hive-users

[Hive-users] OT: Invitation to participate in research project

[Ben A. <ben...@st...>]

Hello there

I would greatly appreciate a small amount of your time to assist with
my doctoral research at The University of Newcastle. The research
concerns open source licensing and we're seeking developers working on
Java projects. The research is supervised, ethics-approved, anonymous
and results will be freely available. Participation will also provide a
custom licensing report for your project. To learn more, please visit:

   http://licensing-research.newcastle.edu.au

Thanks for reading this email, and I hope you'll consider participating.

Best regards
Ben Alex

(My apologies for being off-topic; this list will not be emailed again)

[Hive-users] (no subject)

[Giuseppe B. <bu...@tn...>]

Hi,
I'm new to the Hive environment. I am trying to configure the Hive
BouncingBall demo application on top of the Hive-19991210 binary code, on my
MS Windows 2000 workstation.
In the Readme file, of the BouncingBall download file, the step 6 requires
to add the line edu.mit.media.nelson.wander.wanderShadow to to the
./hive/shadowConfig file.Where is that file?
I don't find it in the downloaded hive19991210 environment. How can I
continue?
Thaks in advance!
Giuseppe Bux

[Hive-users] Hive - Information request

[L. O. G. C. <lg...@un...>]

	Hi all,

	I am working in an IST project (TeleCARE - using mobile
agents over the Internet for elderly care), at CRI-UNINOVA,=20
New University of Lisbon, and I have some questions:

o What's about security mechanisms in Hive (agents, transfer
  agents -mobility-, and/or transfer messages among agents)?
o Is Hive compliance with FIPA and/or MASIF standards?
o Can Jess or any Prolog engine be integrated with/in Hive?
  Is there any related work?

	Thank you very much for your attention and response.

	Best regards,

Luis Octavio Gonz=E1lez Castolo
Centre of Robotic Intelligent - UNINOVA
Campus da Faculdade de Ci=EAncias e Tecnologia
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Quinta da Torre
2825-114 Monte Caparica
PORTUGAL
Tel. +351 212948500
		ext 11923
Fax. +351 212941253

[Hive-users] Hindenburg docs

[Richard W. D. <ri...@me...>]

Hey, Raffi.

I've been porting the wearables hive demos to the Hindenburg release,
and I've run into a few problems.  One problem is that I can't find
the .sgml documentation refereed to by the release notes:
<http://sourceforge.net/project/filenotes.php?group_id=1914&form_filemodule_id=4070&form_release_version=20000521>
Another is that I'm getting startup problems which appear to be caused
by structural changes in the .hive/ RC directory, but I can't find
documentation on what those changes might be.

	Thanks,
	Rich

[Hive-users] Hive Devel Release 20000521 "Hindenburg"

[Tucker I S. <ts...@MI...>]

Hello Hive users,

We have been planning to get out a stable release of Hive for the last
several days, but numerous last minute bugs have delayed it.  Right
now, there is only one item left on our list, but unfortunately, both
Raffi and I need to work on a demo for DL this Wednesday, and won't be
able to get to this last bug until then.  Thus, we are releasing what
we have as a devel release, with a known bug being that there is a
thread locking problem on startup that can keep hive from booting.  We
will get this bug fixed soon after the demos end.  If it doesn't boot
at all on a certain computer, a workaround that *may* help (however
ugly it may be) is to set the debuglevel to notice, either on the
command line with the --debuglevel=notice or in the
HiveCellDescription file with the <DebugLevel>notice</DebugLevel> tag
(see below for more details).


- Hive Devel Team




	Release Notes for Hive-20000521: Hindenburg


Contents:

I.    Overview of current status
II.   New demos built with Hive
III.  Details of the major changes since the previous version
IV.   Incompatibilities with Release 19991210
V.    What's ahead for Hive

                I. Overview of current status

It's been nearly half a year since our last stable release, and big
changes have been taking place.  Now that it's finally stabilized,
Hive is much smaller, faster and more efficient than it ever has
been.  In fact, with code-god Raffi essentially completed with his
renovations of the internals, the core classes of Hive (Cell,
AgentMonitoringAgent, AgentMessagingShadow, etc.) are in a supremely
well tuned state, and will not be going through any more large changes
in the foreseeable future.  In addition, Hive has seen its user-base
grow, and is now the infrastructure of choice for many new demos in
both the Agents Group and the Wearables group here at the Media Lab.
Finally, all of Hive has been renamed from edu.mit.media.hive to
net.hivecell.hive.  Should be easier on the wrists.... In another
renaming spree, the net.hivecell.hive.xml package has been renamed to
net.hivecell.hive.description, and the classes that make up the
package have also been renamed:
        XMLDescription -> Description
        XMLDescribable -> Describable
        XMLDescSet     -> AgentSet
A new class, RemoteDescribable, has also been added to avoid needing
to test a local Describable object for RemoteExceptions when getting
and setting a description.  There is a perl script, PackageRenamer.pl,
that will do the name conversion for you.  It can be found on the
www.hivecell.net web-site in the download section.

