Development

PowerDNS 2.9.4 released

Version 2.9.4 of PowerDNS, a name server alternative to the poplular Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND named) server, has been released. "Big news is the addition of a recursing nameserver which has sprung into existence over the past week. It is in use on several computers already but it is not ready for prime time. Complete integration with PowerDNS is expected around 2.9.5, for now the recursor is a separate program."

The recursor is claimed to offer a fairly big performance improvement over BIND 9, but a few bugs are still being worked out.

According to the online manual: "PDNS is an authoritative only nameserver. It will answer questions about domains it knows about, but will not go out on the net to resolve queries about other domains. However, it can use a recursing backend to provide that functionality. When PDNS answers a question, it comes out of the database, and can be trusted as being authoritative. There is no way to pollute the cache or to confuse the daemon. PDNS has been designed to serve both the needs of small installations by being easy to setup, as well as for serving very large query volumes on large numbers of domains."

Other new features in this release include:

• All SQL queries are available for configuration.
• Zone replacement transfers are only done with capable remote servers.
• Error messages were improved.
• A slowdown bug with pdns_control was fixed.
• Updates are rolled back if a remote server goes down during an AXFR.
• Lots of bugs have been fixed.
• Documentation has been updated.

For more information on PowerDNS, see the Documentation and Release Notes and the fact sheet documents.

PowerDNS downloads are available here, source code and packages for Red Hat and Debian are available. The software is also available for a number of other platforms. PowerDNS is licensed under the GPL, commercial support is available.

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System Applications

Education

Linux in Education Report

Issue #87 of the Linux in Education Report is out. Topics include: an Introduction to the Solar System course, open-source software in the educational press, the National File Format (NFF) for a non-proprietary way to access learning materials, a new TUX&GNU@school column from FSF, a paper titled Alternative Computing in Education, open-source software in UK schools, the GNULinuxIndia newsletter, Linux from Kindergarten to High School, and more.

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Medical Software

Programming in M Resources (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews has put together some links to resources about the MUMPS language. "The MUMPS programming language, also known as M, was specifically designed for use in healthcare and has a long history. It is the basis for the Veterans Administration VistA software as well as many other commercial healthcare applications. Because of its unique properties, it is used in banking as well. Open source bindings to CORBA exist (see below) and a complete open source M compiler, GT.M, is available on Sourceforge."

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Printing

GIMP-Print Drivers for CUPS 4.2.5pre2

The CUPS project has announced version 4.2.5pre2 of GIMP-Print, which now works with CUPS.

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Web Site Development

Analog version 5.31 released

Version 5.31 of the Analog web site log analyzer has been released. The changes in this version include recognition of the Phoenix and Chimera browsers, fixes for the Mac, OpenVMS and RISC OS ports, and a bug fixes.

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Zope Members News

The most recent headlines on the Zope Members News include: AdaptableStorage Product Released, Zope-News Project Needs You!, NeoPortal Content Pak 0.9a3 released, NeoPortalLibrary 0.9a3 released, CMFCollectorNG 0.20 alpha 1 released, ZPhotoSlides 0.9 released!, ZWiki 0.14.0 released, SilvaNews 0.8 released!, and Squishdot 1.5.0 Released!.

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Zope Newbies

New articles on Zope Newbies include: Ed Dumbill on Plone, and The Making of Python, an interview with Guido Van Rossum.

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Creating a Web Application with Ant and Tomcat 4 (O'Reilly)

Paul Wood illustrates the use of Tomcat 4 and Ant on O'Reilly. "I have decided to use Tomcat 4 Servlet/JSP Container technologies to implement a Web application. This still leaves many options, and choosing between the various available technologies is not easy. For this article, I have chosen to keep it simple and use Java Server Pages (JSPs) in combination with Java classes."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Ecasound 2.2.0 released

Version 2.2.0 of Ecasound, a general purpouse audio recording, playing, and editing package, is out. A summary of new features includes: "Support for JACK and LADSPA 1.1 added, more intelligent runtime parameter selection, ECI licence changed from GPL to LGPL, new NetECI client API, ecasound emacs mode added, largefile support, new resample, reverse and typeselect audio objects, new peak amplitude chain operator and new utilities ecalength, ecamonitor and ecasignalview."

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JACK Rack 1.1.1 available

Version 1.1.1 of JACK Rack, a virtual effects rack for the JACK audio system, is available. This release fixes a number of bugs.

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Desktop Environments

FootNotes

Headlines on the GNOME desktop FootNotes site include: Multi-rooted tree view sidebar for Nautilus, Sodipodi and Gimp tutorials, Mono 0.18 released, ACME 2.0 released, GARNOME 0.20.0: ''Back in the Pan'', GNOME 2.2 Desktop RC 1, Lumiere, Updates from the XML front, Couple of Galeon Mini tutorials, Fontilus-0.3 and Nautilus-rpm-0.1 released, GNOME News in Spanish, GStreamer 0.5.1 released, and more.

