Development

Kodos: A Python Regular Expressions Tool

Kodos, apparently named after one of the slobbering alien character on the cartoon "The Simpsons", is a handy GUI tool for working with regular expressions in Python.

In the About Kodos page, author Phil Schwartz says: "I have always found the development cycle of python regular expressions to be tedious and time consuming and I searched for a tool to aid in this area. When I could not locate a desirable tool I began to create my own. As I added features, I thought it would be useful to other developers as well and created the Kodos Project page on Sourceforge."

The Kodos screenshots page shows the utility in action. Kodos' display is divided into three windows. The top window is used for entering the regular expression, the middle window is for entering test strings, and the bottom window shows the resulting matched strings in several formats. The bottom screen also features a handy Sample Code mode that generates several examples of working Python code.

There are a number of radio buttons for selecting regexp flags such as Ignore Case. A handy regexp reference window can be popped up to show the available regexp syntax characters.

It is apparently possible to get Kodos to run under RedHat 7.3 and Debian Woody, but your author ran into several cases of dependency hell on both systems. Luckily, I had a spare machine, and wanted to play with a variant of RedHat 8.0 known as KRUD Linux. Kodos 1.0.2 installed without a hitch on that environment.

Version 1.1 of Kodos was announced this week. Some of the new features include the addition of pausing and unpausing the processing of regexps, an editing timeout, an import file option, new preferences, code cleanup, and bug fixes.

Kodos is definitly a utility that will be a welcome addition to a Python programmer's tool kit. It give an immediate productivity boost to those who use Python regular expressions. The software is availabe for download here. Additional information can be found in the online Kodos Documentation.

Comments (3 posted)

System Applications

Audio Projects

Ogg Traffic

The April 15, 2003 edition of Ogg Traffic is out with the latest Ogg Vorbis audio compression software news. Topics include status reports, a discussion on bitrate peeling, developments to the Xiph.org wiki, a French radio station that offers Ogg Vorbis streams, and more Tremor improvements.

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Planet CCRMA news

Planet CCRMA hosts a collection of audio software for various versions of RedHat Linux. The latest changes on the site include support for a number of audio packages under RedHat Linux 9.0, as well as support for a few new packages.

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Database Software

PostgreSQL Weekly News

The April 9th, 2003 PostgreSQL Weekly News features a discussion of an upcoming test package for PostgreSQL, as well as other development news.

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phpMyAdmin 2.5.0-rc1 released (SourceForge)

Version 2.5.0-rc1 of phpMyAdmin has been released. "phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the http://www. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields. Here is the first release candidate for version 2.5.0. There are lots of new features, see http://phpmyadmin.net or the ChangeLog for details."

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Networking Tools

Release of iptables-1.2.8

Version 1.2.8 of iptables has been released. "Version 1.2.8 is a maintainance release, containing dozens of small bugfixes that have accumulated over the last months since 1.2.7a was released in August 2002."

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Printing

Common UNIX Printing System 1.1.19rc1

Version 1.1.19rc1 of CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System has been announced. "CUPS 1.1.19 adds support for fast reconfiguration, option retension and defaulting when adding and modifying printers, binary PostScript printing, fax device features, custom web applications via CGI, PHP, Java, and Python, and simple scripting support for Java, Perl, and PHP. The new release also contains bug fixes including the LPD printing and Solaris signal handling bugs."

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Foomatic 3.0.0rc1 released

Version 3.0.0rc1 of the Foomatic printer database has been released. "This will be the release candidate for the final release of Foomatic 3.0.0 which will appear not later than first of May. This release allows to apply options to selected pages of the document. It also replaces the ugly numerical printer IDs which still remained from the old PostGreSQL times of Foomatic 0.x by easy-to-remember clear text IDs. And it adds new types for printer driver options."

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Web Site Development

Analog version 5.90beta2 released

A new beta version Analog, a web server log file analysis tool, is available. See the Whatsnew file for more information.

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mnoGoSearch-php-extension-1.72 released

Version 1.72 of the mnoGoSearch-php-extension, a PHP front-end to the mnoGoSearch web site search engine, is available. Change information is in the source code.

