Applied Research,Development and Education

Enterprise Computing Curriculum - the LTC is working with IBM and the BU CS department to develop an Enterprise Computing series of courses. The sessions will focus on Linux virtualization on the mainframe. The first course “Introduction to the Mainframe: z/VM basics” will be completed for the Fall 2008 semester. The 2ndcourse, “Introduction to the zSeries Hardware Management Console” and the 3rd course, “z/VM Systems Programming” will be available in the Spring of 2009. The course will be unique as I will be the faculty member and the World Wide expert from z/VM or the HMC will present a section per week as guest lecturers. The classes will then be available on Enginet where we hope to see enthusiastic business enrollment.

Linux Desktop Search –we have been able to use “the donation” to build a Linux Desktop Search team, led by myself and Dr. Patrick Madden. The team consists of a CS graduate student (Ed Mattison) and an excellent undergraduate student who, for the last two semesters, has worked to develop a Linux Desktop Search program.

Our goal was to develop a tool consistent with the University’s mission of Greater Binghamton economic outreach. The Binghamton University Linux Technology Center (LTC) initiated this project to attract and expand Open Computing businesses and Open Computing workforce skills, in the region. The marketing strategy is to attract business and Open Computing professionals to the LTC by providing web access to valuable Open Source tool(s) developed by the LTC and freely available on the BU LTC site. In this way we will establish a Desktop Search community.

The Linux Open Source desktop search tool provides Linux users with advanced desktop (email, docs, etc.) search capabilities. Our group realized there were not many options for an open source search tool for Linux, so we have the potential to create something that thousands of people could use every day. The idea of searching is a field that has gained popularity over the recent decade with the integration of the internet in our daily lives. Many companies (Google, Microsoft, etc.) are spending millions of dollars to improve the way people search the web and to make searches more efficient. Some of these companies’ methods have attracted different political agendas throughout the world (such as Google censoring search results at the demand of the Chinese government). Therefore users may be interested in a search mechanism for their personal desktop or PC that is completely under their own control (including the source code).

There are many undiscovered methods to solve the problems faced by today's users. This gives our small group the ability to discover some of these methods and make them available to everyone. The BU Linux Desktop Search (BUS) project uses the Apache Lucene high performance, text search engine (lucene.apache.org). Lucene is Java based (so it is portable between OS platforms) and supported by the Apache group. Apache Lucene has an active community of support so this is an excellent place to start.

We had a number of challenges to deal with, with the most important coming up with a User Interface. The team spent most of their time experimenting with ways to display results to the user that would make sense, provide some product differentiation and be intuitive. The team focused on presenting user information, that the user wanted most, presented up front without a lot of scrolling or digging through links. We settled on a design that was an arrangement of search terms and a “venn diagram” approach to multiple searches.

The alpha release of BUS is available for download at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/busearch/. The site has a Linux and Windows executable user documentation has been started and can also be downloaded, and the SVN repository has the initial source code release. The BULTC web site has just gone through some updates and a link to BUS on Sourceforge.net will be added before the end of summer. We look forward to getting feedback and ideas on the Beta version so that we can fix any problems, build our community and add functionality as time goes on.