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Development
GAFFitter: the Genetic Algorithm File Fitter
GAFFitter is a command line utility which can be run against directory trees to create groups of files that fit on media of a specified size:
Genetic Algorithm File Fitter (gaffitter) is a command-line software written in C++ that extracts --via
Genetic Algorithm-- subsets of an input list of files/directories that best fit the given volume size (target), such as CD, DVD and others. It is initially designed to run under Linux and POSIX systems, but easily portable to non-POSIX operating environment.
Using GA search, gaffitter improve different combinations of the files on the list so that the lost of space will be minimized. Ideal to be used for backups/records in CD, DVD and others.
![[GAFFitter]](/images/ns/gaffitter.png){kind=small}
Installation of GAFFitter was easy, the software was downloaded here in tar.bz2 form. Building involved the usual bunzip2, tar, make and make install steps. This all worked without problems on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft system that had the usual software build tools installed.
The GAFFitter usage instructions give an idea of the various ways that the application can be run. An example run was tried on a collection of music files, GAFFitter did a good job of producing packed lists that would fit on a series of 700MB CDs.
Version 0.5.1 of GAFFitter was announced on March 28, 2007: "This release fixes a bug (uninitialized variable) and changes the default behavior of GAFFitter, which now extracts the volumes as much as possible (unlimited iterations)."
GAFFitter is a useful tool that can help to efficiently solve the problem of fitting large collections of files onto fixed-sized media. It is useful by itself, and can be incorporated into higher-level applications, as shown by this example integration script for the K3B multimedia utility. If you need to efficiently pack some files for archival, give it a try.
System Applications
Database Software
pgAdmin 1.6.3 released
Version 1.6.3 of pgAdmin is out with bug fixes. "The pgAdmin Development Team are pleased to announce the release of pgAdmin 1.6.3, the Open Source graphical PostgreSQL administration tool for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD , Mac OS X and Solaris".
SQLite 3.3.14 released
Version 3.3.14 of the SQLite DBMS is out. "This version focuses on performance improvements. If you recompile the amalgamation using GCC option -O3 (the precompiled binaries use -O2) you may see performance improvements of 35% or more over version 3.3.13 depending on your workload. This version also adds support for exclusive access mode."
Emulating Analytic (AKA Ranking) Functions with MySQL (O'ReillyNet)
Stéphane Faroult discusses the emulation of analytic functions in MySQL on O'Reilly. "One of the most hailed extensions brought to SQL in recent years has been these functions that Oracle calls analytic functions, DB2 calls OLAP functions, and SQL Server 2005 calls ranking functions--but which MySQL, so far, still lacks. The good news is that they can be (relatively) easily and efficiently emulated."
Mail Software
Postfix 2.5 snapshot 20070402
Experimental release snapshot 20070402 of the Postfix 2.5 mail transfer agent is out. See the change log file for details.
Web Site Development
Contineo 2.5.0 released
Version 2.5.0 of Contineo, a web-based document management system, has been released. "This release comes with many new features like skin (theme) support, right inheritance, valid XHTML page generation, limiting setup access to admin user, Italian and Spanish document search support, etc. The new version also brings an updated and extended technology platform, so that new versions should be easier to develop."
A New, Improved Visualization for Web Server Logs (O'ReillyNet)
Raju Varghese presents part two in a series on visualizing web server log files in 3D. "In my last article I showed how web server logfiles can be visualized as a 3D plot with the help of Perl and gnuplot. In this article we will enhance the plot in several ways. The main things we will introduce are color and evening out of the plot."
Desktop Applications
Audio Applications
JackMix 0.3 hits the shelfs
Version 0.3 of JackMix, a mixer application for the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is out with the following changes: "Inspired by a lot of talking during LAC I have redone the sliders. They still look kind of similar to some vu-meters but I think it isn't that bad anymore. But there are new knobs in this version too. They did get positive feedback during the conference. :-) The knobs from 0.2 didn't seem to scale well. At least not from the usability point. The biggest change is that version 0.3 saves the own state to xml-files which can be read again later. Also adding a filename on the commandline opens that file on startup. This enables version 0.4 to have lash-support."
QjackCtl 0.2.22 released
Version 0.2.22 of QjackCtl, the GUI control for the JACK Audio Connection Kit, has been released. This version includes bug fixes and other improvements.
Desktop Environments
Creation of a new roadmap for GNOME
A new GNOME roadmap process is being discussed. "In the next few days, all maintainers will receive a mail asking them some questions about their plans for the modules they're maintaining. It's really important that maintainers take the time to correctly reply to this mail. A new team (the Roadmap Gang) will analyse all the replies, and try to keep only the relevant parts for a GNOME-wide roadmap."
