Development

Wired: a music production and creation system

The first official release (version 0.1) of Wired, a Linux-based audio and MIDI recording application, was announced this week.

Wired contrasts with Ardour, another multi-track audio recorder project that recommends the use of one of several expensive multi-track capable sound cards for best results. Also, Ardour does not include MIDI support, although it is a project goal. The Ardour project status has been stuck on the verge of the 1.0 release for a long time, we look forward to progress there.

The Wired features that have been implemented to date include:

• Multi-track audio recording/playback.
• Multi-track MIDI recording/playback.
• Support for an unlimited number of Audio and MIDI tracks.
• MIDI editing capabilities.
• Sequencer capabilities.
• Support for the ALSA and OSS audio drivers.
• Preliminary support for the JACK Audio Connection Kit.
• A plugin system that supports effects and sound sources.
• Support for wav, Midi, and AKAI CD file formats.
• Undo/Redo capability.
• An online help system.

Features that are planned for future releases include:

• A loop sampler with time-stretching capabilities.
• A beatbox for creating drum sequences
• A MIDI-controlled sampler.
• High pass, low pass, and notch filters.
• A compressor/limiter effect.
• An audio delay effect.

Wired appears to use the window manager within a window approach for managing most of its GUI components. See the screenshots page for examples.

Wired has been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the source code is available for download here. Dependencies include GTK2, wxWidgets, PortAudio, SoundTouch, and libsndfile.

Comments (5 posted)

System Applications

Audio Projects

ALSA 1.0.7 released

Following several alpha releases, version 1.0.7 of the ALSA sound driver is stable and ready for download.

Comments (none posted)

Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include new versions of Ecasound, Timemachine, the SWH LADSPA Plugins, and Lilypond.

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Database Software

Daffodil Software Open Sources replication tool (SourceForge)

Daffodil Software has released its Daffodil Replicator software under the GPL. "Daffodil Replicator will provide a unique option to users in certain respects. It supports heterogeneous databases including Oracle, DB2, SQL-Server, PostgreSQL, Derby and Daffodil DB. It is platform-independent by virtue of being built in Java, and supports bi-directional data replication. Now Open Source, it offers users the power to understand its architecture and code, and also modify it if required."

Comments (none posted)

phpPgAdmin 3.5 Released

Version 3.5 of phpPgAdmin has been announced. "A new major version of phpPgAdmin is now available. phpPgAdmin is a web-based administration tool for all 7.x and the new 8.0 version of PostgreSQL. Major emphasis on this release is in supporting all the new 8.0 features."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The November 9, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with the week's PostgreSQL database news.

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The November 15, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with the week's collection of PostgreSQL database news.

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RSS Feeds from PostgreSQL with SRSSS

SRSSS is a new project that can connect an PostgreSQL database to an RSS feed, according to this announcement. "The Simple RSS Service (SRSSS) generates and serves RSS feeds through a common interface via CGI-enabled webservers. It uses modules to extract items for feeds from various sources, and has a virtual filesystem where feeds can be read by CGI-clients."

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Libraries

GLib 2.5.6 (unstable) released

Unstable version 2.5.6 of GLib, the low-level core library for GTK+ and GNOME, is out with several changes. Testing is in order.

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Mail Software

DSPAM 3.2.2 released

Version 3.2.2 of DSPAM, a server-side statistical anti-spam filter is out. Changes are mainly bug fixes, see the release notes for details.

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spamprobe 1.1x4 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.1x4 of spamprobe, a bayesian spam filter, has been announced. "This release adds the final missing pieces to the new parser code. MBX files and Content-Length headers are now supported. Database cleanup when signals are caught has also been improved. I would like to move 1.1 into the stable branch fairly soon so if folks would test out this release and report any problems it would be a big help!"

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Web Site Development

Analog 5.92beta1 is out

Version 5.92beta1 of Analog, a web server log file analyzer, has been released. Starting with this version, the project license has been changed to the GPL. Firebird and Firefox are now in the recognized browsers list, see the what's new document for more information.

Comments (none posted)

New mnoGoSearch releases

New versions of mnoGoSearch-php and mnoGoSearch-php-extension are available from the mnoGoSearch web site search engine project.

