Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Beagle (with Kerry) is a fantastic search tool

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From Beagle‘s website,

“Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you’re looking for. Using Beagle, you can easily find: documents, emails, web history, IM/IRC conversations, source code, images, music/video files, applications and much more…”

Beagle is IMHO the best thing since slice bread (or rather since Ruby). By the way, Beagle runs under Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET architecture.

Beagle is basically a server process (called beagled) which quietly indexes all your files and a graphical client (called beagle-search) which allows you to search using keywords and boolean operators. beagle-search is a Gnome application and, as a result, does not integrate that well with KDE (which I use). I’ve found a great alternative in Kerry:

Kerry is functionally equivalent to beagle-search but is a KDE application and therefore integrates really well. I’ve bound Kerry to the ‘Pause/Break’ key on my keyboard and I can just open it by pressing that key. I really feel I’m more of a power (to the square?)-user now…

Try both and you’ll be hooked. That’s the future of computing!

PS: To install kerry (and, of course, beagle) in either x86 or x86_64 (AMD64) (K)Ubuntu (I’ve tried both), just open a console and type:

sudo aptitude install kerry

and launch kerry like any normal application (it’s in Utilities). Configure it to launch beagled everytime you log in, bound it to a nice key (I’ve used Pause/Break) and have fun ;-)

Movies we are watching today

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Here is today’s top pick:

Identity

  • Parabole Maurice – TPS Star – 8:15
  • 2003. By James Mangold. With John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet…
  • Rated 7.3/10 at IMDB: “Stranded at a desolate Nevada motel during a nasty rainstorm, ten strangers become acquainted with each other when they realize that they’re being killed off one by one.”

Lola rennt (Cours Lola. Cours)

  • Parabole Maurice – TPS Star – 2:15 (Tuesday)
  • 1998. By Tom Tykwer. With Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu…
  • Rated 8.1/10 at IMDB: “A young woman in Germany has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend before he robs a grocery store.”

Microsoft says we should not teach PowerPoint

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Ok. I’m just joking. Actually, it’s much more profound than that. And, for once, I am finding something from Microsoft (or, more precisely, Microsoft Research) fascinating. It’s a report called Towards 2020 Science where, I quote,

“an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.”

There are a number of recommendations at the end of the report. Personally, I find some of them very very interesting. For example (I quote):

  • Urgently re-think how we educate tomorrow’s scientists
    • For children: make teaching of computing more than just ‘IT’ classes and how to use PowerPoint. Make basic principles of computer science, such as abstraction and codification, a core part of the science curriculum.
    • For undergraduates: Make computer science (again, not just ‘computing’) a key element of the science curriculum
  • Re-energise computer science to tackle ‘grand challenges’
    • Computer science teaching and research is currently at an awkward crossroads where it needs to decide whether it is something that serves other disciplines, is an engineering exercise, or a real science in its own right. This report makes it clear that it can be a science in its own right.
  • Develop innovative public private partnerships to accelerate science-based innovation
    • Governments, universities and businesses need to find new kinds of ways to work together.

Now, if only those “luminaries” who are always talking about the Cybercity and/or IT, only spend one afternoon trying to understand (unfortunately, most of them are not very bright) this report, Mauritius might (and I say might) have a chance to succeed…