If you are a past Walnut user, i.e. you have a Walnut database that you used with DCedar, you need to copy all of your Walnut files to either an NFS server or to your workstation's local disk. Unfortunately, your Walnut files were most likely on an Alpine server that no longer exists. You may be able to get them from some archive, or just pretend to be a new user. The files that you need are:

If you are a new user, create empty files with the above mentioned names. These should all reside in the same directory (preferably one that is backed up). The only file that cannot be empty to start with is the Walnut.root file. Copy WalnutTemplate.root from the release directory as a starting point.

Make sure that the files are writeable. The Cedar copy command seems to create UNIX files with only read permission. You may need to use the UNIX "chmod" command to add write permission to the files.

You need to create the database that Walnut uses. First, change to the directory in which you want the database to reside. LoganBerry can only run in a "ux" directory. Next, you build a database with either a full or minimal schema. If you want to use Wallaby, the message browser, then you should have a full schema, otherwise you are better off with a minimal schema. (Wallaby works with a minimal schema but it is real slow.)

To create a database with the minimal schema, type the following:

This will give you an empty LoganBerry database in the current directory. The database will have a single log file and three indices (the minimum set).

To create a database with the full schema, type the following:

This will give you an empty LoganBerry database with a single log file and six indices.

By the way, LoganBerry schema files are real DF files. This means that you can smodel them to some other place. If you want to smodel a database that you create using LBCreate, you will probably need to edit the DF file to change the directory statements.

You need to edit your Walnut.root file so that it points at the LoganBerry database that you just created. Be careful not to introduce Tioga formatting to the file while you are editing it. The root file contains a bunch of entries separated by blank lines. Find the line in the file that says "Database". Change the line below this one so that it contains the full pathname of the database that you created in step 2. For instance, your Walnut.root should contain something like:

If you started with an old Walnut root file, find the entries that start with "SegmentID" and "SegmentIndex". Remove these two entries from the root file. They are no longer needed and, in fact, are no longer allowed.

Lastly, if you want to be able to retrieve new mail using Walnut, change the "MailFor" entry. It currently should contain your Grapevine rname; change it to your XNS name (I believe that just having your last name will work for most people, though I'm not sure. I'll look into this.). If you do not care about reading new mail, you can leave the "MailFor" entry as it is; do not remove it.

Everything else in the file should remain the same.

The set of basic user profile options for Walnut has not changed, though new ones have been added (see below). So, you may want to copy the ones that you used in DCedar or just leave them out completely and use the defaults. It is a good idea to at least have the Walnut.WalnutRootFile profile option set. This should point to the full pathname of your walnut root file (the one you copied in step 1 and edited in step 3). Your user profile should contain something like:

To use message appraising, you need to create a LoganBerry database to store your filters (aka appraisers) and one to store your annotations (aka appraisals). For instance, you might want to call these "TapAppraisersLB.df" and "TapAnnotationsLB.df". The simplest way to to this is to use the LBCreate command to create the schema and log files and then use the LBBuildIndices to build the indices, e.g.

The full names of these two LoganBerry databases should be specified in your user profile entries: WallTapestry.FilterDB and WallTapestry.AnnotationDB. Your user profile might contain something like (see below for a full description of the new user profile entries):

The command names have not changed. That is, you still type "Walnut" to start the mail reading tool. Be sure to do a "XNSLogin" before starting WallTapestry if you want to retrieve new mail. Type "Walnut -n" if you don't want it to retrieve new mail. The Walnut command can take an argument, namely the file name of a root file.

Initially, you will need to scavenge your walnut database. You can do this by typing "WalnutScavenge" either before or after Walnut is running. Scavenging your database can take awhile. (It took 2.5 hours to scavenge my 19 MByte log file.) I believe that if your machine crashes while scavenging, you will need to start over.

See WalnutDoc.tioga for details on how to use Walnut.

