you want
  good results IMHO. You need support from the apps or toolkits or
  something.
  
  But all that said - nothing is stopping you from implementing this as a
  extension an putting my scepticism to shame ;-)
  
  --- seif 2010-11-17 12:34 ---
  Sorry for the confusion.
  So long running sessions might be an issue however fact is if u had something open at a specific timepoint then u cant change it. If this thing is relevant i another issue.
  
  As for the misguiding formulation, there is a difference to what I am
  suggesting and what you are. I am talking about sorting results based on
  what you have open. You are talking about a dashboard if I understood
  correctly.
  
  As for where I get the data from, lets start with "no wnck". I am
  relying on out current dataproviders who all do deliver us access/leave
  events. I know they are not much yet but I hope to have this solved in
  the near future where we will have all default ubuntu as well as GNOME
  apps covered with dataproviders.
  
  I will continue working on this as an extension, maybe if I get it
  working nicely I could convince you to add it as a main extension.

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