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Topics - Lichtsucher

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1
Dear Sanctuary owners, Dear Forum users,

again it's time for a small proposal about the work done in the last weaks. Or this time, days, as most of the work one done in the last days, the first time I could work on something fun for some weeks.
Again I choosed to send in a combined proposal, at it seems a lot easier to handle than multiple smaller proposals, I hope this is ok for everybody.
The focus of work was on updating biblepay-central and make it more awesome. I wanted to make it more like a toolbox or a swiss army knife, something that is not in competition with the regular website, but adds a usefull set of functions. To make this happen, new functions were added, but also the design was changed a lot to make it look quite different from a regular website, and more like something like dash ninja.

Biblepay Central
As written above, a lot had happend with biblepay-central in the last days. The main work:

1. Proof of Distributed Computing update view (4h)
This was done shortly after the last proposal and shows the podc_updates found in the blockchain. Usefull if you want to know if the biblepay client is doing the right podc_updates without needing to sit at your pc.
It took me some time to figure out who to get these information for all users, but now it works fine.

2. Improved the documentations and How-Tos (6h)
No guide out that can't be improved. This is true for the guids of biblepay-central, too. As they seem to be one of the main sources to introduce new persons to the mining in biblepay, it is very important to keep them correct.
My work includes updating all screenshots that were out of date, fixing spelling errors, improved sentences and adding small new infos.
I also added a multi-pc mining guide and laid the foundation for an upcoming WCG guide.

3. Redesign (6h)
The old biblepay-central design was like a lot of websites, and that was a problem. It was never intended to be a competition to the main homepage, to more of an addition to that.
To ensure that all people understand that, the design was changed a lot. Plus the new design is a lot more clear, while at the same time showing more information on one screen.

4. Revamped overview (8h)
As part of the redesign, I changed the overview/startpage of biblepay-central to fit more information on it. Some of the boxes are unchanged, only reordered, but must are changed deeply to show the really usefull infos. The whole page is build from scratch, no old code was reused, as the internal working is very different. The change might be look small from the outside, but it was a very important refactoring.
This was needed, as I plan to offer and option to personalize the frontpage later on (not yet started).

5. Proposal view finished (4h)
The proposal view on biblepay-central was startes some weeks ago, but was never working as intended, a thorn in the side...
But with the redesign I found the worst bugs, and now it looks good and is working as it should.
The idea behind this section of biblepay is to give users the best possible overview of the current proposals, without hiding any useful information, and combining this with nice looking and useful charts on top. You can even visit older superblocks to see what was voted on in the past.
More features will be added in the future, like a view which masternode had voted what, plus a detail view for every proposal.

6. Masternode List (2h)
Completly new is the Masternode Section of BIblepay-Central. It gives you a nice and short overview of all existing Masternodes.
Future releases will see a detail page per Masternode, with payment infos, changelog (status changes) and other information available

7. Login & Alert (10h)
Last, but not least, is the new Login and Alert function on biblepay central. This the new release, users can register on the site and mark Masternodes, PoDC User and Proposals, so that they get alerted if something changes there. Like if a Masternode changes his status from ENABLED something else, or if a proposal gets votes. Or if a user gets a payment from podc.
This is a very important change, as it opens the gates to a lot more cool features, like the personalisation (see above).
To make this possible, most of the code had to be touched, refactored or replaced. But I'm optimistic that it is worth it.
Important: The system is NOT sending our alerts right now, as I still need to test it enough, before I "spam" users.
Right now, there are still bugs in the new biblepay-central release, but I plan to fix them asap.

Ubuntu Packages
Debug time: 5h
As most of you will know, I'm also building the Ubuntu packages for biblepay. Last month a new Ubuntu Version  18.04 was released. Sadly, Biblepay won't compile on that system right now. It took quite some time to understand the problem, or better to understand that external help was needed. It took me some hours to check all possible problems by myself, before thesnat21 could explained me the problem in detail:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2388064.msg37795812#msg37795812
The problem is not fixed yet, but at least we now know whats happening.

Purepool
As always, no work on the pool is part of the proposal, but I like to use this space here to keep you updated.

1. Error informations
The pool shows (added in the last weeks) if a worker pushes invaldi solutions. Usefull to debug broken workers.

2. Rating was removed
With the improved solution checking, the rating of all miners is fine, so the function was removed. The old 150% rule is no longer used.
That's it for the pool. Not much todo here, it simply works. Stability is my main target.