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Python and Apache (O'ReillyNet)

Peter Laurie covers Python and Apache integration on O'Reilly. "Peter Laurie, coauthor of Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, covers the interface between Apache, Python, and MySQL, with a step-by-step walkthrough of an example Python script."

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Quixote 0.6beta6 is available

A beta version of Quixote 0.6, a Python-based web development framework, is available. See the release announcement for details.

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Why MidCOM rocks

Henri Bergius has written an article about MidCOM, the new Midgard Components Framework. "I have been very enthusiastic about the recently announced MidCOM - Midgard Components Framework project. MidCOM provides Midgard developers with a framework for building reusable and configurable site components."

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Web Services

Architect Struts applications for Web services (IBM developerWorks)

Jerome Josephraj discusses the use of Struts and Web services on IBM's developerWorks. "When you're converting an enterprise app for use with Web services, the simplest way to do it is to associate a single operation with a single enterprise service. But that's not necessarily the best idea. In this article, Jerome Josephraj shows you how to build Web services applications based on the tried and true Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. To that end, he's adapted Struts, a popular open-source MVC framework, for use in the Web services arena. By examining the sample application outlined here, you'll see how you can use Struts and Web services together."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

BEAST/BSE 0.5.1 released

Version 0.5.1 of BEAST/BSE is avilable. "BEAST (the Bedevilled Audio SysTem) is a graphical front-end to BSE (the Bedevilled Sound Engine), a library for music composition, audio synthesis and sample manipulation. The project is hosted at: http://beast.gtk.org. This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from any GUI activities."

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GNUsound 0.6 released

Version 0.60 of the GNUsound audio editor and manipulation package is available. Change information is in the source code.

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Desktop Environments

GNOME 2.3.0 changelogs (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop has published a list of changes for the recently announced GNOME 2.3.0. "Here is a compilation of the release notes and NEWS files available for the various modules updated for the GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0...."

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GNOME Fifth Toe 2.2.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

A set of over 30 applications for GNOME has been released as GNOME Fifth Toe. "The Fifth Toe team, Will LaShell, Scott Sibley and myself, are delighted to announce the availability of Fifth Toe 2.2.0. This is a release of extra applications that aren't part of the core/desktop releases."

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Evolution 1.4 Preview 2 Released (GnomeDesktop)

A new preview release of Evolution has been released. "The second preview release of Evolution for GNOME 2, Evolution 1.3.2 has been released, sporting numerous bug fixes and enhancements." Bug testers are needed.

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The April 11, 2003 KDE-CVS-Digest is out. Here's the summary: "Rewrite of smtp kioslave, SMIME support added to kssl, and continuing improvement to the rss dcopservice. KMail gets an mbox import filter."

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XFree86 followup teleconferences

Two additional teleconferences were held to discuss XFree86 and the development community. The minutes have been published online.

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X Window System Network Performance

Here is a white paper by Keith Packard and James Gettys on X Window System Network Performance. "Performance was an important issue in the development of X from the initial protocol design and continues to be important in modern application and extension development. That X is network transparent allows us to analyze the behavior of X from a perspective seldom possible in most systems. We passively monitor network packet flow to measure X application and server performance. The network simulation environment, the data capture tool and data analysis tools will be presented. Data from this analysis are used to show the performance impact of the Render extension, the limitations of the LBX extension and help identify specific application and toolkit performance problems. We believe this analysis technique can be usefully applied to other network protocols." (Found at Hack the Planet)

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Games

Pygame updates

New Python-based game software on the Pygame site includes: Imgv 2.7, Tuxmathscrabble 2.1, Pygsear .42, and Pyddr 0.6.1.

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Graphics

Crystal Space 0.96r004 available

Version 0.96r004 of Crystal Space, a multi-platform Open Source portable 3D engine, is available. This release features a number of bug fixes.

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GIMP 1.3.14 released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for version 1.3.14 of the GIMP. "Quite a few rather long-standing bugs have been fixed (thanks to the help of Pedro Gimeno) and GIMP-1.3 is actually becoming quite useable these days."