GNOME Software Announcements
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:- Accerciser 0.1.0 (unspecified)
- Anjuta DevStudio 2.1.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- Banshee 0.12.1 (bug fixes and translation work)
- Chronojump 0.52 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- csboard 0.8 (new features)
- gdl 0.7.3 (new feature)
- Giggle 0.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- Orca v2.19.0 (bug fixes and translation work)
- Rhythmbox 0.10.0 (new features and bug fixes)
KDE Software Announcements
The following new KDE software has been announced this week:- 3gp-converter 0.1 (initial release)
- AVI TV Episode File Resizer 1.0 (initial release)
- cb2Bib 0.8.1 (new features and performance improvements)
- GLAN 0.4.3 (unspecified)
- kAnyRemote 2.10 (new features and bug fixes)
- Kate Symbol Viewer Plugin 1.9.0 (new features)
- KGmailNotifier 0.2 (new features and bug fixes)
- kio_mtp 0.0.1 (alpha test release)
- Kopete OTR Plugin 0.2 (unspecified)
- KpassDNS 0.5 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- Krusader 1.80.0-beta2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- kshowmail 3.1.1 (stable release)
- KTorrent 2.1.3 (bug fixes)
- KTranslator 0.4 (bug fixes)
- Mailody 0.5.0 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
- PublishCMYK 1.1 (unspecified)
- Terra Letras 0.7 (bug fixes)
- Vladstudio Kompanion 0.60 (unspecified)
KDE Commit-Digest
The April 1, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "The beginnings of a KControl module for Decibel configuration make an appearance. Developments in the Subversion plugin for KDevelop. More optimisations in the KJS JavaScript interpreter. Further progress in the KBattleship rewrite. New country maps in KGeography. KRfb, a desktop sharing utility, starts to be ported to KDE 4. A new GStreamer backend for Phonon, and QSR, a search-and-replace utility, are imported into KDE SVN."
Xorg Software Announcements
The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:- xf86-input-joystick-1.2.0 (new features and documentation work)
- xf86-video-intel-1.9.94 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
Educational Software
GradeL 0.7.5 released
Version 0.7.5 of GradeL, a grade book automation program for teachers, is available. "After quite a layoff, another version of GradeL has been released. This version fixes some issues and also adds some minor features."
Electronics
gnucap development snapshot 2007-03-29
A development snapshot 2007-03-29 of gnucap, the GNU Circuit Analysis Package, has been announced. "The new one contains tools plugins. For now, there are two plugins to adjust calculation precision. One selects full 80 bit precision on systems that by default round to 64 bit. The other selects 64 bit IEEE compliant math on systems that default to 80 bit. These only work on Intel and AMD 32 bit CPU's."
Icarus Verilog 0.8.4 released
Stable version 0.8.4 of Icarus Verilog, an electronic simulation language compiler, is out with bug fixes.
Financial Applications
SQL-Ledger 2.8.0 released
Release 2.8.0 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting package, is out with a long list of new features. See the What's New document for details.
GUI Packages
wxWidgets 2.8.3 released
Release 2.8.3 of wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI toolkit, has been announced. "This is mainly a bug fix release; please see changes.txt for details."
Interoperability
Wine 0.9.34 released
Version 0.3.4 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: Support for Xcursor, A range of fixes for various installers, New builtin xcopy tool, The usual assortment of Direct3D fixes, and Lots of bug fixes.
Wine Weekly Newsletter
The March 30, 2007 edition of the Wine Weekly Newsletter is online with coverage of the Wine project. Topics include: CrossOver & Linspire, Road to 1.0, DirectX To-Do List, 0.9.33 Benchmarks, Testing & Older Windows Versions and Wine's Coverity Contact.
Medical Applications
Ultimate EMR launches (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews covers the release of Ultimate EMR. "Empower Med, Inc. announces the immediate release of Ultimate EMR on Sourceforge.net and Plone.org under the GNU General Public License. Ultimate EMR is the first Plone(tm) based, full-featured, web-enabled Electronic Medical Record software."
GNUmed 0.2.5 released (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews notes the release of GNUmed version 0.2.5. "The GNUmed team worked hard to release yet another stable version. As features are being added more and more success stories of happy users reach us. For this release GNotary support on backup, improved phrasewheel code, handling of the original filename in the document archive, visual indication of patient birthday, initial KVK (German health insurance card) handling, connection pooling (massive speedup over slow network links), a generalized hooks framework and smart allergies handling has been added."
Office Suites
OpenOffice.org 2.2 released
OpenOffice.org 2.2 is out. "In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org's unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields." Click below for the full announcement.
OpenOffice.org Newsletter
The March, 2007 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.
Languages and Tools
Caml
Caml Weekly News
The April 3, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Java
GCJ improves Eclipse support
Eclipse IDE support has been improved for GCJ the GNU Compiler for Java: "Keith Seitz and Kyle Galloway have made considerable progress on GCJ's implementation of the JDWP. It is now possible to use eclipse to debug interpreted Java code using libgcj as the VM."
Perl
Weekly Perl 6 mailing list summary (O'Reilly)
The March 31, 2007 edition of the Weekly Perl 6 mailing list summary is out with coverage of the latest Perl 6 developments.
Python
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links
The March 30, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links
The April 2, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links
The April 3, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
XML
XInclude Processing in XSLT
Erik Wilde discusses XInclude Processing in XSLT on O'Reilly. "Assembling various parts of a document before processing the assembled document is a recurring theme in document processing. XML Inclusions (XInclude) is the W3C standard created to support this scenario, but since it is a standalone specification, it needs to be supported by a piece of software implementing this functionality. The XInclude Processor (XIPr), written in XSLT 2.0, implements XInclude and thus may help to reduce the dependency on numerous software packages if XInclude is used in an environment where XSLT 2.0 is used anyway."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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