Comments (none posted)

Build Your Own Blogging Application, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly has published part two in Matthew Russell's series on blogging software. "In part one, Matthew Russell showed you how to build a front end for your blogging app using Tcl/Tk and some XHTML fundamentals. Here in part two, he uses two parts Perl and a sprinkle of Bash to explain how to build the back end."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

New abcde version

Version 2.2.0 of abcde, a frontend to the cdparanoia CD ripper, is out. "It is a major release, with plenty of new features. See the changelog at www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php".

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Ecasound 2.3.5 released

Version 2.3.5 of Ecasound, a multi-track audio processing utility, is out. Here are the changes: "Various Mac OS X specific build issues have been resolved. Minor changes have been made to the OSS soundcard support to avoid limitations of certain OSS drivers. Many minor updates have been made to user documentation and to build system scripts."

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Business Applications

Grace 0.1.1 Released (SourceForge)

Version 0.1.1 of the Grace Receipting System is out. "The Grace Receipting System allows non-profits to track their donors and contributions, and prints receipts and reports."

Comments (none posted)

SQL-Ledger Version 2.4.4

Version 2.4.4 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, has been released. Changes include session control and cookie-based authentication, ship via search, bug fixes, and translation improvements.

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CAD

Nineteenth release of PythonCAD now available

Release 19 of PythonCAD, a Python-based CAD application, is out. "The nineteenth release of PythonCAD fixes a file saving bug found shortly after the eighteenth release was made public. The bug affected drawings that had text entities. A fix for this bug was found and tested by the bug reporter (thanks Ed Richley!) and confirmed to fix the problem."

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Data Visualization

Fl_2D_Gl_Contour 0.3 is out

A new release of Fl_2D_Gl_Contour and related widgets is available for FLTK. "Fl_2D_Gl_Contour, OpenGL based contour widget for Linux, it allow you to graph contour and color map of irregular data set, by now two-dimensional graphics are available but 3D graphis will be soon" See the developer's web site for more information.

Comments (none posted)

JGraphpad v5.1.0 Released (SourceForge)

Version 5.1.0 of JGraphpad, a graph component for Java, is out. "JGraphpad 5.1.0 fixes a number of minor bugs, corrects the default behaviour for various functionality and introduces several new features. Of note, the image export functionality is improved, GPUserObjects have a number of fixes and jumping to ports behaviour has been corrected."

Comments (none posted)

JUNG 1.5 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.5 of JUNG, the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework, is available. "The current distribution of JUNG includes implementations of a number of algorithms from graph theory, data mining, and social network analysis, such as routines for clustering, decomposition, optimization, random graph generation, statistical analysis, and calculation of network distances, flows, and importance measures (centrality, PageRank, HITS, etc.)."

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Desktop Environments

The Upcoming Changes of the Gnome Subsystem (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop reports that Anders Carlsson of Imendio outlines and explains the API changes that are coming with the Gnome 3.0 release in the future. "One of the most horrible parts of libgnome is GnomeProgram; the code that handles start-up and argument parsing for GNOME programs. This code also sets up the program to be more "integrated" with the rest of GNOME. For example, when your application segfaults you get this nice dialog allowing you to report a bug. When you have accessibility enabled, GnomeProgram calls the necessary hooks for that. All that is done by GnomeProgram."

Comments (1 posted)

GARNOME 2.9.1

Version 2.9.1 of Garnome, the leading-edge GNOME distribution, has been released. "This release incorporates the GNOME 2.9.1 Desktop & Developer Platform, as well the usual assortment of third-party updates to keep even the most seasoned developer frustrated beyond belief."

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KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The November 12, 2004 KDE CVS-Digest is online with the following content summary: "KJSEmbed QT events now work on Windows. Kdm adds themes. Media kioslave now can use HAL. Kate improves Java and Perl syntax highlighting. KWallet adds search, empty password support, and XML data import."

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Xfce 4.2 Release Candidate 1 is out

Release Candidate 1 of Xfce 4.2, a lightweight desktop environment, is available. "This first Release Candidate offers several new and awaited features in comparison with the previous 4.0 stable release, while continuing to be lightweight, including a brand new session manager, keyboard shortcut and desktop menu graphical editors, multihead support, "kiosk mode" support, a desktop menu plugin for the panel, CUPS and BSD-LPR printing support, and a new icon theme." See the Change Log file for more information.

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Desktop Publishing

Passepartout 0.6 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6 of Passepartout, a desktop publishing application for GNOME, has been announced. "Among the new features are PDF output (albeit with some limitations) and TrueType support. It also now uses FontConfig to find font files, an addition that should please and be a relief to users of previous versions."

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Writing "Learning PHP 5" (O'Reilly)

David Sklar describes the tools he used to write his latest book. "What are the tools and processes that I used to write Learning PHP 5? Each chapter (and appendix) is its own file, formatted with the Docbook Lite XML dialect. I used XEmacs to edit the files. XEmacs's xml-mode provides helpful assistance with well-formedness checking and context-sensitive tag insertion. It also works with XEmacs' font-lock mode to make tags, attributes, and other XML goodies appear in pretty colors for easier readability."

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Financial Applications

Grisbi (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org introduces the personal finance application Grisbi. "It's a cool financial/personnal accounting application written with Gnome and Gtk, and it is released under the GPL licence. It features budgeting, a Win32 port and GTK2 interface."

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Graphics

DiaCanvas2 0.14.2 is out

Version 0.14.2 of DiaCanvas2, a GTK+ 2 widget for working with diagrams, is available. This release features several bug fixes.

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GUI Packages

GTK+ 2.5.5 released

Unstable version 2.5.5 of the GTK+ GUI toolkit is available with numerous improvements and bug fixes.

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gtkmm 2.5.1 announced

Version 2.5.1 of gtkmm, a C++ interface to GTK+, has been released. "gtkmm 2.5 wraps new API in GTK+ 2.5, and is API/ABI-compatibile with gtkmm 2.4. The new API is unstable, until this become the API/ABI-stable gtkmm 2.6 when GTK+ 2.5 becomes the API-stable GTK+ 2.6."

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Imaging Applications

F-Spot 0.0.3 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.0.3 of F-Spot has been released. "After quite some time from the previous release, the Mono-based, Novell-sponsored, F-Spot, an image catalog/viewer application, reached version 0.0.3." See the changes document for details.

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Instant Messaging

Gaim 1.0.3 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 1.0.3 of Gaim, an internet chat application, has been announced. "This is a bug-fix release."

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Multimedia

gst-python 0.8.0 announced

Stable version 0.8.0 of gst-python, a set of python bindings for the GStreamer streaming media framework, is out. "gst-python is a set of python bindings for GStreamer, it has a good coverage and is already used by several applications. The tarball contains minimalist examples, for example a video player and a command line based music player."

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News Readers

Liferea 0.6.2 has been announced

Version 0.6.2 of Liferea, the Linux Feed Reader, has been released. Changes include cookie support, security improvements, http authentication support, and bug fixes.

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Office Suites

ooo-build-1.3.6 announced

Build 1.3.6 of the ooo-build fork of OpenOffice.org is available. "This package contains Desktop integration work for OpenOffice.org, several back-ported features & speedups, and a much simplified build wrapper, making an OO.o build / install possible for the common man. It is a staging ground for up-streaming patches to stock OO.o."

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Video Applications

Kino Tips: Installing from Scratch and Exporting MPEG Videos (Linux Journal)

Olexiy Tykhomyrov and Denys Tonkonog explain the process of building and installing Kino, a video editing application in an article on Linux Journal. "Kino is not a monolith program, but it does call some extra stuff and uses many libraries while running. A tree of the main dependencies is shown below in Figure 1. In order to compile Kino successfully, you have to install all the needed packages beforehand and compile them from source. Hopefully, the configuration script will help you determine the required software."

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Web Browsers

Epiphany 1.2.10 released

Stable version 1.2.10 of the Epiphany browser has been released. It fixes a tabbed browsing security vulnerability.

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Epiphany 1.4.5 released

Development version 1.4.5 of the Epiphany browser has been released. It fixes a tabbed browsing security vulnerability and includes many more changes.

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GNOME-Fx 1.0.0: "GNOME Firefox themes"

Version 1.0.0 of GNOME-Fx, the GNOME Firefox themes, has been released. "I finally got around updating the GNOME-Fx themes for Firefox 1.0. No big changes, just support for Firefox 1.0 The GNOME-Fx themes try to make Firefox look like a native GNOME application. Version 0.10.1 is a huge improvement because the themes use more native looking GTK widgets and also the help is GNOMEized."

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Miscellaneous

Browser Bookmarks Menu (Gnome Applet) 0.3

Version 0.3 of the GNOME Browser Bookmarks Menu applet is available. "Version 0.3 was supposed to focus on packaging and installation, but that turned out to be more complicated than I was expecting (and any help would be appreciated). So I went for features instead."

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Coaster 0.1.2 announced

Version 0.1.2 of Coaster, a CD burning application, is available. New features include undo/redo, icon themes and caching, and more.

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gperfmeter v2.0.25 released

Stable version v2.0.25 of gperfmeter, the GNOME performance meter, has been released. "This release is so that there is an official distribution tarball for the possible inclusion of gnome-perfmeter in the JDS release for Solaris 10."

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Languages and Tools

C

Inside memory management

Jonathan Bartlett discusses memory management on IBM developerWorks. "Get an overview of the memory management techniques that are available to Linux programmers, focusing on the C language but applicable to other languages as well. This article gives you the details of how memory management works, and then goes on to show how to manage memory manually, how to manage memory semi-manually using referencing counting or pooling, and how to manage memory automatically using garbage collection."

Comments (1 posted)

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The November 9-16, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the week's Caml language articles.

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Haskell

Haskell Communities and Activities Report

The November, 2004 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report is available with Haskell language coverage. "The Haskell Communities and Activities Report was initiated at the 2001 Haskell workshop, as a status report of the Haskell community as a whole, to be updated twice a year. The purpose is twofold: (a) to establish what communities, people and projects are out there, working with or on Haskell, and what their areas of interest are; (b) to feed back summary information about ongoing activities in the diverse Haskell sub-communities and amongst Haskell users (commercial or otherwise) to the Haskell Community as a whole." Thanks to Shae Matijs Erisson.

Comments (none posted)

Java

SableVM 1.1.7 Released (SourceForge)

Version 1.1.7 of SableVM, a Java Virtual Machine, is available. "In this version, we added an experimental generational garbage collector, we imported a new GNU Classpath snapshot, we added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath, we added user-friendly failure messages for bootstrap problems, we added added a profiling switch, we made sablevm-classpath install its files in standard locations, we made jikes and gcc be less verbose by default, and we made several important bugfixes and improvements."

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Extending Struts (O'ReillyNet)

Sunil Patil talks about extending struts on O'Reilly. "I have seen lot of projects where the developers implemented a proprietary MVC framework, not because they wanted to do something fundamentally different from Struts, but because they were not aware of how to extend Struts. You can get total control by developing your own MVC framework, but it also means you have to commit a lot of resources to it, something that may not be possible in projects with tight schedules."

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Memory Contention in J2EE Applications for Multiprocessor Platforms (O'Reilly)

Ramchandar Krishnamurthy and Deepak Goel look into multiprocessor J2EE memory contention issues on O'Reilly. "With the need for highly scalable J2EE applications in the enterprise environment, parallel processing of threads is required on multi-processor platforms. The memory requirements in the JVM heap for the processing of these threads and concurrent processing have caused to create performance and scalability bottlenecks in the deployment of these J2EE applications. This article explores the issue of synchronization of threads while accessing the memory within the JVM heap on a multi-processor platform for a J2EE application."

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ML

MLton 20041109 is out

Version 20041109 of MLton, the Standard ML compiler, is out. Changes include support for more platforms, MLBasis file support, dynamic libraries, new structures, and more.

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Perl

Perl 5.8.6 RC1 is out (use Perl)

Release Candidate 1 of Perl 5.8.6 is out. "This is a regular maintenance release for perl 5.8.x, providing bug fixes and integrating module updates from CPAN."

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Implementing Flood Control (O'Reilly)

Vladi Belperchinov-Shabanski uses perl to manage Flood Control in an O'Reilly article. "'Flood control' is a method of controlling the processing-rate of a stream of events. It can reject or postpone events until there are available resources (CPU, time, space, etc.) for them. Essentially the flood control restricts the number of events processed in a specific period of time."

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for November 15, 2004

The PHP Weekly Summary for November 15, 2004 is out. Topics include: BC, PostgreSQL and Boolean values, Upload progress meter cont, __get 'feature', php_fork, PDFlib versions, PDO meeting, Operator overloading, Date support, and Much ado.

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The November 10, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with another batch of Python article links.

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urwid 0.8.3 released

Version 0.8.3 of uruwid, a curses-based UI/widget library for Python, is available. Changes include support for CJK double-byte encodings, a word wrapping mode, support for regular and double width characters, and more.

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gnome-python 2.6.1 announced

Version 2.6.1 of gnome-python, the Python language wrappers for the GNOME APIs, is out. Changes include performance improvements, bug fixes, and more.

