Free Software: Flatsweep, LinuxSchools, ASCII Art Tools, and Writing Fast Search

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 04, 2023

• Flatsweep Cleans Leftover Data from Uninstalled Flatpaks

  Anyone who’s been using computers for a while (any OS, not just Linux) will be aware that uninstalling an app doesn’t always remove all data associated with it.

• LinuxSchools Client V8.0.1

  The Linux Schools Client is now available for download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/karoshi/files The client is built from an automated script.

• 19 Delightful Free and Open Source ASCII Art Tools

  ASCII art is a graphic design technique that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures.

• Christian Hergert: Writing Fast Search

  The problem we encountered in my last writing was that gnome-clocks was taking about 300 milliseconds to complete a basic search query. I guess the idea is that if you type “paris” into GNOME Shell you’ll get the time in either Paris, France or one of the Paris’ in the United States. I guess 300 milliseconds wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t also consume 100% of the CPU during that time.

  Thankfully in my career I’ve had plenty of opportunity to work with database search indexes. So I have some practical experience in making that stuff fast(er).

  So this morning I put together a small search index which can be generated from the Locations.bin using the libgweather API. That search index contains the serialized document form and a series of trigrams for the GWeatherLocation textual representation. That search index is meant to be static and installed along side Locations.bin.