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KDE-CVS-Digest for January 10, 2003

The January 10, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is out. Topics this week include: "Apple Safari uses khtml, merge of Apple contributions, Krdc features and numerous bug fixes".

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Games

Pygame updates

New Python-based game software on the Pygame site includes: Bub&bob 0.1, Pytaxx 047, and Imgv 2.3.

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GUI Packages

FLTK Developments

The latest new software for FLTK, the Fast, Light ToolKit include: fltdj - The Daily Journal 0.6.9, Fl_Contour 0.2, Fl_Extent widgets 1.0.2, and SPTK 0.99.

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Interoperability

Wine Weekly News

Issue #151 of the Wine Weekly News is out. Topics include Visual-MinGW Under Winelib, Separating NTDLL and Kernel32, Best Win32 API Spy Tool?, File Locking in Wine, Winemaker Problems (and Solutions), and Special Characters in Resource Names.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #126 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out, with the latest AbiWord word processor development news.

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Kernel Cousin GNUe

Issue #63 of Kernel Cousin GNUe is out with the latest GNU Enterprise development news. Topics include: Project PAPO and GNUe, SKUs in GNUe Small Business, Converting forms to new .gfd format, Format Masks in GNUe, Triggers in GNUe Reports, Using Reports to produce customer invoices as PDFs, Bayonne, the GNU telephony project, Application Server API, and Application Server API.

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LyX 1.2.3 released

Version 1.2.3 of LyX, a GUI interface to the TeX typesetting system, is out. "LyX 1.2.3 is a maintenance release. It mainly fixes a very bad bug where configuring LyX as root could lead to deleting the /dev/null special device (this does not impact users of prebuilt binaries). Also, a bug where LyX would create zombie processes has been fixed."

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Web Browsers

Mozilla 1.0.2 available

Version 1.0.2 of Mozilla is available. "Mozilla 1.0.2 contains stability and security improvements. 1.0.2 also has fixes for standards support, UI correctness and polish, performance, and site compatibility. This is not a feature release. For new features, Mozilla 1.0 users are encouraged to upgrade to Mozilla 1.2." See the release notes for more information.

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Miscellaneous

PythonCAD release 2

The second release of PythonCAD has been released. "As the name implies, PythonCAD is written entirely in Python. The goal of this project is to create a fully scriptable drafting program that will match and eventually exceed features found in commercial CAD software. PythonCAD is released under the GNU Public License"

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Languages and Tools

C

GCC precompiled header implementation

This week, the GCC site says: "Geoffrey Keating of Apple Computer, Inc., with support from Red Hat, Inc., has contributed a precompiled header implementation that can dramatically speed up compilation of some projects."

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Caml

Caml Weekly News

The Caml Weekly News for January 7 to 14, 2003 is out. Topics include: Graph data structures in Baire, Memory management dominates running time, GlSurf 1.2 available, LablGL 0.99, Lambda Calculus, otags 3.06.6, and a New Introductory book on Functional programming, using OCaml (in Italian).

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The Caml Light / OCaml Hump

This week, the new software on The Caml Hump includes the OUnit unit test framework for OCaml, OCamlExpat: an ocaml wrapper for the Expat XML parsing library, LablGL: an Objective Caml interface to OpenGL, LablGTK, an Objective Caml interface to gtk, An executable course on lambda-calculus, and GlSurf, a program (similar to Surf) to draw surfaces from their implicit equations.

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Java

Java theory and practice: Where's your point? (IBM developerWorks)

Brian Goetz talks about Java and floating point calculations on IBM's developerWorks. "In this month's Java theory and practice, Brian Goetz looks at some of the traps and "gotchas" often encountered when using non-integral numeric types in Java programs."

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Object-Relational Mapping with Apache Jakarta OJB (O'Reilly)

Charles Chan covers some Java object mapping issues on O'Reilly. "Three of the most popular persistence frameworks in the open source community are Hibernate, Castor, and OJB. In this article, we will focus on OJB. OJB integrates smoothly into J2EE containers with full support of JTA and JCA, and is a viable alternative to EJB entity beans."

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The JAXB API (O'Reilly)

Kohsuke Kawaguchi introduces Sun's JAXB on O'Reilly. "Sun has recently released version 0.75 of the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), as well as its reference implementation."

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The January 6-12, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. "The porters were busy, and this week's report features a large number of different subjects, from portability and compilation to the proper semantics of method dispatch, not forgetting the usual amount of strange bugs. Read below about the latest potential evolutions of Perl 5."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The January 6, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 is out, topics include: A Pile of Patches to the Perl 6 Compiler, Garbage Collection Headaches, Variable/value vtable split, Parrot Gets Another New Language, Returning new PMCs, Fun with PerlHash, GC/DOD feedback & runtime tuning, Object Semantics, Tree-Frobbing Facilities in Perl 6, PRE/POST in Loops, my int ( 1..31 ) $var ?, Variable Types vs. Value Types, and more.

