Blogs

So far, I have been working on the indexing part of Beacon, which is nearly complete. In the coming weeks, I will be running beacond (now index_server) as a service in the background so that I can find and squash whatever bugs remain in the code. For now, index_server is blazing fast, but that might be because the indexes I test against are just a few megabytes in size. From what I hear, though, CLucene can easily handle indexes which are several gigabytes in size without blinking an eye, so speed might not be an issue as the indexes grow. Anyway, any potential performance bottlenecks will only show themselves once people start using index_server regularly.

And now for the good part: I have a basic search UI for Beacon up and running. For now, it can only perform simple keyword searches. In the future, I would love to integrate full text search into the Tracker "Find" UI, but for now I'm concentrating on improving this simple search tool.

Here is a screenshot:

/Files/pg/ is the directory where I'm keeping about 600MB of Project Gutenberg texts for stressing out index_server.

The next step is, of course, writing DataTranslators for a few file formats (as I've said before, PDF is top priority) and writing a simple preferences UI. I hope to post here soon with more good news :)

PS: Anybody interested in learning the CLucene query syntax can take a look at this page (although, in the future, Beacon will take a BeOS query and convert it into a CLucene query transparently).

DriveSetup with extended partitions I few days ago a patch went into the tree that cleaned up most of the remaining issues with creating primary partitions. So I started working on getting extended partition support in DriveSetup. This has been an interesting task as the extended partition support is not nearly as complete as primary partition support. To make a long story short, I have been able to create an extended partition and logical partitions within. This code is just a hack at the moment and not fit for the public but hopefully in the coming days the code can be cleaned up and the bugs can be fixed and we will have extended partitions! For those of you who are like me and enjoy seeing pictures here is a screen shot. Ciao, Bryce

Hi guys.

Sorry for no update in the previous weeks.

I'v made some progress. mDNSResponder, which provides the underlying ZeroConf functionalities, has been ported to Haiku. It runs on Haiku correctly. In order to make it run, minor updates in our network stack were also applied.

I'm currently working on the service browser. It is almost finished. I'm also trying to write some wrapper classes so developers who need ZeroConf features can easily use them. And my mentor Axel is working on an update to our DNS resolver. After the update we will write some code that can resolve ".local" domains. So in the future you can directly type "http://webserver.local/" in your Web browser. Without any configuration it will resolve it and take you there.

OK. Stop here. Thank you. :-)

This is a sample of the CSS styles taken from the extraordinary work done by Humdinger on the Haiku User Guide. I am showcasing these here because I would like to use them throughout haiku-os.org as well. If it turns out that there is no unsurmountable opposition to adopting these classes, I will eventually document them so that they can be used by those submitting news, blogs posts and documents to haiku-os.org.

Boxes