blog on sharehound app

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

sharehound 1.2.3alpha is finally out

Well well, it's been a long while since the last release. Sharehound is not dead (yet ;), I've got a lot of ideas on quite necessary improvements for it, but unfortunately too little time lately.

This is mostly configuration enhancements release; also added ability to set encoding for individual FTP hosts and some more enhancements and bugfixes. It can be downloaded from here.

Changelog:
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Improvements

hosts screen: files count is now updated right after host crawl is finished
introduced 'encoding' config parameter for FTP crawl tasks
hosts screen: new column, 'encoding'; added UpgradeTo123Task auto-launced migration task (visit app.properties file to set encoding for pre-1.2.3 hosts)
allowed user queries to begin with wildcards ('*', '?' symbols)
secured access to Ajaxified admin functions
hosts screen: 'edit' function for 'encoding' column for FTP hosts (for 'admin' role users only). Uses configurable encodings list from WEB-INF/classes/encodings file. Copy it from expanded war file to config directory first if you want to change it. (see install.html for details on config dir)
improved URL interface: bare search.do now works as searchEntry.do. searchEntry.do is left working for some time for backward compatibility.
sharehound now requires web container supporting JSP 2.0. For Tomcat this means 5.5 and higher.
sharehound is distributed as compressed war now to ease future upgrades; extracted some config files, incl. quartz-config.xml and custom user accounts, to external config directory. See install.html for details.
lucene.properties' "index.directory" propery moved to new properties file, dir.properties; introduced some new dir properties there and made them all optional :)
made sharehound's data dir specified by JVM parameter passed to web cotainer (e.g. Tomcat). See install.html for details.

Fixed bugs

fatal startup error if index.directory (specified in lucene.properties) doesn't exist
'files' link from hosts list item doesn't work for some time when the host is indexed for a first time
Admin screen: 'calculate hosts files counts' function's results are invisible for some time (until somebody call hostIndexer.flush)
some non-ASCII FTP directories are not indexed (appears empty in index while they are not actually)
sharehound can only run on Java 1.6 (was unintentionally compiled in 1.6 only mode)

(Blank) install instructions:
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Please refer to docs/install.html file inside the zip.

Upgrade instructions:
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Please refer to docs/release.txt file inside the zip.

blogger.com: ability to comment on a draft is lost

What a pity, I loved it! Was useful when preparing a sharehound build: first I make a draft, then put a 'make comment' link to it to the application properties file, then test it, then publish zip on Sourceforge, then make a post public. Now the 'test' phase is not working here :(. A workaround is to publish the post prior to testing then make it a draft again. I wonder if that temporary publish is reflected in RSS feed to this blog? Chances are that it is..

users feedback on sharehound 1.2.3alpha

Feel free to leave a comment on your experience with this release, sharehound in general or whatever :) Any language is OK. Feature requests are welcome.

If you wish to post anonymously please leave some nick so that I could comment back (as blogger.com doesn't support hierarchical comments).

Saturday, May 12, 2007

users feedback on sharehound 1.2.2alpha

sharehound 1.2.2alpha is out

1.2.1 was only a pair days before but I can't wait to bring this feedback function up..

(minimalistic) changelog:
** Improvements
* hosts screen: search by address function (only exact match currently)
* introduced user feedback link

users feedback on sharehound

Feel free to leave a comment here on your experience with sharehound product. Any language is OK.

If you wish to post anonymously please leave some nick so that I could comment back (as blogger.com doesn't support hierarchical comments).

sharehound name

I beleive I was pretty lucky to get the 'sharehound' name back in February 2006 (thanks to Vasily Orlov for suggesting it!). Google search results for 'sharehound' were pretty empty at that time, just pair of email addresses, nothing more. So I took the name, and now my project is perfectly identified by this name with google or anything. Happy with it I attached a TM sign next to sharehound logo (as seen on project page) to make it clear that I wish to own the trademark.

Recently I found that now (from Jan 2007) there's also sharehound.com, a files-searching public service. Functionally it's similar to my opensource project but it's completely unrelated to it. I'm sure that owners of that service are aware of my project's existence (just as I'm sure they use web search engines :) and still chose to use my project's name. Strange guys.. Remember that 'proprietary rights in relation to a trademark may be established through actual use in the marketplace' (Wikipedia), so I would have them even without that TM sign.

Just to make it clear - my sharehound is not a service, it's an opensource product. It could be used as a service as it's web based too but I don't have plans to do it - I think for public users it would be interesting only as a search tool for mostly illegal content (music, video files), so it would be banned as soon as it gets popular - definitely not what I would like.

Potentially this name collision can make some problems for me - for example, people will propagate both good and bad experience from sharehound.com to my product. Now the service seems to be pretty unknown and doesn't make any visible problems to me, so I hesitate to spend any resources to go into trials now.. And may be sharehound.com will manage to get rich - then it will be worth money to trial them, ha ha!

For sharehound.com owners - guys, come on, pick some other name - it's not too late now.