Development

The Nvu Web Authoring System

Nvu (pronounced N-view) is a graphical web authoring application from Linspire. Nvu is intended to be an open-source alternative to Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver, it is designed for the non-technical user. It is an open-source project, the code has been released under an MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license. Daniel Glazman, the chief architect for Mozilla Composer, has been contracted by Linspire to be the lead developer and maintainer for the Nvu project. Nvu is based on the Mozilla Composer code, it relies on the Gecko layout engine for rendering HTML.

The main features of Nvu include:

• WYSIWYG web page editing.
• Creation of HTML code that works with most popular web browsers.
• Tabbed editing for working on multiple pages simultaneously.
• Independent undo/redo stacks for each tabbed window.
• HTML form, table, and template support.
• Support for Stylesheets.
• Integrated FTP file management for working remotely from the web server.
• An Nvu Site Manager GUI for managing web files and directories.
• A Color Picker GUI for visually selecting colors.
• A user-customizable toolbar for adding shortcuts.
• Extensibility via JavaScript add-ons.
• Support for calling the W3C's HTML validator.
• Support for the XHTML Friends Network (XFN).

Version 0.5 of Nvu was announced this week: "It include several enhancements in addition to: syntax highlighting, inbuilt spell checker, better horizontal and vertical rulers, Bidi control, smaller windows installer(6.5MB), etc."

The Nvu project FAQ explains the project in more detail. As with most GUI software, the screenshots reveal much of what the underlying code has to offer.

Linspire is planning on merging Nvu back into the main Mozilla CVS tree. The source code and a few binary distributions of Nvu are available here. It should be noted that the installation process for the binary tar file distributions is not well documented. A standard README file would be welcomed, as would .deb and .rpm files.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include new versions of Qsynth, Qjackctl, ZynAddSubFX, Phat, and Specimen. Also, there is a new In the pipeline page that chronicles the project development.

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Database Software

libgda/libgnomedb 1.1.99 released

Version 1.1.99 of libgda/libgnomedb, a framework for developing database-oriented applications on GNOME, is out with lots of changes and bug fixes.

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The PostgreSQL Weekly News for October 11, 2004 is available with the week's PostgreSQL database articles.

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ZODB 3.3 final released

Final version 3.3 of ZODB, the Zope Object Database, is out. "Since 3.3c1, some small fixes were made on code paths unique to Zope 2.8 usage (code not used by Zope X3, Zope 3, or by ZODB itself). And thanks to a 1-character change noted by Andreas Jung, the sizes of network messages exchanged between ZEO clients and servers are smaller now, up to a factor of 4 improvement in extreme cases."

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Embedded Systems

uClinux as an Embedded OS on a DSP (Linux Journal)

Michael and Juergen Hennerich explore the use of uClinux on a DSP platform in a Linux Journal article. "A uClinux Blackfin Processor development environment consists of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC cross compiler) and the binutils (linker, assembler and so on) for the Blackfin Processor. Additionally, some GNU tools such as awk, sed, make and bash, plus Tcl/Tk are needed, although they usually come as part of basic desktop Linux distributions."

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Libraries

GLib 2.4.7 released

Version 2.4.7 of GLib, a low-level core library for GTK+ and GNOME, is out with bug fixes, documentation updates, and improved translations.

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liboggz 0.8.5 Released

Version 0.8.5 of liboggz, a library for reading and writing Ogg files and streams, is out. Changes include the new oggzmerge tool, the OggzReadPage API, seeking improvements, a seek-stress example program, bug fixes, and more.

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Web Site Development

Quixote 1.2 released

Version 1.2 of Quixote, a web content management framework, is out. The CHANGES file lists one bug fix.

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Zope X3 3.0.0 RC 2 released

The second release candidate for Zope X3 3.0.0 is out with bug fixes. "Zope X3 is the next major Zope release and has been written from scratch based on the latest software design patterns and the experiences of Zope 2. The "X" in the name stands for "experimental", since this release does not try to provide any backward-compatibility to Zope 2."

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ZopeMag Weekly News

Issue #44 of the ZopeMag Weekly News is online with the latest Zope and Plone news.

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Google Your Site For Security Vulnerabilities (O'Reilly)

Nitesh Dhanjani uses Google to uncover web site vulnerabilities. "If Google stumbles across data that may expose sensitive information about your organization, Google will not hesitate to index it. The search engine does not discriminate against data it indexes. How can you tell if your secrets have gone public? You can use Google to your advantage with some specific search queries."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

QjackCtl 0.2.12 released!

Version 0.2.12 of QjackCtl, the Qt/GUI frontend for the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is out. Changes include display effect toggling changes, usx2y driver support, scaled connections/patchbay icons, new setup options, bug fixes, and more.

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Calendar Software

Calendar and Sunbird Help Project Launched (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has an announcement for the new CalendarHelp project. "Users of Mozilla Calendar and Sunbird, the standalone calendar, may be interested in the new CalendarHelp project at mozdev.org. Launching this week with a prototype for Sunbird only, the new project aims to provide end-user help for all Calendar's versions, platforms and languages. Expect to see prototypes for Thunderbird, Firefox and Mozilla Application Suite over the coming weeks. The project is currently looking for writers, reviewers and translators to contribute to the content."