On a personal note, Hive's leading developer, Raffi Krikorian, won the
Fano award for being the most outstanding UROP at MIT because of his
work on Hive.  He's been doing an unbelievable job, and it shows.
Hive has really come far since the last release because of the massive
amount of time and effort he's put into it.

Both of us (me being Tucker) will be away this summer, and any
releases (after the next one in a few weeks) will be small bugfixes,
not any attempts of answering research type questions.  Raffi will be
taking a leave of absence next term (he desperately needs a break from
school), but I will still be around, and I'm in the process of trying
to recruit more UROPs to keep Hive moving.  Maybe we'll still see
some check ins from Raffi when he's bored.

              II. New demos built with Hive

InShop 
(http://agents.www.media.mit.edu/groups/agents/projects/impulse/inshop/)
        Intelligent agents manage a customer's shopping list as they 
        wander around a grocery store, and suggest recipe options
        based on ingredients they have already bought, and lets them
        know what to buy to make certain recipes.  Hive allows several
        different types of agents to easily cooperate and share
        information, and also allow possible-but-not-yet-implemented
        features (such as a map of the store) to be easily added
        later.

WAPPointments
        This is a collaborative scheduling demo, which compares your
        appointment book with those of your friends to see if you will
        be in the same place at the same time, and suggests a meeting
        place if so desired.

streetWise
(http://agents.www.media.mit.edu/groups/agents/projects/impulse/streetwise/)
        This demo uses Hive as a framework for allowing agents with
        location awareness to communicate with other agents specified
        by the user.  These agents are in communication with one
        another, and let the user know when he is around places and
        things which are of interest to him.

        III. Details of the major changes since the previous version

1) Probably the largest change in the release is the complete re-write
   of the message handling system, also by Raffi.  Previously, each
   agent spawned a thread to handle messaging to other agents through
   RMI, which was a time consuming and inefficient process.  This also
   could eat up a large number of ports, depending on how many agents
   were messaging each other.  Now, a single shadow,
   AgentMessagingShadow, handles event communication between agents on
   different cells.  This means only one dedicated port is required to
   talk between any two given cells, and if a message is being sent to
   more than one agent, it is only transmitted once, and forwarded
   multiple times by the AgentMessagingShadow.  This allows Hive to
   send more than 500 events per second, up from about 50 or so
   previously.

2) The second largest change is the switch from RDF to XML as the
   internal mechanism for storing Agent's description and
   configuration information.  What these means to developers/users is
   that agent descriptions/config files are much easier to write, due
   to the simpler syntax of XML.  In addition, there are now way more
   functions in the description package for querying agents and sets
   of agents based on their descriptions.  Many of these new features
   are not being used anywhere (yet), so check the javadocs for
   net.hivecell.hive.description.* to see what the new package can do.
   Highlights include the ability to dynamically modify an agent's
   description, print out the description in XML, query a description
   based on XML attributes, and support for querying AgentSets
   (formerly XMLDescSets) that used to be available only to through
   the Cell's queryAgents method.

3) Debug improvements: Ability to set specific debug levels by
   class. This means you can block all messages less severe than, say,
   warnings for all classes except one, for which you can show all
   notices.  In addition, debug messages can be sent to an arbitrary
   stream, allowing for the easy creating of log files.  Also, a
   pre-processor has been written to insert file and line number
   everywhere it finds a debug statement.  This will allow us to get
   full Debugging information even in a JIT, as well as avoiding the
   overhead of throwing and catching exceptions to parse the
   information out.  However, no one currently on the Hive team knows
   how to integrate it into the Makefile, so any suggestions would be
   appreciated :) Also added the printStackTrace() method in case the
   debug output will show the entire stack trace instead of just file
   and line.

