What I've Been Waiting For
I'm bringing my somewhat political bent to a close this week, with a return to some more tech-centric reporting. I'll start with two new pieces of Gnome development that I've been waiting for since I've been using computers.
I was investigating some applet-style blogging software that integrates with Gnome when I discovered Storage and the Sutra system. This is similar in design to the scrapped WinFS/OFS except the metadata is handled outside the realm of the filesystem, in an isolated layer of code. WinFS/OFS was part of Cairo and was slated to make its first appearance in Windows 2000, and then was pushed back to become a part of Longhorn and whatever the next Windows release will be. They've since pushed the project back further, and it's debatable whether or not we'll see this in 2006 with the next Windows.
In any case, what does this technology mean? Well, combining a metadata database with the filesystem with a natural language parser means that you can do effective contextual filesystem searching quickly and easily without much extra effort. For me this means something like typing in "open the blog entry that I started last night before I played Doom" or "play all the Maroon 5 songs on my computer" or "show me the bloggerfest pictures from my first memory card" or "open all emails related to the last SLUG thread" or something else along those lines.
For those of you who aren't impressed as it is, may be more impressed that this technology could be ready for the next round of Gnome development. We could see this on the Gnome desktop in six months to a year. FootNotes is reporting today that the development branch is active again. So around the time I'm having my next birthday we should be seeing Gnome 2.10 out for the public. This is one of the nice things about Gnome, one can generally count on a release every six months regardless of chaos in the so-called real world, presidential elections and the like. With regular slushy and hard freezes, it's amusing to follow the roadmaps to each new Gnome release.
