# $Id: README,v 1.3 2004/11/06 02:48:01 asc Exp $

The 'so-called w5 application' is a working title for a cross-platform [1]
GUI application to display random images polled from a list of
user-defined servers.

'w5' is short for the phrase 'who, what, where, when, why' which are
the optional metadata that a server may return, and the client will
display, with each image.

The application can also store a compact lookup table (one per server)
of images that it has already seen. The client can then pass it to a
server and the latter can use it to check for duplicated before
sending back an image. *

The lookup tables are implemented using Bloom Filters which are
described in detail at : 

  http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/04/08/bloom_filters.html

The various implementations of Bloom Filters are not yet compatible
across languages so its promise is so-far limited to servers written
in Python.

The current release of the application is 1.0 alpha 7.
  
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[1] Well, Windows and the various flavours of Unix anyway. I have
    a working version for MacOS X which uses wxPython 2.5 that I
    will release soon.