4) Cell.java code cleanup: Exceptions are being thrown in a more
   consistent manner.  Also, the multiple hive startup files are now
   stored in the config section of the cell's description,
   ~/.hive/HiveCellDescription.  See the file HiveCellDescription.sgml
   in docs for a complete listing the new startup format.  Shadow
   startup and management is handled similarly to the agents (see
   below), so there are now two new inner-classes that replace the
   functionality of ShadowDB.java and AgentGateKeeper.java.  Thread
   handling has been cleaned up a lot, so the intermittent lockups
   during boot should be a thing of the past.

5) There is also vastly improved infrastructure for handling shadows.
   There is no longer a shadowDB; agents and shadows are now managed
   the AgentTable and the ShadowTable in the Cell, and in addition,
   lazyShadowInstantiation has been removed.  Thanks to Raffi, there
   is now a complement to rmic for compiling stubs for shadows.  This
   means that Hive doesn't need to expose all the methods of a shadow
   to agents.  Functions that should only be called by the cell can be
   hidden, as the agent only sees a stub.

6) Agent startup is now more controlled, and Hive can make more
   promises on the state the agents are in during the stages of their
   creation.  Blank descriptions are created for agents by default
   when they are instantiated, so an agent's description is never
   null.  An AgentSetupException must be thrown if an agent realizes
   it can't be created in its doLocalSetup, instead of calling
   diePlease().  This will need to be changed in any existing agents.

7) Shiny New AgentMonitoringAgent: This fixes the cache coherency
   problems sometimes experienced in the previous versions of Hive,
   and provides better data synchronization.  In addition, this agent
   now has a much simpler remote interface.

8) ExternalInterfaceShadow: This shadow in the apps package is the
   first stage of the infrastructure that allows Hive to communicate
   with non-Hive devices by sending meesages over an XML stream.  This
   is used in the InShop demo for communicating with a PalmPilot,
   which doesn't have a JVM.  In the far distant future, all messaging
   will be done through XML streams in the AgentMessagingShadow.
   Then, non-hive devices would be able to be integrated with hive
   simply by talking the standard hive protocol.  Until then though,
   this shadow provides a means for letting non-Java devices to
   communicate with Hive.

9) The RMI registry is now exposed, so non-Hive RMI objects can use
   RMI to communicate with Hive.  This does for RMI what the
   ExternalInterfaceShadow does for messaging (see above).  Daniele de
   Francesco built an agent that also exposes itself through the
   registry, so that it can communicate with hive over RMI without
   using Hive.

                IV. Incompatibilities with Release 19991210

This is a (hopefully) complete list of the changes that will break
existing agents, either at compile time, or when they start up.  If
you find an incompatibility that isn't listed here, please send it to
hiv...@hi....

1) Agents using RDF need to be converted to use the XML description
   package.  The differences between the two packages are outlined in
   the docs, descriptions.sgml.

2) Different Exceptions are being thrown by Cell.java, so some
   try/catch blocks will need to be added to get old agents to
   compile.

3) diePlease() in doLocalSetup causes problems.  It needs to be
   changed to throw new a AgentSetupException

4) edu.mit.media.hive and references to the edu.mit.media.hive.xml
   package will need to be changed to the new net.hivecell.hive
   namespace, and references to the edu...hive.rdf or edu...hive.xml
   will also need to be changed to the description package.  A perl
   script, PackageRenamer.pl, that will do the name conversion for you
   can be found on the www.hivecell.net website in the downloads
   section.

5) Due to the new AgentMessagingShadow, new cells may have a problem
   sending events to old cells, and RMI between this version and old
   versions will not work at all.

                       V. What's ahead for Hive

Next Release:

1) Hive Classloader - By building a tree of classloaders, we hope to
   solve the version compatibility problem that currently prevents
   agents from different versions of Hive working together reliably.

2) More security - Mainly focused on protecting the Cell from
   malicious agents.  Protecting the agent from malicious Cells is a
   hard problem!

3) Better Control of debug output from the CellDescription - in the
   Cell's description, it will be possible to specify the level of
   debugging output based on a class by class basis, not just for the
   entire cell.

4) debugPreProcessor integrated into the Makefile - Any takers?

Beyond the next release:

1) No more ExternalInterfaceShadow, instead the AgentMessaging shadow
   will use XML instead of a serialized stream, and inter-cell event
   communication can happen thorough that. Thus, non-hive devices can
   talk to hive using the same standard protocol that hive uses to
   talk to hive.

