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DevelopmentThe Sylpheed Email ClientSylpheed is a GTK+ based lightweight email client that is authored by Hiroyuki Yamamoto. According to the project FAQ, Sylpheed aims to be fast, graceful, intuitive, easy to configure, reliable and full of features. The name comes from the wind spirits, the Sylphs, representing the lightweight nature of the application.
Version 2.0.0 of Sylpheed was announced this week, it features a switch to GTK2, usability improvements, inline viewing of attached images, and more. The software was a breeze to configure, build, and install on a Fedora Core 3 system. Pre-compiled packages are available for several popular Linux distributions. Operation was simple and intuitive, as advertised. Your author is seriously considering a switch from the old reliable (and somewhat clunky by today's standards) exmh mail client to Sylpheed.
System Applications Audio Projects Alsa 1.0.10rc1 packages are availableVersion 1.0.10rc1 of the ALSA sound driver packages are available for testing: "all packages except alsa-firmare were released - version name is 1.0.10rc1. Please, test the packages and report the bugs (especially packaging and compilation problems) to the ALSA bug-tracking-system." See the change log file for details.
Clusters and Grids Open MPI code base now availableThe Open MPI Project has released their high-performance message passing library code under the BSD license. "Open MPI is a project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI) in order to build the best MPI library available. A completely new MPI-2 compliant implementation, Open MPI offers advantages for system and software vendors, application developers and computer science researchers."
Database Software Firebird 1.5.3 Release Candidate 1Release Candidate 1 of the Firebird 1.5.3 database is available. "The Firebird Project is pleased to announce a release candidate for the forthcoming Firebird 1.5.3 release, for testing. Download kits are available for Windows and Linux."
PhpPgAdmin 3.5.5 ReleasedVersion 3.5.5 of PhpPgAdmin has been announced, it features several bug fixes.
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe August 21, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out. Take a look for the latest PostgreSQL stories.
Embedded Systems BusyBox 1.01 releasedStable version 1.01 of BusyBox, a condensed collection of command-line utilities, is out. "A new stable release (BusyBox 1.01) is now available for download, containing over a hundred small fixes that have have cropped up since the 1.00 release."
Interoperability Samba 3.0.20 is AvailableVersion 3.0.20 of Samba has been announced. "This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes. This is a substantial upgrade from previous Samba 3.0.x releases."
LDAP Software LAT 0.7 ReleasedVersion 0.7 of LAT, the LDAP Administration Tool, is out with a number of new features.
Mail Software Gotmail 0.8.6 ReleasedVersion 0.8.6 of Gotmail is available. "The Gotmail project, a perl script which downloads mail from hotmail.com without user interaction, released version 0.8.6 today. This version adds support for running the script on the various Windows platforms. Additionally, thanks to new developer, Jos De Laender, Gotmail now has support for multiple languages. There are many new commandline options as well as several improvements with the packaging for the project."
Networking Tools aircrack 2.23 releasedStable version 2.23 of aircrack, a set of tools for auditing wireless networks, is out with bug fixes.
Web Site Development CherryPy for CGI programmers (IBM developerWorks)Leonard Richardson introduces CherryPy on IBM developerWorks. "The CherryPy application framework for Python makes Web applications easier to write than plain Common Gateway Interface (CGI). At the same time, it's simple -- not full of little-used features -- and easy to learn. This introduction shows everything needed to write Web applications with CherryPy."
Qwicap 1.3 Released (SourceForge)Version 1.3 of Qwicap has been announced. "Qwicap ("Quick Web Interface for Conventional Applications") is a Java web application development API based on Servlet, XHTML, and CSS2 technologies. It greatly simplifies development by dispensing with the usual hit-run-exit model of web applications, automates a variety of best-, or pretty-good-, practice behaviors, and provides a powerful XML "templating" engine to avoid mixing code and content. After more than two years of development, Qwicap has simultaneously reached version 1.3, and has been open-sourced under the LGPL." See the changes file for more information on this release.
scgi 1.7 releasedVersion 1.7 of scgi has been released. A bug fix for Apache2 mod_scgi and other changes are included.