Calculation
Calculation in EURO:

1 BBP: EUR 0,0030 (coinmarketcap)
Per Hour: 40/h

Time Log:
Biblepay-Central: 40h
Ubuntu Packages: 5h

Budget: IT
Requested budged for this proposal:  600.000 BBP (45h @ 40)



P.S.: The proposal itself will be online soon

2
Dear Sanctuary owners, Dear Forum users,

we had seem some awesome new things for Biblepay in the last days, like the upcoming Biblepay Mobile Wallet, which looks fantastic. It is great to know that Biblepay is still so powerful and alive. My own work is a little bit smaller this time, and not as great as the Mobile Wallet, but I still hope that it is part of the overall movement to make Biblepay great.
Again I choosed to send in a combined proposal, at it seems a lot easier to handle than multiple smaller proposals, I hope this is ok for everybody.

My work this month was focused on fine tuning the projects I started the last month, make them more stable, more useful and fix some small problems. I personally think that is very important to not only start projects, but to maintain them :)

Biblepay Central
It makes me really happy to see Biblepay Central used by so many users, as you can often see it in discussions when it is used in links. But nothing is perfect, and there is still a lot todo with Biblepay Central. My work this month related to Biblepay Central was:

1. Improving the Mining How-To
I'm proud of this how to, and how it helps so many newcomers. Most of the time this month I fixed smaller spelling mistakes, updated all the sections to reflect the current situation with biblepay and added more informations for experienced users. I also integrated a lot of fantastic feedback and helpful ideas from other users into the guide. Thanks to all users who submitted text for fixes for the guide.
Plus I improved the FAQ section, to help users solve some basic problems on their own. The new entries are based upon standard problems I saw in the forums.
Indeed, feedback is still very welcome :)

2. "How to get Biblepay Coins" Section added
The "How to get Biblepay Coins" section was added to help new users start with biblepay mining, as it requires some coins in their wallet. It is a small list of things users can do to start getting coins. Nothing big, but I hope it leads them in the right direction.

3. Mobile view improved
Last, still very important: I improved the mobile view of Biblepay Central by ensuring that every element of the page is responsive, even all of the tables. I used a nice trick to transform the tables into lists that works great on mobile devices.
In addition, I reworked some Graphics and Charts to fix the mobile screens, and fixed some css and html errors.

Ubuntu Packages
A lot of feedback I get suggests that the Ubuntu packages are used by many users right now. This is good, as this is reasons why they exists. But while they work good, not always was I fast enough in creating new packages when important changes happen. The reason is that I create the packages manually, as I want to ensure that everything is fine.
To solve this problem, I made some changes, but they took surprisingly much time, as launchpad is often a little bit... unstable.

1. Nightly Builds service
Yes, you read right, Biblepay now has a Ubuntu Packages Nightly Build PPA: https://launchpad.net/~biblepay/+archive/ubuntu/nightly
A new server of mine (as it contains the secret gpg keys, it can't be one of the existing servers for security reasons) is looking for new commits on the github repository of biblepay and creates a new package every hour if something had been changed.

2. Created a Biblepay Team on Launchpad
The current Biblepay Ubuntu PPA contains my own username, but it is now so widely used, that it seems better to rename it. To do that, I started a Biblepay-Team on Launchpad, so other users could be invited, too.
The Team has the same configuration, so we still have packages for ARM (2x), i386 and x64 available.

For the next month, I will maintain both PPAs (my own and the team), When I'm sure that the team PPA works well, I will anounce the end of life for my own PPA later.

3. The PPA is now self-containing
Before this change, users needed to add the biblepay AND the bitcoin PPA. But now, the biblepay PPA contains everything a user needs, including the barkley libdb packages. It took some time to make this work, as Launchpad won't compile the packages, but now it seems to be as stable as the bitcoin PPA for these packages.
It looked weird that we needed the Bitcoin PPA, I think it looks much more profesional without it.

4. Preparing for Bionic (Ubuntu 18.04)
End of this month, Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic will be released. I started to support it, but Launchpad fails at compiling packages for it right now, so we need to wait some time until packages will be available. Not all dependencies seems to be ok right now. It took some hours to understand this problem...

5. Updated the Wiki
Indeed, I updated the official Biblepay Wiki to reflect the changes above. I also removed the "Unofficial" from the PPA, as I hope that I proved my trustworthiness, so that the PPA now looks more inviting for users.

Hosting
For the first time, I want to ask for support in the hosting costs. In didn't want to do this, but the number of servers is growing, and a little bit of support would be fantastic. This does NOT include the servers for Purepool.

Servers:
1. Biblepay-Central
2. Biblepay-Central Explorer
3. Nightly-Build Server

Including Domains, Backups and Hosting, this makes 250 EUR for 12 month.

Purepool
Indeed, as last month, these changes are not part of the proposal, but I want to list them for your information.

1. Checking the validity of the CPID
With the great help of Rob (he added a very important new output/check to the biblepay client), the pool can now check if the CPID is valid, and if the solutions submitted helps finding blocks. Makes the pool even more fair.

