Coming Soon: SMART@znmeb 0.5!

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes)

Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit

Update August 29, 2010

Version 0.8.9 of the SMART@znmeb Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit is now available in the SUSE Studio Gallery. The link is:

• Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit 0.8.9 – SUSE Gallery  http://meb.tw/bdox3f #measure #smmeasure

There's been quite a bit going on here at the Bar Nothing Ranch, and the SMART@znmeb project is no exception. I'm pushing towards release 0.5. I don't have an exact date yet, because I don't know how long it will take me to update the SUSE Studio processing to the openSUSE 11.2 repositories after they are deployed. The target date is November 26, 2009 - Black Friday. But here's what will be in SMART@znmeb 0.5:

1. openSUSE 11.2: I've been testing openSUSE 11.2 in various forms since milestone 4, and I'm now running on Release Candidate 1. Everything is working well, and I've blogged about my experiences here. In short, it's a keeper!
2. PostgreSQL 8.4 and an I/O subsystem tuned to the pgbench PostgreSQL benchmark. Note that it is the Linux I/O subsystem that I am tuning, not PostgreSQL, at the present time. PostgreSQL tuning depends heavily on the workload. For more information, see the PostgreSQL Wiki Performance Optimization page.
3. A new desktop: I'm still testing desktops, but the one thing I know is that it probably won't be Gnome. There are three problems with the Gnome desktop that have led me to reconsider its use in SMART@znmeb.
   • I haven't been able to make a Gnome desktop operate in VMware Workstation's "Unity" mode. That's a show-stopper - if "Unity" mode doesn't work with the openSUSE 11.2 / Gnome 2.28 desktop, it won't be used.
   • Gnome doesn't have a decent built-in PIM / Contact Management capability. KDE does, and I think some other desktops do as well.
   • openSUSE 11.2 defaults to KDE 4.3.2, so people coming to SMART@znmeb from openSUSE are likely to prefer KDE.
4. R 2.10.0: This is the latest release of R (today, in fact!)

At this point, I'm still debating whether or not to include the scripts to collect data from theTwitter streaming API. The API is still in alpha test according to Twitter, and I haven't had a chance to research Perl open source libraries that connect to it. I've written some primitive scripts, connected to it, collected data, etc., but even though SMART@znmeb is itself alpha-level software, I don't think I want to put them in the release.