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ecasound 2.4.3 releasedVersion 2.4.3 of Ecasound, a multi-track command line audio processing utility, is out. Here are the changes: "Support for the ALSA sequencer API has been added. A few bugs related to .ewf file processing have been fixed. A serious problem in the disk i/o subsystem, which caused system freezes in some conditions, has been fixed. Disk subsystem performance has also improved slighly in this release."
snd-ls 0.9.5.1 releasedVersion 0.9.5.1 of Snd-ls is out with many changes. "Snd-ls is a distribution of the sound editor Snd. Its target is people that don't know scheme very well, and don't want to spend too much time configuring Snd. It can also serve as a quick introduction to Snd and how it can be set up."
Sweep 0.8.4 ReleasedVersion 0.8.4 of Sweep, an audio editor and playback tool, is out. Changes include ALSA 1.0 support, translation work, and more.
Calendar Software pcal 4.9.0 releasedVersion 4.9.0 of `pcal', a program which generates PostScript- or HTML-format monthly/yearly calendars, has been announced. Changes include support for several new languages (and improved support for existing languages), ability to delete specific events, improved EPS image support, a Perl script for HTML/CGI access, additional sample calendar event files, additional sample character encoding/font test files, and various bug fixes. (Thanks to Bill Marr.)
Desktop Environments GNOME's Project RidleyThe GTK+ developers have announced a new initiative called "Project Ridley." The idea is to get rid of a number of the small libraries which follow GNOME applications around, merging their functionality into the core GTK+ toolkit. The end result will likely be the GTK+-3.0 release. More information can be found in the announcement (click below) or on the Project Ridley wiki page.
The story of two SVG libraries (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org covers the merging of the librsvg and libsvg SVG library projects. "The teams working on librsvg and libsvg have decided to join forces around the CVS version of librsvg. Thanks to the work of the librsvg team, mostly Caleb Moore, librsvg now can support multiple rendering backends, with libart and Cairo backends implemented."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Electronics GerbMerge 1.0 released (OpenCollector)Version 1.0 of GerbMerge, a panelizer for Gerber RS274X and Excellon files, has been announced. "New features include handling simple aperture macros, more than 99 apertures in input files, trimming Gerber/Excellon data to the board extents, configurable output filenames, better documentation, and panel margins to allow for extra space for tooling."
GUI Packages Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0.1 (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the release of Qt 4.0.1. "Among the over 450 bug fixes and optimizations are numerous improvements to raster engine, X11 engine and QPainterPath, significantly speeding a range of drawing processes and introduction of top-level window transparency on X11."
Music Applications Mondrian Project announcedThe Mondrian Project has been launched by Peter Brinkmann. "I would like to announce the Mondrian Project. Mondrian is an attempt to create a text-based setting for writing and performing music." Mondrian includes plugins for vi and emacs that turn your favorite text editor into a musical instrument.
Web Browsers Mozilla SVG Presentation at SVG Open 2005 (MozillaZine)MozillaZine covers a talk on Mozilla SVG developments. "The Mozilla Scalable Vector Graphics Project team gave a presentation entitled Past, Present, and Future of Mozilla SVG at the SVG Open 2005 conference in the Netherlands today. As well as detailing the current status of SVG in Mozilla, the talk also discussed the history of the Mozilla SVG project and some of the implementation problems the team faced. Future plans were also covered and the presentation included a demonstration of the SVG-powered MozMapEditor application."
Word Processors AbiWord 2.3.5 released (GnomeDesktop)AbiWord v2.3.5, aka AbiWord 2.4 beta 2, has been released. "This release is virtually identical to what will become AbiWord 2.4, but still contains some bugs that might the speed up the greenhouse effect or cause your house to fall over."
Miscellaneous PenguinTV 0.75 Released (GnomeDesktop)Version 0.75 of PenguinTV has been announced. "PenguinTV is a full-featured RSS, podcast, and video blog reading tool written in Python. It can be used by itself to download and view media, or you can copy the media files and a ready-made playlist to a portable mp3 player."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe August 16-23, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with the latest Caml language articles.
