BeeSeek Blog

In a few hours from the event, I'd like to tell everyone that we'll be at the first international COMMUNIA workshop, The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain. Coordinated by NEXA, Center for Internet and Society, COMMUNIA is a project backed by europea community in the wider project eContentplus.This lab is dubbed "Technology an the Public Domain" and wants to create a discussion on the relationship between digital technology and the fast-growing internet users.

The first of a long serie?

BeeSeek has been proposed by Philippe Aigrain, Simone Brunozzi will be the english speaker on P2P search and BeeSeek. This is an important acknowledgement for us. For those not able to attend, here the official slides:

BS-presentation-pdf
BS-presentation-odp

This documentation about BeeSeek is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC at-nc-sa) license.

I'll be at the event, and I'll videorecord and/or take pictures, to show you at least some visual reportage.

Good luck Simone!

The BeeSeek Planet finally have a new theme and is ready to start a stable work. Thanks to DnaX again, was possible this complete restyling and you can see the results in the following screenshot:

Nice, isn't it?

But that isn't all yet: even if our choice for the platform was one of the most popular and famous from the open source world, planetplanet, this didn't allow the automatic feeds update. Andrea-bs solved the problem cleverly (as usual! ) with a simple bash script that controls the rss every 10 minutes.

Thereby we can give our welcome to the BeeSeek Planet in our network. So don't wait, go and write on your blog about the bees' search engine or get involved and help us, and soon you'll receive the request to put your feeds in it too! ;)

The alpha 2 version of Hive has been released and the main changes is the adoption of a modular structure. That means faster and easier development without adapting the main code every time, but it makes also upgrades and code reading easier and improves the stability. This also gives the possibility to personalize easily your own server writing your modules.

~ HoneyBee ~

Currently the only module developed already is HoneyBee, that is in alpha 1 version. This module collects all the statistics needed for the future page ranking.
But let's see how it saves the data in /hive/var/stats.log:

Extract sample from stas.log


Time: 1200939792
ID: 1196464515-54220160-65216570
MovTime: 4
StatTime: 18
Scrolls: 0
Url: http://127.0.0.1:50007/blog.beeseek.org/
Referer: http://localhost:50007/?query=beeseek%20blog


1. Time: records date and time of the search.
2. ID: identify the user who perform the search. The ID remains in the browser's cookies for 1 hour after the last use.
3. MovTime: records the time that the mouse moves.
4. StatTime: records the time that the mouse remains static.
5. Scrolls: records how many times the page was scrolled.
6. Url: records the address the stats are for.
7. Referer: records the address you came from.

~ Installation ~

To get the latest release you can use this page, where are available .deb packages and tarballs.

For Ubuntu users are also available our
repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ hardy main devel
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ hardy main devel

Even if the packages are for Hardy, they are perfectly compatible with all the previous Ubuntu releases since Edgy. Anyway specific packages for Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy are going to be added too.

~ The future ~

The plans for the future are:
Hive: solve two blueprints (ipv6 e apport).
HoneyBee: set up the p2p network wich BeeSeek is going to be based on.

HoneyBee is the part of the project that is going to become our stable web application and will provide the BeeSeek service to everyone.

This is the HoneyBee's homepage:

As you can see, is the same as beeseek.org.
But have a look at the following screenshot: the results' page has just been updated to a new theme that reflect the style of our network:

All the restiling work was done in the BeeSeek Forum-it, where everyone can suggest new ideas to improve BeeSeek.

~ Installation ~

The page is now working installing Hive and HoneyBee as a module, using bazaar as already explained in the previous article Debugging.

Once downloaded both the programs, you need to copy all the items contained in the HoneyBee directory:

• ball-blue.png
• fireresult.html
• honeybee.py
• separator.png
• firepage.html
• head-bg.png
• honeybee.js
• logo.png

theese files (the list could change in the time because of the development activity) have to be copied to:

/hive/etc/modules

and the file:

• honeybee.conf

has to be copied in:

/hive/etc/

For all the Ubunutu users are also avalaible our repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ DISTRO main devel

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ DISTRO main devel

In the place of DISTRO put the name of your distribution: Edgy, Feisty, Gustsy or Hardy.

~ Start up ~

Now is possible to use HoneyBee launching Hive (read here) and connecting your browser to:

http://localhost:50007

Happy BeeSeeking to everyone!

We decided to reopen the BeeSeek's forum...well, actually we opened two forums.
In fact we opted for a double installation, to have one in English, project's official language, and the second in Italian. Thanks to SMF, a lightweight but complete and powerful platform, now we have our two forums.
Here are the links:

http://forum.beeseek.org/ for the English forum
http://forum.beeseek.org/it for the Italian forum

Unlike the old forums, the new ones are made to provide a wide support to users about all the problems and questions related to BeeSeek. That's why we made many sections over all the possible topics, but, don't worry, we made also a section called BeeSeek Bar, where you can freely improve your offtopic's skill ! ;)

Before the official opening, we made a new theme that match the renovated blog look.

Registrations are, of course, open to everyone and you can propose yourself for the moderators' team submitting this post.

And now, all you have to do is to join us! :D

Thank to DnaX88, which restyled the blog theme, and thank to lele85, which redesigned the header, our blog finally has a new look!
We didn't reinvent the wheel, but rather tuned up the look-and-feel, giving a better cohesion to the various elements.

To see it at higher resolution... just look around you! :P

As usual, for the theme we used Launchpad and Bazaar, and so the theme can be modified by anyone willing to do so. To download it, follow this link:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~beeseek-core-devs/beeseek/blog-theme

An example of using bazaar in Linux:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~beeseek-core-devs/beeseek/blog-theme

Launchpad Page:

ttps://code.launchpad.net/~beeseek-core-devs/beeseek/blog-theme

EDIT:
Thank to DnaX for reminding me that, I didn't say that the theme is not yet final. I thank again DnaX also for his support for standard compatibility.

After the announcement to ask for more debuggers, BeeSeek is finally ready to officially start Hive debugging also because bug #172810 has been fixed.
Let's see what we have to do:

~ Setup ~

Hive can be installed in any Linux distribution, or any Unix-based system like Mac OS X, and it can be used in Windows as well. You just need:

- Python 2.5
- Bazaar >= 0.90

Most linux distributions already have python installed or they've a quick method to install it. If you have troubles, take a look at the end of this post to find community links to get help.

~ Installation ~

You can install Hive using Bazaar NG:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~beeseek-core-devs/beeseek/hive

This command creates a folder, named hive, in which you'll find all the needed software. If you don't want to download it in your home folder, create another folder and move hive there, like this:

mkdir ~/foldername
cd ~/foldername

~ Start up ~

Go in the folder in which you downloaded hive:

cd ~/foldername/hive

Change permissions:

chmod a+x hive

and launch it:

./hive -vfa

-v = verbose (shows more informations)
-f = foreground
-a = keep alive (keep hive open in case of noncritical errors)

The option -t is useful because you can close Hive with ctrl+c or ctrl-d.

~ Debugging ~

You can test Hive looking for bugs, reporting them on Launchpad. For
further help and informations, look at our wiki page about Bugs.
Most important things are:

• do not report an existing bug (look for something similar before posting it)
• add as more details as possible (software version, operating system, what you did, bug effects, special configurations)

It could also be useful to register in our developers mailing list or chat with us on IRC.

If you'd like to become an active debugger and help us constancily, you have to register in the Quality Assurance Team and read the page about Bug Triaging. For further informations on how to register in a team, visit the wiki Community page.

-------------------------

EDIT: correction under Startup section of option -t = not daemonic, now this has been replaced in developing Hive with -f = foreground.