WallTapestry allows users to specify queries that get run against all new messages. Messages that match a particular query get assigned particular annotations, such as priority levels. The user can specify whether or not message set displayers should display a message's priority and which message sets are to be sorted by priority order. A new menu in each message set displayer permits users to change the ordering of messages in the displayer. A new menu in the Walnut window allows users to easily add new appraiser queries, list appraisers, and delete existing appraisers.

Each message has an associated "priority" or "interest" level. An interest level is a number between 0 and 100 (actually it could be any number). The interest level of a message is intended to denote the user's level of interest in the message. The default interest level for messages is 50 (though this can be changed in a user's profile).

Interest levels are attached to messages by appraisers when the messages arrive. An interest level is an annotation of type "Level" with an integer value, e.g. Level: 75. If a message has several annotations of type "Level", then the maximum value is taken as the message's interest level. An interest level is simply one of many possible types of annotations. It is the only one that WallTapestry currently looks at.

In the WallTapestry message set displayer, each message's "table of contents" is preceded by the message's interest level. For instance, a line of the displayer may contain "70> 23 Feb 90 Mark Weise... parcpad, ubicomp". The "70" is the message's interest level. Depending on the value of various user profile entries, the messages may be listed in interest-level order. That is, the highest level messages are at the top and the lowest level messages are at the bottom.

Each message set displayer has a notion of its current sort order. By default, messages in a displayer are listed in date order (the previous Walnut behavior). The user profile entries, WallTapestry.SortByDate and WallTapestry.SortByPriority, permit users to change the default ordering for various named message sets. Moreover, the "SortBy" menu button on each displayer, allows the user to change the current sort order. Clicking on this button gives a pop-up menu with the following sorting options: Date, Priority, Unread, Unread then Priority, Subject, Sender. Selecting a new order causes the displayer to be resorted by the selected order. This order also applies to new mail, as described below. Shift-selecting "SortBy" forces the displayer to be resorted even if the selected sort order is the same as the current sort order. This is useful for sorting new mail with the old. Changing the sort order for a message set does not change its default sort order. That is, each time the message set displayer is destroyed and then recreated, the default sort order is used.

As new messages are retrieved, they are added to the bottom of the Active displayer. Those messages within a group of messages that are retrieved at the same time are sorted according to the current sort order for the Active message set displayer. That is, if 5 new messages are retrieved, those 5 messages will be sorted in order, but they will not be interspersed with previously retrieved messages. (I'm not sure if this is ideal behavior.)

At any time, interest levels can be attached to old messages by reappraising them. The message set displayer's "MsgOps" menu contains two new operations for this purpose:

Both of these operations cause the message set displayer to be refreshed so that the correct priority level is displayed for the reannotated messages and they are displayed in the correct sort order.

Appraisers can be added, listed, modified, and deleted using a variety of tools. Simple appraisers can be created and managed using the "Appraisers" entry in the main WallTapestry menu. Clicking on this entry produces a pop-up menu with the following operations:

These operations are intended as a simple starting point for using the WallTapestry appraising capabilities. They are not the ultimate user interface. They do not even provide access to the full set of appraising and annotation capabilities.

Appraiser queries can be more complicated than those that can be added using "Add Appraiser". These queries can be arbitrary LoganQuery queries (such as those given as arguments to the LBQuery command). In particular, these queries can use various types of pattern matching and can refer to multiple fields of a message (see "Boolean Queries" in LoganQueryDoc.tioga for more details). Moreover, appraisers can add arbitrary annotations, i.e. more than just the interest level.

To add more complex appraisers, one can use the TapAddFilter command as described in TapestryProtoDoc.tioga. Any header field(s) of the message can be referenced in an appraiser query; these should be written in all lower case. For example:

Remember to click "Re-read Appraiser Database" after doing this or the new appraiser(s) will not be used until you next re-start WallTapestry. One can also add, delete, modify, or list appraisers using the LoganBerry browser directly on the appraiser database.

