With that done, and a little cheating (i.e. not really doing any parsing on the userQuery), Mikkel’s simple-ui and xesam-adaptor now talk to each other. Whoopee! There’s still a bug I can’t seem to pin down which crashes the adaptor after 2-3 searches from the UI. Will look at that soon. Instructions on taking these out for a whirl are also up.

This is what it looks like:

Well, I’ve got some code up and running. It doesn’t install anywhere yet, but does talk Xesam in it’s own limited and special way. The parser is possibly not too efficient, and definitely has trouble parsing more complex queries (ones with multiple or data elements). You can find the code is in the Gnome subversion repository.

There’s a list of outstanding issues in the top-level directory. For example, a major concern is that there isn’t much of a grouping mechanism in Beagle for queries with lots of ANDs and ORs (something like “(a and b) or c” is not possible right now).

In the initial implementation I left a lot of the smaller details hanging, I’m going about addressing these now. The set of supported metadata fields needs to be finalised before I can touch upon the set of fields returned and sorting order. The parser is also could do with some touching up (I’ve kept it as simple as possible now).

All this should push the adaptor closer to completeness.

GetProperty is supposed to return a so-called “Variant” type. Depending on the property requested, the method might return a bool, an int, a string, or even an array of strings. Now I’m not sure how the C# bindings for DBus (dbus-sharp) handle this. Intuitively, returning an ‘object’ (the class from which all types are derived) should work, but it doesn’t seem to. Will need to dig deeper, since this might just be a problem with my version of dbus-sharp (0.63, from Gentoo’s gentopia overlay), and speak to the creator of dbus-sharp (Alp Toker) about it.

It feels good to be writing C# code. The focus is purely on solving the problem at hand, rather than small, nagging, ancillary tasks. For example, setting up the Xesam listener is as simple as:

public static int Main(string[] args)
{
    Application.Init();


Connection conn = Bus.GetSessionBus();
Service xesam = new Service(conn, "org.freedesktop.xesam.searcher");
Xesam.Search search = new Xesam.Search();
xesam.RegisterObject(search, "/org/freedesktop/xesam/searcher/main");

Application.Run();

return 0;


}

Many thanks to jonp and mdx4ever on #mono for their patience with all my n00b questions. :-)

Fun, fun, fun! Good night!

I will be working on Beagle, an uber-cool desktop search tool. The idea behind such a tool is that most of us today work with a massive amount of diverse information everyday. Often we find ourselves trying to remember the answers to questions like “where’d I put that email about …”, “what was that site I saw on …”, “what was that phone number X gave me on IM”, and “where the !@#$ did I put that file …”. Beagle tracks all this and more information, and makes is very simple for you to find. If you haven’t used it, or a similar tool, I highly recommend it, especially if you do a lot of work on your computer.

I’ve posted more details on what I’ll be working on, and why at http://beagle-project.org/BeagleXesam

Phew! Comments, feedback welcome.

Personally, this is great for me, having a focused task to work on and being able to contribute to an open source project. I’m also excited about working with Mono/C#. This might seem strange, given my reservations about a Microsoft-controlled platform. You have to see the code to understand how much cleaner Beagle looks than an equivalent C/C++ implementation would.

Once the semester ends (2 weeks), I will dive into the code and familiarise myself with it.

Update: It seems that I forgot one thing. :D

Time I read Slaughterhouse 5. Currently on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Time, it is short, as the semester end nears.

And it appears that I will be busy this summer.

Not much else that is spectacularly worthy of reporting. Now to read about routing protocols in mobile, wireless, ad-hoc networks and associated security concerns.