Comments on: Zeitgeist Storage Awareness

By: Victor Bogado

Victor Bogado — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:49:15 +0000

Maybe the log should be stored in the device it self? If I recently edited a file on my office’s workstation and saved to the pen drive to continue working at home. I believe that the “correct” would be for Zeitgeist to figure out that I’ve recently worked on that file, even if I didn’t actually worked on it with the current computer.

This would solve the volume id, but it would open another can of worms, since pendrives usually have poor FS (FAT) and also where should those logs be stored, and how to merge them.

By: kamstrup

kamstrup — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:21:03 +0000

@Benjamin Otte: Indeed I’ve though a lot about this myself, VPN, SSH tunnels, proxies, authentications… My conclusion was that it was a quite complex problem to solve elegantly and going for the simpler “net or no-net” solution would get us to a “goo enough” solution quite fast with very little potential for bugs.

By: Benjamin Otte

Benjamin Otte — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:45:56 +0000

I wonder if “net” is good enough. Some resources on “the net” are only available sometimes. And I don’t just mean friends that are disconnected (Telepathy to the rescue?), but more importantly VPN and other private networks.
Not that I think it’s terribly important, but surely it’s a way to make your APIs more complicated and give you more stuff to think about :p

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:33:24 +0000

I’m not an expert by any means, but afaik CDDB and co use a kind of hash of the TOC to identify disks. This may be a good starting point for more info: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/DiscIDCalculation

Researching other disk catalog software may turn up solutions better suited for data disks.

Greg

By: kamstrup

kamstrup — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:03:23 +0000

@Wout: Fear not. This is indeed possible with the current approach. We can figure out which device you file was on when you interactedd with it and we can figure out which files you last interacted with on a given device.

By: Wout

Wout — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:46:04 +0000

I’m not currently a zeitgeist user but I do have an opinion, as always. Sadly I’m not a coder so I can’t do the:”Talk is cheap show me code” thingy.

I would really like storage awareness in metadata solutions, but I think there might be a better way. I’d want these type of solutions to show me where data is. Not only available data just related data. Wouldn’t it be nice if this system would show me that some documents where edited on this computer but they are not available right now. Show a disconnected icon over a document or files.

Clicking on the icon could instruct the user to insert the media or connect to a specified network.

Just my two cents

By: kamstrup

kamstrup — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:55:23 +0000

@RubenV: This is purely in Zeitgeist. Each subject URI has an associated storage medium id. We then have a ’storage’ table listing these ids and their state (available,unavilable). We then have a GIO based VolumeMonitor thingie that tracks your storage volumes and updates the ’storage’ table accordingly (using UUIDs as ids), and also a NetworkManager based monitor updating the state of the ‘net’ id of ’storage’. All we have to do is then a simple INNER JOIN on the ’storage’ table when querying the log.

By: RubenV

RubenV — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:29:56 +0000

How does this work, is this something in Zeitgeist’s code, or tracker magic?

By: Seif Lotfy

Seif Lotfy — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:57:11 +0000

ALL BOW TO THE MIGHTY KAMSTRUP