Technology

Beagle (with Kerry) is a fantastic search tool

9 April 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

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 ;-)

Microsoft says we should not teach PowerPoint

26 March 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 3 Comments

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…

Try many programming languages

25 March 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

One of the main reasons to use Linux (or any Unix-inspired operating system like FreeBSD or Mac OS X) is the sheer number of programming languages that you can install, learn and use freely:

In his very influential essay, “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”, Peter Norvig states:

“Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).”

I do not always agree with the specific languages he mentions but the important point is that all great programmers know (or, at least, are aware of) the many programming paradigms that exist (functional, imperative, object-oriented, generic, logic, concurrent, distributed, etc.)

This is important because some real-life problems can be easily solved if a programming language supporting a specific paradigm is used and, conversely, very very difficult to solve if the bad language is chosen. Don’t forget that:

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer,
to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

Here is a commented list of the many programming languages that I have installed in my Kubuntu Linux computer:

Language	Implementation	Comments
C	KDevelop (using gcc)	Linux is written in C…
C++	KDevelop (using g++)	Much too complicated for my taste
C#	MonoDevelop (using the Mono/.NET framework)	Looks a lot like Java to me :-)
Boo	MonoDevelop (using the Mono/.NET framework)	I’m discovering it now…
Nemerle	MonoDevelop (using the Mono/.NET framework)	I’m discovering it now…
Erlang	Erlang	A functional language by Ericsson for distributed systems
Haskell	Hugs	A great pure and lazy functional language
Java	BlueJ / Eclipse / Netbeans (all using a Sun JVM)	A fantastic object-oriented (but too verbose) language with top-quality IDEs (you need to try BlueJ if you are a beginner)
Lisp	CLISP	Very powerful if you get into its more advanced features like macros but I personally prefer Scheme…
Objective Caml	Objective Caml	I’m discovering it now…
Python	Eric / Idle	One top language and Eric is a very good IDE. Learn it now!
Ruby	Eric / Interactive Ruby	My favourite programming language – it’s so nice and powerful at the same time!
Scheme	DrScheme	A great functional language to learn programming… and it’s poweful too. DrScheme is a fantastic IDE for beginners.
Smalltalk	Squeak	Addictive and powerful language. Try Squeak, it’s fun!

Have fun discovering some of those languages…