[help-GIFT] New application to the GIFT

[John Restrepo]

Hi Everybody,

I am new to the list and to GIFT, so I will probably be posting a lot here 
(for help, of course).
I work at the Industrial Design Engineering Faculty at TU-Delft in The 
Netherlands. My work is about interactions between designers and 
information systems. As part of my research (I am aiming at a PhD), I want 
to study the effect of format and media in which information is presented 
to designers in the design process etc. Whatever, I am not going to bore 
you with all this stuff. The point is that I want to use the gift because 
it's query by example capabilities.

I managed to install the gift. Installation was reasonably smooth (except 
for some Perl dependencies that have other dependencies, etc. That seemed 
to be endless, and I did not want to use CPAN). I have indexed a collection 
of about 5000 objects from famous and not so famous designers. The 
collection includes bikes, sunglasses, vacuum cleaners, watches, and a long 
etc.

I also managed to get the charmer client running. In my collection, perhaps 
because of  the uniformity of the photos, I have obtained remarkable 
results. The indexing of the collection was also surprisingly fast (I was 
expecting my PC working on it for 3 days...) In the first attempt I indexed 
2000 photos in under three hours (Pentium 4,  1.4 GHz, 256 Mb RAM with Red 
Hat 8) and the definitive collection (about 4900 photos) in about 6 hours.

Ok, here the complaints section. I swear I have read the documentation and 
the help archives before writing this, and nothing helped.

I managed to have the charmer interface running on the Linux box, displayed 
with Mozilla 1.0 and the java2 plugin. It works smoothly (when accessed 
from the linux box). I can also serve the applet to the web (making the 
changes to the demo files) but it does not connect to the server when 
accessed from any other computer. The java window says that they might be a 
security problem with the applet. I know something can be done about this 
issue because I have tried a demo of the charmer interface somewhere in the 
web (perhaps in the viper site???) Some hints on this will be very 
appreciated.

Now, the PHP interface seems to be bugging everybody (for what I have read 
on the help-archive on this list). I have made all the appropriate changes 
to the demo.php and client.php files but still I am unable to connect to 
the server. It does basically nothing and displays not complains. You can 
try what I have at http://dutodj.io.tudelft.nl/demo/php/demo.php or 
/client.php It is frustrating me.... Grrrr.

My configuration is as follows
Gift runs on port 12789
image collection /home/johnrpo/public_html/imagedatabase
I have given the following permissions to the files (just in case that was 
the problem)

-rw-rw-rw-    1 johnrpo  johnrpo      8333 Nov  1 01:58 gift-config.mrml
-rwxrw-r--    1 johnrpo  johnrpo       291 Oct 31 18:24 
gift-embed-perl-modules.pl
drwxr-xr-x    3 johnrpo  johnrpo      4096 Oct 31 18:24 gift-indexing-data
-rw-rw-rw-    1 johnrpo  johnrpo      5593 Nov  1 13:40 
gift-last-in-message.mrml
-rw-rw-rw-    1 johnrpo  johnrpo      9460 Nov  1 13:40 
gift-last-out-message.mrml
-rw-rw-rw-    1 johnrpo  johnrpo   1140685 Nov  4 12:17 gift-log.mrml
-rw-rw-r--    1 johnrpo  johnrpo        12 Nov  4 12:17 gift-port.txt

I have also given 775 attribs to the directory where the php interface is 
located.

Help in this issue is HIGHLY required and appreciated.
N.B. There is no version number for the interface,  but I downloaded it 
last week.


Cheers,




________________________________________
John Restrepo <address@hidden>
TU Delft
Industrieel Ontwerpen
Landbergstraat 15 Kamer 10-4B-39
2628CE Delft
The Netherlands
Phone +31 15 278-5146 Fax +31 15 278-7179
________________________________________