[Hive-users] "agents that move for things that think"

[Raffi K. <ra...@hi...>]

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i added a link off the hivecell.net web page to a pdf of the "agents
that move for things that think" article about hive in the
IEEE:Intelligent Systems journal.  you can get to it at
http://www.computer.org/intelligent/ex2000/pdf/x2004.pdf...

rk
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[Hive-users] an article in IEEE Intelligent Systems

[Raffi K. <ra...@hi...>]

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i just wanted to drop everybody a note to take a look at the
March/April 2000 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems.  the lead article
in the "intelligencer" features is a entitled "Agents That Move for
Things That Think" by Dennis Taylor -- it is a good overview and
synopsis of hive (besides the fact they spelled my last name wrong).

let me just take this chance to tell you all that we are heading
towards the final release of the spring.  a lot of work has gone in
getting the XML to be "right" and a lot of work has gone in (and
continues to) to get the system more and more stable.  we will also
contain real documentation for all to use.  that is what we is really
holding us back.  so, i think it might be time to actually go ahead
and compile it all.

rk
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Re: [Hive-users] re: CellListAgent

[Raffi K. <ra...@hi...>]

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Suranga Chandratillake writes:
 > 
 > Hi,
 > 
 > Yes - thanks for the help, now that pinotnoir.media.mit.edu is running
 > again everything's fine.  Do you think you could keep the earlier version
 > running?  

no problem!  i intend to keep the latest stable release running on
pinotnoir (which would be 19991210).  if there are any requests for me
to run a more "bleeding edge" release on pinotnoir for people to
conenct to using their server list, just e-mail me or the list and i
probably can arrange something.......

 > I've got the recent devel release, but my code didn't work with it
 > straight off (uses some of the rdf code, unfortunately) and I'm trying to
 > get my project working in its current state before I move over to the new
 > system...let me know if this is going to be a problem and I'll start the
 > migration sooner rather than later.

nope.  i plan to burn a release relatively soon (depending on my
stress levels).  the only thing holding me up is a new agent
monitoring agent -- but i have the code almost perfectly working.  the
BaseUIAgentImpl is complaining about it, but i'm attempting to beat it
into submission.

 > Thanks for the quick response  - and thanks for helping write Hive - it's
 > very, very cool!

thanks :)  that means a lot to me :)

rk
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Re: [Hive-users] re: CellListAgent

[Raffi K. <rc...@mi...>]

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hi!  the problem is that the main server list agent is not running on
pinotnoir.media.mit.edu...

there are three solutions to the problem

1) run the master server list agent. i'll start doing that again.
   i'll try to make sure that hive 19991210 is always running on
   pinotnoir.medis.mit.edu with the master server list agent

2) you could run your own master server list agent.  you can designate
   this at the command line by doing a

   java edu.mit.media.hive.Hive --join hive://sc258.kings.cam.ac.uk:6363 

   or whatever your machine is.  this tells your server list agent to
   join a federation managed by itself.  and if you start up other
   hive cells and point it to that cell, then the server list agent on
   that cell will act as the master for everythign

3) tell your server list agent to not join any federation.  you can do
   that by running
  
   java edu.mit.media.hive.Hive --nojoin


of all these, the ideal solution is #1.  and once i get into lab today
(in a few hours), i'll get the master server list agent running again.

feel free to e-mail out again if you need anything else!

rk



Suranga Chandratillake writes:
 > 
 > Hi all,
 > 
 > I've been playing with Hive for a couple of months now and never had any
 > real problems, but recently I get a hang while a new cell is being
 > setup.  Specifically, it happens when CellListAgent issues the following
 > message :
 > 
 > <NOTICE CellListAgentImpl.java:441> Tracking
 > hive://sc258.kings.cam.ac.uk:6363 2Apr2000-04:04:38.030
 > 
 > Basically, the code hangs at this point for a variable length of time (the
 > worst ever was about five minutes) and then proceeds as normal.  I'm not
 > sure, but I get the feeling this is to do with the code looking at the
 > default CellList url
 > (nelson.www.media.mit.edu/people/nelson/tmp/hiveMasterCell) and that
 > taking a long time to come through.  The main reasoning behind this is
 > that if I try and look at Nelson's pages on my web browser, they seem to
 > take a similar time too.
 > 
 > Anyway, does anyone know if this diagnosis is correct and, if so, what
 > does the hiveMasterCell file actually look like and could I just re-create
 > it on my machine and point the code towards that instead while I'm
 > coding/testing?
 > 
 > Thanks,
 > 
 > Suranga