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Desktop Environments

KDE 3.3.1 released

The KDE Project has released KDE 3.3.1. This is a maintenance and bugfix release; there's not a whole lot of new features. The KDE 3.3.1 changelog has the details.

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KDE-CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The October 8, 2004 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is online, here's the content summary: "KSpread improves Gnumeric export filter. Krita adds a crop tool. Kexi adds database command line options. gmail.google.com now works in Konqueror. Kicker clock supports NTP. Whither DBUS and KDE?"

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Thesis about Kolab, Task Juggler IDE, Helix-Qt, Blast from the Past (KDE.News)

A new KDE Quickies article looks at Kolab, Task Juggler IDE, Helix-Qt, and more.

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Desktop Publishing

JabRef 1.55 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.55 of JabRef, a BibTeX database GUI application, has been announced. "Highlights include (configurable) preview with and without abstract, remote Medline search, CiteSeer support, a new dialog for easily creating entries from plain text, a new panel for the Abstract in the entry editor, and numerous usability improvements. And, as usual, many bug fixes."

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Electronics

Open Collector Releases

Open Collector Releases The latest new electronics applications on Open Collector include Oregano 0.3.2, GRLIB IP Library Beta 0.11, and Icarus Verilog 20041004.

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Financial Applications

jPOS 1.4.8 has been released (SourceForge)

Version 1.4.8 of jPOS has been released. "jPOS is a Java[tm] based financial transaction library/framework that can be customized and extended in order to implement financial interchanges. This new version represents over an year of hard work that include bugfixes, performance tuning, new components, new TransactionManager framework, etc."

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Games

EntityForge 0.2.1 released

Version of EntityForge, a 3D graphical media display, animation and manipulation tool, has been released. Changes include an improved model part selection UI and a new md3 loader.

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gnome-games 2.8.1 is out

Version 2.8.1 of gnome-games is available "There are no new features, merely bug fixes and translation updates. Unless you are experiencing problems there is no need to upgrade."

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GUI Packages

GTK+ 2.4.13 released

Version 2.4.13 of GTK+ is out. "This is a bug fix release and is source and binary compatible with 2.4.0. This quick release was necessary to fix some size allocation problems in 2.4.11."

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Gtk2-Perl 2.8.1 is out

Stable version 2.8.1 of Gtk2-Perl, the Perl bindings to GTK+, is out. Changes include code cleanup, build fixes, documentation improvements, and more.

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wxWidgets 2.5.3 is out

Version 2.5.3 of wxWidgets, a multi-platform GUI toolkit, has been released. "This is an unstable development snapshot, for people interested in the new features in the development branch and prepared to put up with glitches that may not occur in the stable release."

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Interoperability

Wine Traffic

The October 8, 2004 edition of Wine Traffic is available with the latest Wine project news.

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Multimedia

GStreamer 0.8.7 released

Stable version 0.8.7 of GStreamer, a streaming multimedia framework, is out with bug fixes.

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Music Applications

QSynth 0.2.2 released

Version 0.2.2 of QSynth, a Qt/GUI frontend for Fluidsynth, is out with numerous changes and bug fixes.

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Office Applications

Gnumeric 1.3.91 announced

Version 1.3.91 of the Gnumeric spreadsheet is available. "I would have liked to characterise this as just stabilisation release, but there is more in here than bug fixes. Yaacov Zamir and Morten cleared out lots of old code and synced the cell printing to use the same pango generation we used for display. While that was going on Emmanuel added some nice eye candy to the plots, grid lines. I was surprised by how much they add to the charts. The docs are also shaping up nicely. Adrian could probably use some editorial/proofreading help folks."

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gcalctool v4.4.20 announced

Stable version 4.4.20 of gcalctool, the default GNOME desktop calculator, is out. This release coincides with GNOME 2.8.1 and adds some translation updates.

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Office Suites

OpenOffice.org Is Four Today

OpenOffice.org is celebrating its fourth birthday. "Tens of millions use the application daily; millions visit the project website monthly; thousands contribute to the project. There have been at least 31 million downloads since the project began--and that is not counting the millions registered by Red Hat, SuSE, or Mandrake Linux, which include OpenOffice.org in their distributions."

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Web Browsers

Epiphany 1.4.3 released

Version 1.4.3 of the Epiphany browser has been released, it features bug fixes. Epiphany 1.4.4 was also announced this week, it features more bug fixes.

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Miscellaneous

Dowser version 0.26 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.26 of Dowser, a multi-platform web search assistant, has been released. "Version 0.26 brings editable search filters such as "no shopping" and "no blogs". This version adds Teoma to the search engine list; there is also a working German translation. Added options to allow remote clients."

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GNOME CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor 0.3.1

Version 0.3.1 of the GNOME CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor is available with bug fixes.