Haskell Haskell Weekly NewsThe August 23, 2005 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online with the latest Haskell news. Topics covered this week include the new ghc-src project, Oracle on Haskell, The Monad.Reader, and how Linus/git impact darcs.
Java Introduction to the ASM 2.0 Bytecode Framework (O'ReillyNet)Eugene Kuleshov introduces the ASM 2.0 Bytecode Framework on O'Reilly. "J2SE 5.0 made major changes to the language, and version 2.0 of the ASM bytecode manipulation toolkit is well-suited to handle them. In this article, Eugene Kuleshov shows how ASM 2.0 makes working with bytecode easier, and even offers an example of how to map the external dependencies in an arbitrary .jar file."
HiveMind Utilities 0.4.5 released (SourceForge)Version 0.4.5 of HiveMind Utilities, a set of modules for the HiveMind lightweight container, is available. "The HiveMind Utilities project team announces the release of "HiveMind Utilities 0.4.5", which mainly is improving poor performance of gzip related features introduced in version 0.4.4."
Internationalization, Part 1 (O'Reilly)David Flanagan discusses Java internationalization issues in an O'Reilly book excerpt. "In this excerpt from Chapter 8 of Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition, author David Flanagan offers real-world programming examples covering the three steps to internationalization in Java. This week, he covers how to use Unicode character encoding and how to handle local customs. Next week's excerpt will cover the third step: localizing user-visible messages."
JPasswords 0-1-0 Released (SourceForge)Version 0-1-0 of JPasswords has been released. "JPasswords offers a compact but proficient and user-friendly, Java Swing based application to store and manage passwords on encrypted files. - I am happy to announce the first edition of JPasswords. It brings a complete security password management tool in advanced maturity state. The program makes full compatible use of Password Safe files (CounterPane). Among its striking features are its platform-independence and the astounding compactness of only 188 KB."
OVal 0.1.0 alpha released (SourceForge)Version 0.1.0 alpha of OVal has been announced. "OVal is a generic Java 5 based object validation framework that uses annotations to express constraints and AspectJ to handle automatic validation. It supports validation of class fields as well as constructor and method parameters."
Lisp First public release of ContextLThe initial release of ContextL, a Common Lisp CLOS extension for Context-oriented programming, is out.
wxCL 1.0.0 Alpha releasedwxCL 1.0.0 Alpha is available. "The first public release of wxCL, version 1.0.0 Alpha, has been announced. wxCL is a portable Common Lisp GUI library based on the C++ wxWidgets library."
Perl This Week in Perl 6 (O'Reilly)The August 18 edition of O'Reilly's This Week in Perl 6 is out with the week's Perl 6 development news.
Python Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The August 18, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the latest Python language article links.
python-dev SummaryThe July 16-31, 2005 edition of the python-dev Summary is online with coverage of the python-dev mailing list activity.
Ruby Ruby Weekly NewsThe August 21, 2005 edition of the Ruby Weekly News summarizes the latest discussions on the ruby-talk mailing list.
Scheme Schemer's GazetteIssue #8 of the Schemer's Gazette is online with the latest Scheme language discussions.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The August 19, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with the weekly collection of Tcl/Tk articles.
Version Control Mercurial v0.6c released!Version 0.6c of Mercurial, a source code management system, is out with numerous new capabilities.
Miscellaneous Deskzilla Desktop Bugzilla Client Beta (MozillaZine)MozillaZine looks at Deskzilla, a Java-based Bugzilla client application. "Deskzilla is an alternative, desktop client application for the Bugzilla bug-tracking system, created by an independent software vendor. Deskzilla is free for open-source projects. "Deskzilla introduces several new features and helps to do routine bug tracking, yet it cannot be viewed as a full replacement for the vast Bugzilla web interface. The goal of the Deskzilla project is to explore possibilities for unique bug-tracking features that are open for a desktop application.""
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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Sylpheed