Shriphani Palakodety

I returned after writing my english exam today at FIITJEE. Hats off to them for having thrown the practical examination 3 days after the prefinals end. I have never seen an institution with such excellent planning. I am not going to waste space on this blog writing about this education factory. Let me instead dwell upon what I have done in the past week.

I finished reading the final year project of PrashMohan (His IRC nick). His FYP talks about a semantic filesystem – SemFS. SemFS is a filesystem implements file-searching based on the file’s metadata. This is a solution to the ever-increasing hard-disk capacity making it difficult to retrieve files.

SemFS allows a user to choose either the traditional “/home/shriphani/bingo.txt” hierarchy or a mechanism based on queries to offer virtual directories. SemFS provides properties of “Owner” and “Timestamp” by default. Files like JPEG images and MP3s of course carry info about the height and width (image properties) and length and artist respectively.

SemFS reminds me of Beagle, the search engine that comes with Ubuntu nowadays (and makes computers like mine groan under the strain – I use debian though :) ). I had a look at how Beagle worked and it seems to work in the same fashion by look at a file’s metadata.

It was a good read indeed and I have decided to create my own semantic filesystem ! I was trying out something called LUFS-Python when I was in class 11. LUFS allows you to create filesystems in Python. I will direct towards devices like iPods ( I love mine ). I have been pissed by the impracticality of picking ext3fs as the filesystem. I believe media players need filesystems with features like:

1. Versioning – Do take snapshots at times and do not let the user fiddle with these. If snapshots promise to tick off all the media, just archive the metadata of each song. It will be of great help in combating piracy and will for once force people to look beyond recording labels for artists who release their music under open-source licenses.
2. Lightweight caching application for updating the metadata. Tag-cache from rockbox sucks too much of my battery.

I will keep adding to this list and then see how it turns out.

BTW this blog has undergone another transformation and I picked this theme as I like its feel. I am going to put up a post for Lorelle Van Fossen’s blogging challenge. But first BOFH beckons !