Suggestions for improved appraiser management tools are solicited. This is an ongoing area for investigation.

Debugging appraisers (i.e. understanding why certain appraisers matched certain messages) can be difficult. To aid in this process, an entry has been added to the message set displayer's "MsgOps" menu:

This operation is also available on the message displayer's "MsgOps" menu along with a couple of highlight operations:

The current implementation of "Highlight Msg's Priority" is quite simple. It highlights fields of the message that are mentioned in the query and words that occur in the query patterns. For example, if the query is "to: Joe AND from: Sam" then the following words will be highlighted wherever they occur in the message: "to:", "Joe", "from:", "Sam". This simple scheme words okay for most queries. It does not work for complex queries, i.e. queries involving regular expressions or soundex. It also may show portions of a message that did not contribute to the query, e.g. if "Joe" occurs in both the to: and cc: fields.

If you use the Tapestry clipping service, you can help out other Tapestry users by indicating Tapestry messages that you find particularly interesting or particularly uninteresting. To make this easy, two new buttons are available in the main menu at the top of WallTapestry's message displayer:

These buttons record your feedback in the Tapestry database. Normally, Tapestry records not only the fact that someone likes or dislikes a message, but also the name of the person making the recommendation. Clicking either "LikeIt" or "HateIt" with the right mouse button, rather than the left or middle button, records the feedback anonymously.

This user feedback can be accessed by Tapestry users' filter queries. For instance, a Tapestry user can have filter queries like "show me all messages that were recommended by at least one person" or "show me all Dave Barry articles that were recommended by Joe".

Currently these buttons have no effect for a message that does not reside in the Tapestry database, i.e. one that was not delivered by the Tapestry clipping service. One can imagine scenarios in which your appraisers make use of this feedback to adjust their behavior, i.e. they employ a learning algorithm; this is not currently done. Even so, you can be a good citizen by recommending messages to others.

When displaying a message, WallTapestry will prune uninteresting header fields of the message if so desired. For example, you can specify that you only want to see the "Subject" and "From" fields. In this case, WallTapestry will not display fields like "Received" or "Message-ID" or "Return-Path". WallTapestry keeps track of whether or not header pruning is desired. To turn header pruning on and off, the "MsgOps" menu in a message displayer contains the following entry:

By default, full headers are displayed. This can be changed by clicking on the menu entry described above or by setting the Walnut.PruneHeaders user profile entry to TRUE. By default the following header fields are considered interesting: Subject, From, To, Cc, and Date; all others are considered uninteresting and are elided if header pruning is turned on. To change the set of interesting header fields, add a Walnut.UnprunedHeaders entry to your user profile (see below).

Caveat: The headers for messages that include Tioga formatting are always shown in their entirety. In other words, header pruning currently only works for non-Tioga formatted messages, i.e. for messages that are received from non-Cedar users. This probably includes most of your messages, and undoubtedly includes all of your messages with lots of extraneous header items.

WallTapestry allows several messages to be selected within a message set at the same time. Operations that used to operate on the current selected message, now operate on the set of selected messages. For instance, you can select a range of messages and click on the "Delete" menu entry to delete the whole set or click "MoveTo" to move them or click on the "Display" menu entry to see a "mail movie."

To use these new selection features, set "Walnut.FancyNewMessageSelect: TRUE" in your user profile. This slightly changes the meaning of certain mouse clicks used to select messages within a message set. It enables multiple message In particular, the following mouse clicks cause the following actions (all other mouse clicks work as before, i.e. as described in WalnutDoc.tioga):

(FancyNewMessageSelect also changes the way "come from" works, but I don't know how; see Dan Swinehart for details.)

If you want to use WallTapestry the same way that you used Walnut in the DCedar world, then you can ignore this whole section and need not add any new entries to your user profile. If you want to try out the new functionality, then you will want to set some or all of these new user profile options: