Pinot 0.90

To celebrate the start of the year of the Ox, I am releasing Pinot 0.90 !

Since the release of 0.89 in September, a lot of changes have been made on several fronts :
- Unicode text.
Charset conversion errors are better handled, tokenizing was improved and leads to far less "rubbish" terms. Issues the UI had with non-Latin locales were resolved
- Portability.
The code base builds with MingW and hopefully without too many problems with GCC 4.4.
- Web metasearch.
Plugins were updated, extracts and results URLs are more accurate.
- more coherent UI.
Some features were previously only available in search mode, others in browse mode; some were duplicated. The new menu layout tries to unify both modes. The status window' refresh is smoother. Preferences can be open separately from the UI. Spelling suggestions are less invasive, they pop up in the same tabs as queries results.
- improved More Like This.
Stored queries generated on More Like This don't include the original query's terms, stopwords, infrequent terms or similar terms if the stemming language is set.
- command-line and desktop integration.
pinot-cd.sh implements a "tagged cd", and lets one change the shell's current directory to the directory that matches the path elements passed as parameter. The Deskbar module shows snippets when used with Deskbar 2.24.
- more flexible daemon.
The daemon is smarter at crawling symlinks, it skips those that refer to locations that have been crawled or that it knows will be crawled. It is much better at resuming where it stopped after user interruption. While user-set meta-data would previously be lost on a reindex, or when the file changed on the disk, it's now preserved.

With all these out of the way, I will be able to return to a monthly release cycle where each release brings incremental improvements and bug fixes and bring the project to its 1.0 release.

I would like to thank Adrian Bunk, Adel Gadllah, Martin Michlmayr, C. Scott Ananian and especially John Werden for their contributions to this release in the form of patches, ideas, suggestions and testing. As always the NEWS file has the details. Head to the download page to get the source.

Fedora 10 and MingW

I upgraded to Fedora 10 a few days after it came out. This looks like the best Fedora release ever. Upgrade went very well and the few issues I used to run into with Fedora 9 (sound, mostly) have vanished.
Plymouth, the tweaked boot process works like a charm on my Macbook Pro, which surprises me since I thought anything other than ATI chipsets got a text based boot.

One thing I am especially excited about is the integration of MingW for cross-compiling. Right now, it's not officially supported but it's enabled me to port the bulk of Pinot's source code over to Windows without having to jump through the many hoops that installing Windows+compiler+dependencies would have involved. I love the idea of compiling for Windows without Windows ;-) As a result, Pinot 0.90 will very probably include a beta-quality Windows port.

Congratulations to all Fedora developers !

Pinot goes nuclear

Funny... Every week I run the Web logs through a script of mine that geolocates visitors and queries whois. It turns out that pinot.berlios.de has got a lot of visits from people at the French and US Departments of Nuclear Energy, namely the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique based at Gif-sur-Yvette, France and the Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research at Germantown, MD, USA.
I would like to know what is up with that and if/how these two research labs are using Pinot :-)

Pinot on the OLPC ?

Two weeks ago, I got a pleasant surprise. C. Scott Ananian, a OLPC hacker, used Pinot for his work on the next generation Journal program and gave a talk on this. Screencasts, slides, audio and video are available here.

Target for Pinot 0.90

Based on my tasks list for Pinot 0.90, I reckon it won't be ready before the end of the year. Most likely, it will be released sometime in January.
Besides fresh ideas I got from talking to people on the mailing list, there's a bunch of features I meant to implement for a while that really ought to go in. I hope I'll have time to refresh the UI as well as enhance the daemon.

Moving...

I am moving my blog from the old BerliOS shared blog to here. Stay tuned.