Re: [Seeks-users] Seeks Project.

[Emmanuel B. <ebe...@se...>]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 06:26:17PM -0400, David Mackey wrote:
>    Editing:
>    I'll certainly take a look at the API wiki article and am willing to look
>    at other articles/posts as they are completed.
>    VirtualBox:
>    VirtualBox is a virtualization application similar to VMWare Workstation.
>    I installed Ubuntu Server into VirtualBox and then downloaded and
>    installed the application package from launchpad for Ubuntu. After a few
>    slight tweaks I was up and running.
>    I'm going to run through the process once or twice more and will write a
>    step-by-step guide for the process for anyone who is interested. I
>    initially tried to build seeks from the code, but ran into some issues
>    accomplishing this...but will keep working on getting a virtual instance
>    of Ubuntu up and running with seeks from source.
>    The application process (if we were to distribute this to end users) would
>    involve:
>    1. Downloading and installing the VirtualBox application (which is
>    cross-platform compatible).
>    2. Downloading and opening a saved virtual machine (the one I built).
>    That would be it from the end user perspective. It isn't a perfect
>    solution - but it is a fairly easy solution, especially for individuals
>    with mid-level technical expertise. 

Hi David,

thanks for the details on VirtualBox. Seeks is designed to run on even
tiny devices with low CPU and memory, so at first glance, the full
Ubuntu server installation looks like it's killing the 'lightweight'
initial purpose. But that is clearly the only working solution we have
right now on Windows! So you're breaking into new ground here anyways ;)

>    I'd also like to continue working on
>    getting seeks running with Cygwin and perhaps writing a native windows
>    port at some juncture...though I'd prefer to leave the last to someone
>    with more technical expertise than I.

Right. A full windows port requires some low level work. FYI, Seeks
proxy was initially gathered and ported (to a mix of C / C++) from
Privoxy. Privoxy is known to work on Windows and to compile with
cygwin. So in the end, the knowledge is around. Just mentioning it in
case you'd like to dig in further.

>    Automatic IP Discovery:
>    A virtual machine has an IP address just like a physical machine. In order
>    for the end user to use either the proxy or the http server, they must
>    know what url to use to connect to the machine (e.g. 192.168.1.6).
>    However, this IP is going to change from system to system. We can have the
>    virtual machine use DHCP to determine what its IP will be, but on some
>    networks this may be 10.1.0.x, others 192.168.0.x, and so on.

OK. Let's wait for confirmation from someone with more knowledge that
I have about this, but I believe that using 0.0.0.0 as the listening
address will automatically bind to the VM's IP address.

>    Active User Interaction:
>         I'm not seeing any red x by which I can remove results? Is there any
>    reason this option would not appear for me? I am running
>         seeks-0.3.5.

The option does not appear on fresh queries, but should appear on any
past query (or similar).

Also, make sure you did compile Seeks with all libraries that are required
for personalization of results, ie. protocol buffers & tokyo cabinet.
Double-check that you have everything installed:
http://seeks-project.info/wiki/index.php/Download
And read what the configure script says at the end (whether or not it
did find those libraries).

>         I understand that a large percentage of users don't want to be
>    actively engaged in optimizing search results - but I know there is also a
>    significant minority who are heavily interested in reorganizing results
>    and who could provide significant benefits to the seeks (or any search
>    community) as a whole...but this topic probably requires more length than
>    I can contribute right at this moment and I'd like to break it out from
>    this thread for separate, concentrated discussion. I'll post another
>    separate message soon to the list focused solely on the topic of Active
>    User Interactions.

OK, I'll wait for the dedicated thread then. They are inherent
mecanisms that make it difficult to allow fixed ranking by default.

Thanks for your current dedication to the project!

Em.