A mind less ordinary

Well, I’m now ready to start playing around with FUSE and see where it gets me. I’m getting quite concerned now by how little time is left… we got our exam timetable yesterday, and it doesn’t seem too bad… although we do have two exams on the same day at one point. Still, I’ve got a [...]

Insight is progressing, but slowly. I’m working on the first prototype, which should essentially prove the concept of the indexing system. It turns out that writing a B+ tree is more awkward than I had thought, which is slightly depressing, as that is meant to be the easy bit! Then again, once the tree is done, it should be plain sailing for a little while.

I had my second marker meeting last Wednesday, which went well. I do need to find a way to explain Insight very quickly, however. People tend to look blankly at me and say “Why would I need this?” to begin with, then they might say something like “What about Spotlight/other indexing service?” or “Why in the file system?” but once I fully explain some of its potential, they get quite excited.

Continue reading “Insight: Work so far…” »

Well I’ve recently finished reading the BeOS File System (BFS) book, and it was a very interesting read. There was a lot of useful information there, and it really helped me think about the system I’m writing. I’ll put some of the ideas that came to mind in this post.

Continue reading “Insight: Finished reading about BFS” »

I had a meeting with my project supervisor earlier, during which we discussed a few things about the Insight project. One of the things he reminded me about was that I have to give a presentation and demo of my project at the very end.

This will be interesting, especially for my project. The demo should be as impressive as possible, and should ideally have a big “wow!” factor. I’ve had a number of ideas in this direction, so I’d probably best put them here, although be warned: this may spoil the surprise for anyone who attends the presentation

Continue reading “Insight: The presentation” »

So, I’ve been reading the book about BFS (the file system of BeOS), which shares some ideas with mine, although it still adheres to the idea of a hierarchical filesystem. It goes into some depth, and although I’ve only reached partway through chapter 6, I have found it to be a very useful resource, particularly with a brief overview of the heuristics of search optimisations.

Anyway, the key thing recently is that I’ve started to think about how to implement the data structures for DBFS that deal with storing the attributes, and I feel that I have come across a rather neat solution. Whether it is efficient or fast is another matter entirely, but that is definitely not the point of this project; I just want to prove it is possible. If performance isn’t too bad, then so much the better.

Continue reading “Insight: Implementation Thoughts” »

Apologies to anyone this confuses, but this post is just a collection of random thoughts about DBFS (now called Insight); what it might do, how it might be implemented… all sorts of things. Some of these will be taken from The Book of the Project, and some have developed as I do more research.

Continue reading “Insight: some thoughts” »

So I’ve begun my research with Hans Reiser’s The Naming System Venture whitepaper, which is now no longer available online. Unfortunately the Wayback Machine doesn’t provide the diagrams, so unless I can find anyone with a mirror of it (so far unsuccessful) then I shall just have to do without them. Incidentally, I am also writing [...]