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Python 3D Software Collection

Mike C Fletcher has assembled the Python 3D Software Collection, "A small collection (51 packages) of pointers to Python software for working in three dimensions"

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PYRO: Python Robotics

Version 3.4.1 of the Python Robotics project is out. "Pyro is a library, environment, graphical user interface, and low-level drivers to explore AI and robotics using the Python language." Support has been added for the Sony Aibo robot, see the What's New document for release information.

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Ruby

One Man’s Journey of Dependency-Injected Discovery (Ruby Garden)

Jamis Buck describes the evolution of the Coopland project into Poseidon, and Ruby dependency injection issues in an article on the Ruby Garden.

Comments (none posted)

S

RPy 0.4.0 released

Version 0.4.0 of RPy is out. "RPy is a very simple, yet robust, Python interface to the R Programming Language. It can manage all kinds of R objects and can execute arbitrary R functions (including the graphic functions). All errors from the R language are converted to Python exceptions. Any module installed for the R system can be used from within Python." See the News page for release details.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The November 15, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with the latest Tcl/Tk article links.

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UML

Gaphor 0.7.0 announced

Version 0.7.0 of Gaphor, a Python-based UML modeling environment, is out. New features include an XMI export plugin, item alignment, an undo mechanism, copy/paste operation, and more.

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XML

Ali 0.4 was released

Version 0.4 of Ali is out with new UTF-8 support. "Ali is a simple to use C API to parse XML data. It's scanf like approach is much easier than using SAX or DOM. A tutorial, complete reference documentation, and code examples in the download are all provided. Ali is pronounced like "Alley""

Comments (none posted)

Announcing csv2xml version 0.5 (SourceForge)

Version 0.5 of csv2xml, a csv to xml converter, is out. "Version 0.5 has just been released, it is reccomended that people do not use versions earlier than 0.5 as it fixes a memory leak. The new version provides command line options for greater flexibility. Allowing the user to customise the xml output format, depending on users needs."

Comments (none posted)

Introduction to XML Events (IBM developerWorks)

Micah Dubinko introduces XML Events on IBM developerWorks. "A number of markup technologies involve attaching behaviors to specific parts of a document. XML Events is a W3C Recommendation that allows declarative attachment of a behavior -- which can be a predefined bundle of actions defined in XML or a more general call to a scripting language -- to a specific element. This article gives an overview of how XML Events came about, what it's useful for, and how it works."

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XML, the Web, and Beyond (O'Reilly)

Edd Dumbill covers developments in the XML world in his O'Reilly column. "Welcome to this week's column, in which I'm excited to be able to tell you about changes in prospect for next year's XML Europe conference, and report on a discussion about when multiple schemas for XML documents should be used."

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Build Tools

Got Project Automation? (O'ReillyNet)

Mike Clark presents an overview of project automation techniques on O'Reilly. "In his new book, Pragmatic Project Automation, Mike Clark gives you soup-to-nuts recipes for automating your software project: creating one-step builds with Ant, scheduling continuous builds with CruiseControl, generating software releases at the push of a button, installing and deploying applications with ease, and monitoring builds and running programs via email, RSS, your cell phone, and, yes, even lava lamps."

Comments (none posted)

Cross Assemblers

An MPLAB plugin for gputils

The gputils project (GNU Pic Utilities) has announced a new plugin that supports the Microchip mplab Universal Device Programmer.

Comments (none posted)

Debuggers

Emacs Mode for GDB (Linux Journal)

Nick Roberts introduces the Emacs interface to the GDB debugger. "Graphical front ends are available for GDB, including Insight, but they require a separate editor. Until now, Emacs used a mode that originally was written by Eric Raymond in 1992. This comprised of the GUD buffer, where GDB commands were entered as though on the command line, and the source buffer, where a arrow string ("=>") pointed to the current line of program execution. In this article, I describe a new mode, which I call GDB-UI, that is a part of the next release of Emacs (21.4) and offers the GUI features of many modern debuggers. The advantage of this mode over the other debuggers is the powerful features of Emacs are available for tasks such as editing and searching to provide a truly integrated development environment."

Comments (none posted)

IDEs

Wing IDE 2.0 announced

Version 2.0 of Wing, an IDE for Python, is available. "New features in Wing IDE 2.0 include a completely redesigned customizable user interface, call tips, syntax error indicators, editor tabs and splits, multi-file wildcard and regular expression searching, integrated documentation and tutorial, a German localization, and Unicode support."

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