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GRASS 5.0.2 released

Version 5.0.2 of GRASS GIS is available with stability and reliability fixes. "The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modeling, and visualization of many types of data."

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Interoperability

Wine release 20030408

Release 20030408 of Wine is available. Changes include:

• Some reorganizations of the source tree.
• File change notifications.
• Support for all variants of glibc 2.3.
• Many documentation updates.
• Lots of bug fixes.

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Wine Traffic

Issue #165 of Wine Traffic is out. Topics include: Wine-20030408, Distro Reviews, Debugging Threads, Change in nm Symbol Output, and XFree86 Keyboard Mapping Issues.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #139 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out, with the latest AbiWord word processor development news. "Thanks to some outside help, Abiword's Win32 port is coming along nicely. In fact, we've even got a couple of pretty screenshots included for you. Get this, how does "back from the dead" strike you as a theme? Hub applies a patch from Gery DELOGE for...BeOS! "Glass of water for Mr. Grainger!" "Glass of water for Mr. Bjork!" Also, for those of you still whining about not being able to get 1.0.5, you needn't worry any further, as it appears that 1.0.6 may be out on SourceForge (and Savannah for you GNUists) pretty soon. Yes, soon, you, too, will be able to --enable-gnome."

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OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 available

Version 1.0.3 of OpenOffice.org is available. "No new features are included in this release. Just lots of bugfixes, making the application more stable and more usable."

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Web Browsers

Epiphany 0.5.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop has an announcement for version 0.5.0 of the Epiphany web browser. "Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the mozilla rendering engine. The name meaning: "An intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking""

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Independent Staus Reports (MozillaZine)

This week's Mozilla Independent Status Reports are available. "The latest set of status reports includes updates from the Creating Applications with Mozilla book project, JSLib, XPTK, Preferential, MessageID-Finder and Linky."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has posted the minutes from the April 9, 2003 Mozilla.org staff meeting. "Issues discussed include 1.4 Beta, 1.3.1, the new Roadmap, the future of the Mozilla suite and Mozilla documentation."

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Miscellaneous

KBarcode: Professional Label Printing for KDE

KDE.News looks at KBarcode, a bar chart printing utility. "After more than 5 months of development, the KBarcode team has released version 1.2.0 of KBarcode. This latest stable release brings professional high-quality label printing to the KDE desktop. In fact, KBarcode is already used by a few companies under production conditions and has proven to be reliable and stable -- considering the high costs for similar commercial applications, KBarcode might save you some money!" Fire up those old Cue-Cat scanners.

Comments (none posted)

Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The April 8-15, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language news.

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Java

A JSTL primer: Presentation is everything (IBM developerWorks)

Mark A. Kolb explains JSTL on IBM's developerWorks. "Localizing content for visitors is a critical element for developers who want their Web applications to have global impact. Internationalization features have been part of the Java programming language since JDK 1.1, and the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) fmt library provides convenient access to all of these features through a focused set of custom tags. Mark Kolb returns to the topic of JSTL in this third installment of his four-part series with a look at the fmt tags for formatting and internationalizing data."

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JSP best practices: Improve your look and feel with the JSP include mechanism (IBM developerWorks)

Brett McLaughlin covers the JSP include mechanism on IBM's developerWorks. "This first installment in the new JSP best practices series introduces the JavaServer Pages include mechanism. Follow along as Java programming expert Brett McLaughlin shows you how to use include to incorporate static header and footer files into your Web site or Web application pages"

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A Custom JSP Tag Library for Dynamic Menus (O'Reilly)

Prabu Arumugam writes about menu programming under JSP. "While the Java programming language has built-in support to create basic menu structures, JSP lacks support. Web applications must use either Java applets or JavaScript to implement menu structures. Many web application developers prefer JavaScript to applets for simplicity and ease of deployment. This article describes a custom tag library that simplifies the process of generating JavaScript dynamically. The design and implementation of the tag library are covered in detail."

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Lisp

CMUCL 18e released

CMU Common Lisp (CMUCL) version 18e is available. "This major release contains several enhancements and changes including faster bignum multiplications, better support for linking foreign libraries, a cross-referencing facility for the compiler, bindings to POSIX user and group database access functions, support for Unix sockets, an implementation of large file support (> 2GiB), numerous ANSI compliance fixes and bug fixes, several improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS, much and more."