Calculation
Calculation in EURO:

1 BBP: EUR 0,0027 (coinmarketcap)
Per Hour: 40/h

Time Log:
Biblepay-Central: 10h
Ubuntu Packages: 12h

Budget: IT
Requested budged for this proposal: 418'518 BBP (22h @ 40 + 250eur)

3
Dear Sanctuary owners, Dear Forum users,

exactly two month after my first proposal, it is a good time to they hello again and tell you about my work of the last 60 days and why I now a new proposal. In the following text, I will show you my work and the benefits it has for Biblepay. This proposal is for a whole set of interconnected projects, that are created to make Biblepay easier for everyone.

As must of you will agree, a good community need a good ecosystem, websites that supports the community, documentations that help new users to start painfree, software that is easy to setup. In my first proposal, I talked about the Ubuntu Packages I created. I got very good feedback later on these packages, and it showed me how important it is, to make things easier.

To do that, I created a couple of useful and powerful tools, websites and documentations:

1. Continued building Ubuntu packages
As a proof of my reliability, you might have noticed, that Ubuntu packages are still build ;) They are still started by hand, to prevent the build&sendout of an unfinished commit.
URL: https://launchpad.net/~lichtsucher/+archive/ubuntu/biblepay

2. Mining How-To
I hope most of you had already seen it. As we started a little bit early with PoDC, no real easy documentation was available. So I decided to sleep a little bit less and work a little bit more, and created a Step-by-Step Guide for newcomers to Biblepay Mining. The response was very good so far, and I hope it will help a lot of users.
URL: https://www.biblepay-central.org/en/mining-how-to/

It was a lot of work to create this How-To, as it includes a lot of testing, creating new accounts and even running some work on these accounts, to ensure that I hadn't missed something. But it payed off :)

3. Purepool Mining pool
The pool is not part of this proposal, as I agreed with Rob that we keep the Pools out of these for now.
But it was an important part of my steps into creating userfriendly websites for Biblepay. The fantastic feedback I got for that Pool was one reason why I created the next important site:

4. Biblepay Central
We already have very nice homepage, and I like it. But it is hard to create a Website that has a focus on every aspect of something as complex as Biblepay. A good way of solving such a probem is by created specialiced sub-sites, that try to be perfect in there category.
Biblepay-Central is such a site. I created it as a tech-centred community-hub. It is itself not a community, more a place that points you in the right direction. A place you visit every day, look up for the newest statistics and use the links to go to places you might not now.
It tries to make all important information available on one place, like the current prices on the exchanges, or your personal PoDC status. Or, in very short time, a very nice overview of all proposals ;)
It targets newcomers and old users, hold documentations and links to all important places, even some most old users might have forgotten already ;)
As it is an always evolving site, it will never be "complete", but will be worked on in the future. The proposal include the parts already build.
URL: https://www.biblepay-central.org/en/

And indeed, as always: Biblepay Central is Open Source: https://github.com/Lichtsucher/biblepaycentral

Please also have a look at the PoDC User page: https://www.biblepay-central.org/en/podc/user/1981209/
It is very new, it might still have bugs, but I think it is a great addition for Biblepay.
You can access your own user by using the front page https://www.biblepay-central.org and enter your username, CPID oder Biblepay Address in the "User lookup" field in the middle of the page. You can also see the Leaderboard there.

5. A Blockchain Explorer
Sadly, our second Blockchain Explorer had gone offline, so we needed a replacement. I created one, based on the same base as the original Explorer. It is already online and can be used. We always should have more then one explorer, as they are used by other sites to get statistics about biblepay.
URL: https://explorer.biblepay-central.org/

Benefits for Biblepay

Because of my work above, new users get an easier start into Biblepay, are more likely to stay and be active part of the Community. It made it more likely, that they will become Investors, which is indeed good for everybody.
Aside from that, Biblepay Central and the Blockchain Explorer are usefull for old users, too. Especially the new PoDC User Status page is hopefully an important place for most users from now on.
The same will be done for the proposals, and making them visible to the world, not only the registered pool users.

