People,
it is my pleasure to inform you that I have just compiled and uploaded
what we believe to be the release candidate for Piggy Bank 2.1.0.
We would really like to test this out before we release it to the
general public and if you could help us out and test it on your own
systems and give us some feedback on what went wrong or what you didn't
understand, it would be very very valuable for us.
Find the XPI at
http://simile.mit.edu/~stefano/piggy-bank-2.1.0-rc1.xpi
NOTE: while we cannot be 100% positive that this won't cause harm to
your data, we have spent several months now polishing, cleaning up and
re-architecting Piggy Bank so that it won't eat your homework. This
means that we consider it safe to install Piggy Bank 2.1.0-rc1 on top of
Piggy Bank 2.0.4 (or even earlier 2.0.x versions) without worries and we
in fact hope that you'll do so.
Here is a list of things that changed since 2.0.4:
1) fixed major memory leak in the way the piggy bank interacted with
firefox tab manager, now you browser for months without piggybank adding
any memory leak to firefox
2) dramatic performance improvement (up to 15x!) thanks to Sesame
1.2.2 and the ability to create additional indexes for expensive queries
3) solid and reliable support for Goggle Maps (that was broken last
time they changed their API and moved into a key-based subscription)
4) works on both Firefox 1.0 and Firefox 1.5
5) introduced handlers by MIME-type that allows Piggy Bank to be
invoked directly when browsing RDF content (without the need to click on
the data coin)
6) welcome wizard steps you thru the initialization and configuration
phase and progress meters will help you understanding what's going on
during the first startup
7) more solid error-handling framework will allow you to give us
precise indications of what went wrong and help you recognize the
problem yourself
8) "how what?" page will help find scrapers and what to do with your
piggy bank.
and many more bug fixes....
NOTE: unless major problems are discovered, we plan to release to the
general public Monday next week. So, please, help us help you and other
users by testing on your various systems, firefox versions and profiles
so that we can all make Piggy Bank 2.1.0 a reality.
On behalf of the Piggy Bank development team,
--
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 email: stefanom at mit . edu
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tue Sep 27 2005 - 20:46:36 EDT