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DateTime modules moving again (use Perl)

According to Use Perl, the Perl Date and Time modules will be moving again. "If you care about Date/Time modules, or if you are the author of one or more, you might want to watch this."

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Maintaining CPAN modules of Ariel Brosh (SCHOP) (use Perl)

Use Perl is calling for volunteers to take over the code of Ariel Brosh, who passed away recently.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary

Topics on this week's PHP Weekly Summary include: Extensions with Zend Engine 2, PEAR officially released, Non-thread safe Win32 builds, SAPI/servlet, JPEG2000 in 4.3.0, Sablotron 0.97, Ncurses CDK, and Oracle 8.1.

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PHP Foundations Working with Files in PHP, Part 3 (O'Reilly)

John Coggeshall continues his series on PHP. "This week, I'll introduce the concept of working with directories in PHP, including creating new directories, changing directories, and getting a file list for a given directory using PHP's pseudo directory object. We'll be starting from reading directories from a list, and then we'll discuss creating new directories or changing the current directory using PHP's directory manipulation functions."

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PEAR Out of Beta!

The PEAR framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components is out of Beta testing. "The PEAR development team is proud to announce that PEAR finally is out of its long beta period. As of PHP 4.3, the PEAR installer is installed by default. Unix support is considered stable, while Windows and Darwin are still of beta-quality."

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The Python-URL for January 13, 2003 is out, with this week's Python news and links.

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The Daily Python-URL

This week's Daily Python-URL article topics include: Modeling Framework, an object-relational bridge for Python, The Making of Python: A Conversation with Guido van Rossum, Part I, Soya 3D, PythonCAD, Roundup 0.5.4, Book review: 'Python Cookbook', Text Processing in Python, Generating DOM Magic, Oak DNS server, Mailman 2.1, What is RSS?, SimPy simplifies complex models, and more.

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Generating DOM Magic (O'Reilly)

Uche Ogbuji writes about Python generators on O'Reilly. "Python 2.2 introduced generators, a special type of function which has more flexible flow-of-control than ordinary, procedural functions. Standard procedural functions start at the top and execute until returning to the caller, maintaining all along a local state for the subroutine (which comprises local variables and passed-in parameters). The function can have multiple return points, but for each invocation, it runs until a single return, and its local state then becomes unavailable. Generators, by contrast, can send control back to the caller and yet remain in a sort of suspended animation, maintaining local state."

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The Making of Python (Part 1) (artima.com)

Artima.com has the first in a series of interviews with Python creator Guido Van Rossum. "Python creator Guido van Rossum talks with Bill Venners about Python's history, the influence of the ABC language, and Python's original design goals." Thanks to Matt Gerrans.

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Ruby

The Ruby Garden

This week, the Ruby Garden looks at Require quirks.

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The Ruby Weekly News

Topics on this week's Ruby Weekly News include: Things Newcomers to Ruby Should Know, RubyConf 2002 slides have arrived, Portland Perl Mongers find new gems, and 'borrow' TCL's virtual file system.

New Ruby software includes: FormatR 1.07, YAML.rb 0.49.1, Ruby 1.6.8 Windows Installer, GridFlow 0.6.5, xml-configfile 0.6.0, and Win32Serial 0.1.

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Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for January 14 is available with the usual collection of news from the Tcl/Tk development community.

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XML

Data binding, Part 1: Code generation approaches -- JAXB and more (IBM developerWorks)

Dennis M. Sosnoski writes about data binding with XML and Java. "Data binding provides a simple and direct way to use XML in your Java Platform applications. With data binding your application can largely ignore the actual structure of XML documents, instead working directly with the data content of those documents. This isn't suitable for all applications, but it is ideal for the common case of applications that use XML for data exchange."

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Miscellaneous

New Intel Tools Help Developers Optimize Software Applications

Intel Corporation has released a new set of tools for helping to analyze and optimize code on the Pentium(R) 4 and Xeon(R) processors, known as the VTune Performance Analyzer.

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The Year In Scripting Languages

"The Year in Scripting Languages" is a lengthy report written by members of the Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl communities; it is a worthwhile read for anybody interested in a condensed view of how these languages are developing.

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Final Alpha of KDevelop 3.0 (aka Gideon) is out

KDE.News announces the release of the third and final alpha release of KDevelop 3.0. "Since the previous alpha release almost all known crashes have been eliminated, many bugs have been fixed, and an integrated valgrind part has been added. All users of earlier versions of Gideon are encouraged to upgrade, and KDevelop 2.1 users are also encouraged to try Gideon out."

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KOffice 1.2.1 Supported by DRT Design Recovery Tool (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at the latest release (version 0.2.2) of DRT, the Design Recovery Tool. "DRT is a design recovery tool for interactive graphical applications running under X Windows. The tool automatically captures actions performed while using such an application. Functions particularly relevant to each action are highlighted. Moreover, the action itself is described visually from fragments of the application display. One can search and browse these actions to learn about the design of an application."

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