Future

I hope that you will accept my proposal and help me by supporting me in being an active part of the developing community of Biblepay.
I already have more work on my list, that incluses (and more):
- Writing an easier documentation for PoDC itself
- Improving the Mining How-To even further. Including information about Staking and others
- Created the proposal section on the Biblepay-Central page
- Now that Rob had created a fixed layout for the version numbers, there could be a Nightly-Build Ubuntu Package Service
- Improving on the "How to get Biblepay" Guide on Biblepay-Central
- Adding an API to Biblepay Central to allow access to proposal and PoDC statistics
But indeed, these are only Ideas ;)

Calculation
Calculation in EURO:

1 BBP: EUR 0,0024 (18 Mar 2018, 22:39 CET, coinmarketcap)
30 per/h Group A
40 per/h Group B

Time log:
Group A:
- Package Building in the last 60 days: 4 hours
- Mining How-To (includes testing): 11 hours
= 15h

Group B:
- Biblepay Central: 35 hours
- 2. Blockchain explorer: 5 hours
= 40h

Budget: IT
Requested budged for this proposal: 854'166 BBP (15 hrs @ 30 + 40 hrs @ 40)




4
Dear Sanctuary owners, Dear Forum users,

with great joy I want to announce the first version of an (unofficial) ubuntu package repository to the Biblepay community. In the course of a couple of days containing very hard and long work, I was able to bring the existing biblepay code to the modern world of package management.

URL of the PPA repository: https://launchpad.net/~lichtsucher/+archive/ubuntu/biblepay

But it is not only the repository, it is the whole workflow of creating and managing ubuntu packages that was solved. A new subproject (https://github.com/Lichtsucher/biblepay-deb-builder) was started that streamlines the process and make it available for everybody. Documentation included. An official repository would be very easy to setup and maintain.

In the hopes that future users of Biblepay will benefit of the very easy installation and easy-to-update nature of such packages, I hope that you will accept my proposal.

With all that said, I really need to get some sleep ;)

Features for the users
  • Easy installation, Desktop with Icons and Menu entries
  • Separate Packages for biblepay-qt and biblepayd/biblepay-cli
  • Quick update with apt-get upgrade
  • No compilation hazzle, seconds of download time version minutes or hours of compilation time
  • Easy-to-follow howto for installation in the wiki: http://wiki.biblepay.org/Ubuntu_Packages
  • Launchpad PPA is more trustworthy then most binary releases *1
  • Binaries for different ubuntu versions and plattforms (i386 & amd64)

*1 = The code is build by launchpad and everybody can download the source code that was used to verify it.

Features for the developers
  • New project that simplifies the workflow: https://github.com/Lichtsucher/biblepay-deb-builder
  • Workflow for upload to PPA
  • Supports local deb building, too (like for custom builds)
  • Less questions from newcomers about problems with the compilation
  • Creating of deb file requires only 2 short steps: Update changelog + build/upload
  • Builds multiple versions at the same time: Multiple ubuntu releases and plattforms (i386 & amd64) build with one run

Benefits for Biblepay
  • Looks more professional than requiring to compile the code
  • A must have for desktop users on Ubuntu, compilation isn't common there
  • Less Users are scared away (by compiling the source code)
  • More users = better for the project as a whole
  • Helps admins of bigger serverfarms to keep there servers up-to-date

Work done
  • Preparation: Investigation the best way of deploying deb files for a project like biblepay. Tested repositories via webserver, Amazon S3 upload and PPA. PPA won, as it was the easiest on the long run.
  • Started the project "biblepay-deb-builder" to local build deb-files
  • Fixed the old contrib/debian folder. Created pull request (https://github.com/biblepay/biblepay/pull/11)
  • Bug hunt: Got problems with qt4 build of the ui that costs me hours of understanding it, seems to be a bug in biblepay that was already fixed in dashpay: https://github.com/dashpay/dash/pull/1672
  • Improved biblepay-deb-builder to support PPA Builds (source code builds)
  • Improved the script to use Docker, to support different ubuntu versions
  • Wrote a detailed howto for the setup of a launchpad PPA
  • Wrote a Wiki page how to install the debian package
  • Tested the whole setup on Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04 (i386 and x86) with server version and desktop version, plus Lubuntu as a test for a more exotic version.

I still want to create a version for debian to, I'm currently investigating how to make that possible with PPA.

Calculation
Calculation in EURO:

1 BBP: EUR 0,0055 (19 Jan 2018, 10:00 CET, coinmarketcap)
30EUR/h - Local low rate for a normal DevOp

Time log:
5 hrs: Preparation and Investigation
15 hrs: Project setup, contrib/debian fixing, bug searching, first builds
15 hrs: Add PPA support, PPA setup, troubleshooting (ppa has horrible error messages...), ppa documentation (README.md)
5 hrs: Installation Wiki and testing the setup with different ubuntu versions
= 40 hrs

Budget: IT
Requested budged for this proposal: 216'785 BBP (40 hrs @ 30 EUR + costs of the proposal)


Relevant Links:
Biblepay-Deb-Builder:
https://github.com/Lichtsucher/biblepay-deb-builder

Launchpad PPA Repository:
https://launchpad.net/~lichtsucher/+archive/ubuntu/biblepay

Pull Request:
https://github.com/biblepay/biblepay/pull/11




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