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comp.lang.ruby

Soks rocks

Bil Kleb

3/1/2005 10:35:00 PM

Part I:

Some folks from our newly-formed "Innovation Institute" scheduled
a meeting to talk with me and my officemate, Bill Wood, about
"what we were doing" and if any of it could be incorporated into
their world.

We didn't know what to make of this, but as the meeting progressed
we talked about the notion of aggressive incompetence, agile
software development, time management, meeting skills, study groups,
NASAGA, and many other things we've come to learn through the
software development community. -- Thanks!

Apparently picking up on our strong software-development bent,
they related a story of spending the last year trying to get
a "knowledge management system" out of our local IT folks and how
they recently abandoned them and are now becoming frustrated
with an onsite contractor team. (The first try produced nothing
after nearly a year and the second seems to want to document
*everything*.)

They said all they wanted was "unfettered add, search, upload,
and open discussion". After the meeting, I considered Ruwiki,
Instiki and then recalled Britt's report on trying out Soks.
So I did the one-step install

sudo gem install Soks soks-create-wiki.rb

and I'll be damned if not within 4 hours I had there entire site
humming on Soks -- If they would have hired me for the original
job, I could have absconded with $75k/hr!

I'm supposed to demonstrate Wiki technology to their director
tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how it goes over having
their entire site in my pocket...

Regards,
--
Bil, x4364

P.S. http://soks.cou... (http://soks.rub...) just gave me:

Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Apache/1.3.26 Server at soks.counsell.org Port 80
7 Answers

Seb Clediere

3/2/2005 9:54:00 AM

0

Soks is a very good wiki indeed. I have moved my personal wiki from
Instiki to Soks and I have installed one at work for project
collaboration. The strong points about Soks are:
1) Full control over your data: stored directly in textile files,
revisions in yaml files.
2) Very easy to customise to your needs.
3) Powerful: automatic linking, file uploa...
A really great wiki.

Seb.

Bil Kleb

3/3/2005 11:37:00 AM

0

Bil Kleb wrote:
> Part I:
>
> I'm supposed to demonstrate Wiki technology to their director
> tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how it goes over having
> their entire site in my pocket...

Part II:

Had the director changing web pages. He said we *must* talk
some more, this is exactly what we want. By the afternoon,
I was called back to demonstrate Wiki power to the person
that would be overseeing implementation. I have been invited
to the heavy-weight website re-design presentation this
Friday.

However, they want "deep" search capabilities for this
internal site, i.e., they want a text search of not only
titles and page content, but of file attachments such as
Word documents, PowerPoint, PDF, and so forth.

What's the path toward this end?

Thanks,
--
Bil Kleb, Hampton, Virginia
http://fun3d.lar...

Dave Burt

3/3/2005 12:06:00 PM

0

"Bil Kleb" <Bil.Kleb@NASA.Gov> asked:
> However, they want "deep" search capabilities for this
> internal site, i.e., they want a text search of not only
> titles and page content, but of file attachments such as
> Word documents, PowerPoint, PDF, and so forth.
>
> What's the path toward this end?

You can use WIN32OLE to fire up and automate Word, Powerpoint, etc., grab
the text, and update your indexes (after upload or periodically). Win32ole
scripts are strange animals - I find it easiest to half write them in MS'
VBA IDE, with its context help and Object Browser; they translate quite
easily into Ruby/win32ole.

And I'm sure there's a Ruby Way to read PDFs which I know nothing about.

If you come up with the code to do this in Soks, please share it :)

Cheers,
Dave


Martin DeMello

3/3/2005 12:17:00 PM

0

Bil Kleb <Bil.Kleb@nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> However, they want "deep" search capabilities for this
> internal site, i.e., they want a text search of not only
> titles and page content, but of file attachments such as
> Word documents, PowerPoint, PDF, and so forth.
>
> What's the path toward this end?

What's the time frame for this? It seems to me that it'd be very
possible to do it by writing a ruby interface to glimpse (or, heck, even
using webglimpse as a drop in solution, even if it's written in perl). I
assume licensing glimpse will not be a problem if they were prepared to
spend enough money to do it inhouse. Lucene is probably worth a look
too.

martin

tamc

3/3/2005 1:03:00 PM

0

Hi Bil and comp.lang.ruby

Sorry for the delay in responding to this thread, it doesn't seem to be
being copied across to the ruby-talk mailing list.

In response to your first messages note about http://soks.co...
being down, it is now back up, so if anyone is interested they can look
there for an example of a running soks and to see all the current bugs
etc... Note that it is only running on a feeble virtual server and so
performance can be better (although it will never be the quickest wiki
on the block).

Bil Kleb wrote:
> Bil Kleb wrote:
>> Had the director changing web pages. He said we *must* talk
> some more, this is exactly what we want. By the afternoon,
> I was called back to demonstrate Wiki power to the person
> that would be overseeing implementation. I have been invited
> to the heavy-weight website re-design presentation this
> Friday.

Glad it helped.

> However, they want "deep" search capabilities for this
> internal site, i.e., they want a text search of not only
> titles and page content, but of file attachments such as
> Word documents, PowerPoint, PDF, and so forth.

A brute force 'grep the files as if they were text' approach could be
done pretty easily.

I'd appreciate the groups thoughts on any more sophisticated
approaches?

If it is needed right now, the alternative would be to use an external
search program, and linking the search box across. Could be done
publicly with google, or privately by buying one of the search programs
that deals with office documents (e.g.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/... ). I don't know if
there are open source equivalents.

Tom (Developer of Soks)

Bil Kleb

3/4/2005 3:48:00 AM

0

Martin DeMello wrote:
> Bil Kleb <Bil.Kleb@nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>>However, they want "deep" search capabilities for this
>>internal site, i.e., they want a text search of not only
>>titles and page content, but of file attachments such as
>>Word documents, PowerPoint, PDF, and so forth.
>>
>>What's the path toward this end?
>
> What's the time frame for this?

To blow their Soks off? Tomorrow by 2pm.

> It seems to me that it'd be very
> possible to do it by writing a ruby interface to glimpse (or, heck, even
> using webglimpse as a drop in solution, even if it's written in perl).

I'll take a look...thanks for the lead.

> I assume licensing glimpse will not be a problem if they were prepared to
> spend enough money to do it inhouse. Lucene is probably worth a look
> too.

Actually, since it was developed with government funds,
and I am putting it to government use, it is free!

Thanks again,
--
Bil Kleb,
http://fun3d.lar...

Bil Kleb

3/4/2005 5:05:00 AM

0

Bil Kleb wrote:
> Martin DeMello wrote:
>> It seems to me that it'd be very
>> possible to do it by writing a ruby interface to glimpse (or, heck, even
>> using webglimpse as a drop in solution, even if it's written in perl).
>
> I'll take a look...thanks for the lead.

I managed to get glimpse and webglimpse installed and running, but
it's not building the search archive correctly. It beats up on Soks'
webrick, it says it finds 136 documents, but then searches return nada.
I guess I'll have to RTFM to get any further...

Meanwhile, I found that xpdf ships with a nice little script, pdftotext.

So instead, I am now trying to figure out how to hack that
into Soks' search as that will give me search capability
equal to the competition...

Later,
--
Bil Kleb,
http://fun3d.lar...