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The Latex Beamer Class Version 3.00 is out (SourceForge)

Version 3.00 of the LaTeX beamer class, a class for creating video projector presentations, is available. "Most importantly, this new version comes with a very much improved theming mechanism. You can now change every aspect of your presentation easily and independently of everything else."

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PasswordSafe 2.06 released (SourceForge)

Version 2.06 of PasswordSafe has been released. "Password Safe is a password database utility. Users can keep their passwords securely encrypted on their computers. A single Safe Combination unlocks them all. This release has some nice new features, and a few minor bug fixes."

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The Caml Weekly News for October 5-12, 2004 is online with the latest Caml language information.

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Java

Using the ASM Toolkit for Bytecode Manipulation (O'ReillyNet)

Eugene Kuleshov introduces the ASM Toolkit on O'Reilly. "ASM is making inroads in the Java bytecode manipulation community--it's used by Groovy, AspectWerkz, BeanShell, and others--because of its light weight and good performance."

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Bridging the Gap: J2SE 5.0 Annotations (O'ReillyNet)

Kyle Downey explores Annotations in an O'Reilly article. "Annotations, a means of providing your own metadata for your code, are among the major features of J2SE 5.0, but you don't have to move to 5.0 to use them. Kyle Downey introduces annotations and their implementation in several Java 1.4-compatible forms."

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Ease Swing development with the TableModel Free framework (IBM developerWorks)

Michael Abernethy explores the TableModel Free framework on IBM developerWorks. "This article introduces the TableModel Free (TMF) framework which eliminates the need to use TableModels with Swing JTables. The TMF framework allows for more configurable JTables by moving all of table-specific data outside of the compiled code and into a configurable XML file. Framework developer and Java UI enthusiast Michael Abernethy walks you through TMF framework, helping you reduce the size of a TableModel from hundreds of lines of code to just a single line, making management a snap."

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Perl

Parrot 0.1.1 released! (use Perl)

Version 0.1.1 of Parrot has been announced. Changes include initial Python support, improved PIR syntax, reworked dynamic loading, library improvements, IA64 and hppa JIT support, bug fixes, and more.

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

This Week on perl5-porters for September 25 - October 3, 2004 has been published. Here's the content summary: "The new P5P summarizer is Scott Lanning. Read on for his latest summary, which is, in fact, his second one. In order to catch up with the Perl 5 development, he also wrote a summary for the month of september."

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The October 10, 2004 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is online with the following content summary: "New week, new summary, from the hands of our newly recruited summarizer. This time, thoughts on cross-compilation, threads, BSD, scary internals stuff, and other things."

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The October 11, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out with the week's Python article links.

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S

Statistical programming with R: Part 2 (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks looks at finding and analyzing anomalies using R. "True to its functional programming heritage, you can do most everything you want to do in R using plain declarative statements. Two features of R make imperative flow control superfluous in most cases. In the first place, you have already seen that most operations on collection objects work elementwise. There is no need to manually loop through a vector of data to do something to its elements, as you can simply do something to all the elements of a vector..."

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for October 11, 2004 is out with the week's Tcl/Tk news and resources.

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XML

Discover the flexibility of Schematron abstract patterns (IBM developerWorks)

Uche Ogbuji digs into Schematron on IBM developerWorks. "If you have the basics of an XML format in mind, but know that you will not be able to get everyone at the table to agree to every detail of the schema, consider Schematron abstract patterns. Schematron is probably the most powerful XML schema language available (and it can be much more than just a schema language). Its advanced features, especially abstract patterns, allow for schemata that you can quickly adapt to multiple variants of XML formats. This opens up extraordinary possibilities for XML schema, including the abilities to restrict XML formats and to make them generic and adaptable as well."

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Not Evil, Just Smelly (XML.com)

Edd Dumbill discusses Ted Nelson's XML is Evil essay on O'Reilly. "Nelson's article argues that inline markup, such as SGML and XML, is problematic. His alternative model comprises three layers: content, structure, and presentation. This is not coincidentally the model used by Xanadu, the hypertext system designed by Nelson and others. Xanadu's hypertext model is a closed world, where links never break, supporting copyright and version-management features. It sounds ideal. It is also widely unimplemented."

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Editors

gedit 2.8.1 released

Version 2.8.1 of gedit, the official text editor for the GNOME environment, is out. Changes include bug fixes and more.

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GHex 2.8.0 released

Version 2.8.0 of GHex, a hexidecimal editor, has been released. "A rather large amount of bugs has been squashed since 2.6.1, the preferences dialog's "Help" button now works, entry fields in dialogs are checked for sanity more strictly, handling of URIs when doing drag'n'drop has been fixed and the UI has been polished a bit." The find and replace dialog has also been improved.

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IDEs

Treebeard version 0.9.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.9.0 of Treebeard, a cross-platform XSLT IDE written in Java, has been released. "This latest version has a major UI overhaul and also includes the BSH bean shell for your scripting pleasure".

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