= History of the Lobotomy Project =

Despite the fact Lobotomy Project is constantly under development and presents little effective production, it has a very long story.

Long long time ago its creator, Roberto "!MadBob" Guido, was a student at the [http://www.di.unito.it Department of Informatics] in [http://www.unito.it University of Turin], deeping into Linux and freesoftware but lacking any true programming skill other than the basics given by school. Sometime he tried to implement some little software just to approach the C language, but was convinced that only experience can be really usefull and was looking for something more advanced to engage. Moreover than a wannabe developer, he was also an active user into an italian "hackish" community, Knuth (now no longer existing), and used to discuss with other guys about geeks' news and interesting projects.

In 2004 happens !MadBob read an article about the role of the desktop graphical environment in Linux operating system, claiming it would be something different than a Windows clone; due the complete agree about this position he shared the link with online friends, but they glacially reply "Very well, but how would appear something different than a classical desktop?". That was enough to open the doors of a challenge, and our hero begins to imagine a different way to organize applications and data across the screen.

It was the beginning for the "!BrainTop" project, an effort to reorganize the traditional desktop. !BrainTop wanted to be an [http://www.xfce.org/ XFCE] fork where workspaces were specialized around single tasks of the user, grouping all programs and contents related to a particular job such as the writing of a document or coding a software. In the end, most of this project was about learning from the existing code, and if poor effective results were obtained in the other hand a great experience was collected about programming.

After some time passed thinking around the best backend for the !BrainTop window manager, looking for something able to collect and categorize data due not so well defined heuristics, !MadBob meets the "relational filesystem" concept, and before understand what the definition really meant was newly inspired, looking at his work as the natural graphical extension for those kind of storages. Little delusion come when he realized the so-called "relational" filesystem, such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS ReiserFS], had nothing of "relational", being usable just as any other folders trees and enriched with slots for passive metadata: mostly useless for his aims.

But, again, where there is a lack comes the developer, and the absence of a really relational storage produced a domino-effect in the mind of the young hacker: in matter of weeks !BrainTop was temporary suspended in favor of a new project, firstly named "BrainFS" and then "Hyppocampus" (beginning the tradition of neural related naming), implementing a [http://fuse.sf.net FUSE] filesystem without tree hierarchy and navigable only via SQL queries, and after a while the upper desktop environment was enriched by "Synapse", a filemanager designed around that new exotic filesystem, and was also included in that system the "!SubConsciousDaemon", batch metadata extractor for files indexed by Hyppocampus. A collective name for all those components acting one with the others was required, and "Lobotomy" was choosen due the will to eradicate the common "desktop" concept from users' brains.

In the same time !MadBob was assumed both as software developer and designer from an italian company working on embedded communications devices, and his interest for usable user interfaces grown: he begins to read more about the argument, to explore solutions, to write lot of code for manage graphics... In a word, be more conscious about graphic interfaces issues.

In the end, he was for the third time inspired: the old but undefined idea to abstract the effective data from files (which are by default "data formatted in a specific way") combined to the flexibility given by the underlying relational filesystem and the ability to build widgetless interfaces with [http://clutter-project.org Clutter] and similar frameworks drives to a [wiki:Architecture new paradigm] for information management, which is the one currently under development.

Time is passed from the first original project, started to fill boring evenings and have something to work around to learn the programming art. More have to be done, to fill the gap between abstract ideas and an usable product to feed the community.