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[Hive-users] re: CellListAgent

[Suranga C. <sc...@ca...>]

Hi all,

I've been playing with Hive for a couple of months now and never had any
real problems, but recently I get a hang while a new cell is being
setup.  Specifically, it happens when CellListAgent issues the following
message :

<NOTICE CellListAgentImpl.java:441> Tracking
hive://sc258.kings.cam.ac.uk:6363 2Apr2000-04:04:38.030

Basically, the code hangs at this point for a variable length of time (the
worst ever was about five minutes) and then proceeds as normal.  I'm not
sure, but I get the feeling this is to do with the code looking at the
default CellList url
(nelson.www.media.mit.edu/people/nelson/tmp/hiveMasterCell) and that
taking a long time to come through.  The main reasoning behind this is
that if I try and look at Nelson's pages on my web browser, they seem to
take a similar time too.

Anyway, does anyone know if this diagnosis is correct and, if so, what
does the hiveMasterCell file actually look like and could I just re-create
it on my machine and point the code towards that instead while I'm
coding/testing?

Thanks,

Suranga

[Hive-users] annoucement of Hive-20000327 devel release

[Raffi K. <ra...@hi...>]

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hello!

whew - what a few months.  after agonizing and optimizing and bug
fixing, the i'm proud to annouce Hive-20000327, our first ever "devel"
release.

we have never released a devel release of hive before, but i feel it
is important to start doing so now as we are starting to make some
fundamental changes to the way hive operates.  please feel free to
download this release and play with it -- if you do, please send us
e-mail about it with your thoughts and suggestions!  and, as always,
we're here to help you guys too.  

the two main changes:

first off, out with RDF in with XML.  thanks to tucker
(tu...@hi...), our resident XML-god, we have removed all RDF
and have gone to a fully XML system.  all descriptions and
configurations for agents and shadows are now -so- much cleaner and
easier to understand.  we have tried to minimize the amount of changes
programmers would see in the API though.  also, the cell configuration
files are now in XML also.

secondly, agent event messaging is now different.  again, we have
tried to minimize the changes seen by the programmer, but in the
background we are no longer using RMI to deliver events except when
necessary.  the problem with RMI is that it is slow and we had a lot
of trouble controlling how many sockets it would open at any time.  i
authored a socket protocol which is allowing us to cache serialization
for speed improvements, and also minimize the amount of sockets hive
uses.

besides this, we have fixed a few random bugs here and there.

what's next?  well - we still have a lot on our plate.  i'm in the
middle of rewriting the agent monitoring agent (the core of inter-cell
management in hive) to make it significantly more robust -- i'm
shooting to have that one in CVS by the end of the week.  haven't
committed it yet because its -really- unstable right now.  tucker and
i are also working on doing a full code review of Cell.java to clean
it up, make it smaller and to work on writing custom class loaders so
we can deal with the class file versioning issue.  on top of this,
tucker is in his own world of trying to do great things with agent
descriptions, and i'm dreaming of ways to get hive security up to par.

rk
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[Hive-users] changes to HIVE locations

[Raffi K. <ra...@me...>]

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Hello-

  I just wanted to send a small note detailing what has happened with
  HIVE over the past month.  No real changes have happened to the
  codebase, but there have been plenty of changes on how HIVE is being
  adminstered -- HIVE no longer administrated from inside the MIT
  Media Lab, however I would like to make it clear that this is still
  an MIT Media Lab research project.  HIVE has been moved out all in
  an effort to make it more of an Internet wide project.

  All of HIVE is being managed through the services of SourceForge
  (http://www.sourceforge.net).  SourceForge provides us with
  anonymous CVS access for all of you who are interested, mailing
  lists, bug trackers, public forums, file release management, and all
  this other good stuf.  The web page at http://hive.media.mit.edu is
  now redirecting to http://www.hivecell.net which has all the links
  into the HIVE project pages at SourceForge.  If you take a look at
  the To header on this message, you will see that the mailing lists
  have been changed to the hivecell.net domain name -- they are now
  hi...@hi..., and hiv...@hi....

  As always, we always have a lot of work to do, and a lot of projects
  to keep us happy -- ubiquitous computing middle-ware for wearables,
  infrastructure for e-commerce applications, and intelligent
  kitchens.

  Feel free to contact me or to e-mail the development team at
  hi...@hi... if you have any interest or questions!

Raffi Krikorian
ra...@hi...
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