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Lisp and Allegro CL Code Repository

An open-source code repository for Lisp has been made available by Franz, Inc. "The repository provides source code of examples and utilities for demonstrating Allegro CL features and non-trivial ways Common Lisp can be used."

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The April 7-13, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. "This week : MacOS X problems, big and small patch proposals, cross-compilation and unknown errors."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The April 4, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 is available. "Welcome my friends to the show that never ends. Yes, it's another of Piers Cawley's risible attempts to summarize the week's happenings in the Perl 6 development community. We start, as usual, with events in the perl6-internals world (not the perk6-internals world, obviously, that would be the sort of foolish typo that would never make it into any mail sent to the Perl 6 lists) where things have been quiet... too quiet. I think they're planning something."

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Synopsis 6 (O'Reilly)

Damian Conway and Allison Randal have published Synopsis 6, a condensation of Larry Wall's Apocalypse 6 for Perl. "This document summarizes Apocalypse 6, which covers subroutines and the new type system."

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PHP

PHP and Heredocs (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly has published an article on PHP heredocs. "Tired of having PHP, HTML, and even SQL jumbled together in the same file? Are your designers, coders, and DBAs going crazy trying to keep everything in check? A clean layer of separation can help. Daniel Smith explains how PHP's heredocs can make your life much easier by separating presentation, content, and logic."

Comments (none posted)

PHP Weekly Summary

Topics on this week's PHP Weekly Summary include: "International PHP conference, DOMXML extension, Simple but effective, YAML extension, Too much data on mirrors, MySQL thread safety, Files or streams, Zend Engine 2 constants."

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Python

This week's Python-URL

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for April 14 is out. It looks at the merits of __slots__, a proposed list method change, and several other topics.

Full Story (comments: none)

Gems From the Archives (O'Reilly)

Uche Ogbuji points out a few of his favorite Python-based XML utilities. "In this and in subsequent articles I will mine the richness of the XML-SIG mailing list for some of its choicest bits of code. I start in this article with a couple of very handy snippets from 1998 and 1999. Where necessary, I have updated code to use current APIs, style, and conventions in order to make it immediately useful to readers."

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Ruby

The Ruby Weekly News

Topics on this week's Ruby Weekly News include: a call for a standardized package installation procedure, array subtraction, and the usual round-up of new Ruby software.

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Scheme

Scheme Weekly News

The April 14, 2003 edition of the Scheme Weekly News has been published, check it out for the latest Scheme language development news.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The April 14, 2003 Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with the latest roundup of Tcl/Tk developments.

Full Story (comments: none)

XML

Processing RSS (O'Reilly)

Ivelin Ivanov discusses processing RSS feeds with XQuery. "The goal of this article is to demonstrate the use of XQuery to accomplish a routine, yet interesting task; in particular, to render an HTML page that merges RSS news feeds from two different weblogs. RSS has earned its popularity by allowing people to easily share news among and between web sites. And for almost any programming language used on the Web, there is a good selection of libraries for consuming RSS."

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Debuggers

Alleyoop - a GNOME2 front-end for Valgrind (GnomeDesktop)

Jeffrey Stedfast has announced a project called Alleyoop that is a front-end for the Valgrind x86 architecture memory debugger. The code is still in a fairly early state of development.

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Miscellaneous

Multitail 1.6 available

Folkert van Heusden has released version 1.6 of multitail, a utility that works like the Unix tail command, but supports multiple windows.

Full Story (comments: 1)

Improve Linux performance (IBM developerWorks)

Cameron Laird gives some tips on squeezing performance out of a Linux system. "While performance is certainly important, the best way to handle this requirement is not always obvious. Time and again, I've experienced a software challenge that followed roughly this pattern: a program is in use. Its functionality is correct. A user stops in, though, to report that it's "too slow" and needs acceleration. Someone on the team quickly hacks in a "monitor" that slows performance a bit but keeps the user informed about how much time remains for a long-running computation. Satisfaction settles in."

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