Dreamcatcher Changes
Now the goals of the Dreamcatcher have change quite a bit. Previously the goals was to create a P2P forum and then provided an implementation that would overlay a dream specific ideology to the entries. But the actually forum contents would be the same. Now the end goal is to create a P2P Forum API that will allow for people to totally customize their forum, and to deploy it. I think this would be interesting and many people would excited about it.
First we will create a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) for the application to show that it works and to figure out where the weaknesses lie.
I think that their will be three major approaches we will undergo along the lines of where content is stored.

1. Only local database
2. Local database backed up by dedicated mySql database somewhere on the internet
3. Local database backed up by entry replication across other peers

The advantage of (1) is that it is the simplest, the major disadvantage is the an entry is only available if the owner is online. The reason to use (2) is that it should be pretty simple to implement once the forum is up and running, and will provide a means to access entries when the owner is offline. (3) can only be successful once many people are using it. If this happens I think that we could get to the point that we have 95% available entries at any time, based on replicating entries across peers. I guess you could also keep that mySql database to provide the other 5 entries. I guess we'll have to see what happens when we get to that point. Obviously we are no where near having to make these decisions.
I'll have to update the Dreamcatcher website, and the design documents soon. Hopefully I'll be able to do this by Monday.
- posted by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi @ 1:37 PM 0 comments

 
Eclipse & Ant
Lately for some reason I've found myself having to work from many different machines on the same set of projects. I've always hated working on a project from a machine that I hadn't developed on yet. Never could explain it but always seemed to be a pain. Today I'm working on my Dad's new notebook that he received recently. So here's what I did, from my other machine I copied the workspace onto a CD. When I got here I had to download Eclipse & Java and many other things, so I did all that. Then after I ensured that all the Eclipse classpath's were relative, and resolved any Eclipse build issues...I think I'm home free. But this was not the case. When I tried to invoke Ant to compile the project I got this error:

Need less to say this is not a very meaningful error message, lol. Oh well. So I dug a little deeper, check out the ant properties image below.

Since I knew that I had downloaded a newer version of Eclipse, I decied to confirm that this "C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.6.2" folder actually existed. But indeed it does not, it has been replaced with ""C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.6.5"". So now the question is how to change that? So I looked through the settings, both workspace and project and I was unable to find the entry for this, and I certainly didn't want to change that setting on all those jars listed in that image above, cuz that would just take too long. I'm sure there is a way to change this within Eclipse itself, but I couldn't find out what it was. So I went to the workspace directory and in the .metadata there is a file org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.ant.core.prefs. This file contains all those entries that are displayed on that image from above. So I just did a find and replace, restarted Eclipse and it now works fine. In retrospect, if I'm working on a small project with out many Eclipse settings I might just get rid of that .metadata directory all together, because who knows what else is hiding in there. But it would suck to redefine many build entries for large projects. I wonder if there is a tool that will make all these changes for you, beacuse if you simply upgrade Eclipse on your own machine, you can run into many of these issues. Maybe I'm just in the dark on this one.
- posted by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi @ 5:08 PM 0 comments

 
Tutorials coming soon!
Ok, so my dad recently bought a computer. It's not really his first computer, but it kinda is. He 'kinda' had one a while ago, but I think it was really for us :) So now my dad is wanting to learn about these computers and what not. I have agreed to create him some tutorial documents. I have decided that I'll post them here as well, or links to them at least. Here are some topics that I'm going to cover. And these are vey basic things.

• Check & Send email including pictures
• How to search for stuff
• maps.google.com
• how to install stuff
• word basics
• excel basics

This list is not complete or in any order, actually I'm not even sure if I'll do all of these but we'll see. I'll try to create at least one tomorrow. Most likely the email one, because I think that will be the best one for him right now. First I'll get him hooked on email, then next thing you know it...I'll be teaching him Java :)
- posted by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi @ 2:36 AM 0 comments