Pyro,
the Pyro AI and Robotics System, brings the Python language to
Robotic control systems.
This is not to be confused with the other
pyro, Python Remote Objects.
"Pyro is a library, environment, graphical user interface, and low-level drivers to explore AI and robotics using the Python language.
Key features of Pyro include:
- Support for a number of popular robotics platforms.
- Designed for robotics research and development.
- Built-in robot simulators.
- Ability to run a given robot with a choice of brains.
- Support for Reactive Control, Planning and Reasoning, and Evolutionary algorithms.
- Support for range, bumper, and video sensor inputs.
- Built-in Vision Recognition Software.
- Built on the RedHat 7 and 8 Linux platform.
The
Learning Pyro document is organized as a robotics course
curriculum. The majority of the project documentation is within.
The
PyroWhatsNew document lists the project's history in detail,
version 2.0.2 was just released.
For those of you who are interested in getting some hands-on experience
with Pyro, the first
Pyro Workshop will be held on August 3-5, 2003 in Lowell,
Massachusetts at U-Mass.
Pyro looks like a fun project to experiment with,
installation instructions and software downloads are available
here.
Comments (none posted)
System Applications
Audio Projects
The initial release of Soundmesh, an Internet2 audio streaming package,
has been announced.
"
Soundmesh is a result of a collaborative work with Mara Helmuth. It
originally started as an "Internet Sound Exchange" Internet2 project and
has since grown to become a full-fledged audio streaming front-end. The
sole purpose of this app is to provide a mechanism for streaming
multiple
CD-quality (or better) audio soundfiles via fast Internet2 connection,
utilizing hacked version of the RTcmix v.3.1.0. Hence, Soundmesh
provides for a unique "jamming" tool via Internet for a larger groups of
participants."
Full Story (comments: none)
The
latest changes to the
Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include the addition
of
Ardour version 0.9beta2-1.
Ardour is an up and coming multi-track audio recording package.
Comments (none posted)
Database Software
Version 0.90.0 of libgda/libgnomedb, a framework for developing database
applications under GNOME,
has been
released.
"
This release marks the beginning of the end of the normal
development process, since this is one of the latest releases before
the 1.0 beta testing cycle starts."
Comments (none posted)
Electronics
A new development snapshot of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation
language compiler
has been released.
See the
release notes for change information.
Comments (none posted)
Version 3.1.16 of Xcircuit, an electronic circuit drawing package,
has been released.
The change information is somewhat sparse at this time.
Comments (none posted)
Mail Software
MailBoxer 2.2.5
has been announced.
"
MailBoxer is a lightweight ZOPE-Product to run mailinglists, newsletters and
mailarchives. Its main idea is to give you an extensible framework for
building mailinglist-based applications with the power of ZOPE. Out of the
box it provides a full featured mailinglist/ newsletter/
mailarchiving-framework." A number of bug fixes and new
features are included in this release.
Comments (none posted)
Printing
The latest addition to the Foomatic printer database on
LinuxPrinting.org
is the Minolta Color PageWorks Pro L color laser printer.
Comments (none posted)
Web Site Development
Version 2.7.0a1 of Zope
has been released.
"
Zope 2.7.0 represents a concentration on
software configuration and installation improvement over older versions. It
requires Python 2.2.3."
Comments (none posted)
Version 0.5.1 of Epoz, a wysiwyg editor for Zope,
has been released. Changes include bug fixes for bold text,
a new timeout feature, a view/edit source switch, a French translation,
a change of license to Zpl 2.0, and more.
Comments (none posted)
The first alpha release of PortalTransforms
is available for the Zope platform.
"
It provides two new CMF tools in order to make MIME types based
transformations on the portal contents and so an easy to way to plugin some
new transformations for previously unsupported content types. You will find
more info in the package's README and docs directory."
Comments (none posted)
MozillaZine has
an announcement for version 1.0 of NewsMonster, a cross-platform
web log manager.
"
Come and get it gang! This build focuses on stability while we
work hard on 1.1."
Comments (none posted)
Web Services
Adam Trachtenberg
introduces SOAP and web services on O'Reilly.
"
Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast for New York City, the current stock price of IBM, or the best-selling DVD according to Amazon.com, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer's perspective, it's as if you're calling a local function that returns a value."
Comments (none posted)
Miscellaneous
Version 2.1.0 of EVMS, the Enterprise Volume Management System,
is available.
"
This release
is for the new EVMS design, which is based on user-space volume discovery and
communication with existing kernel drivers, such as MD/Software-RAID and
Device-Mapper."
Comments (none posted)
Desktop Applications
Audio Applications
The first release of gmorgan has been released.
"
Gmorgan is a .. Rhythm Station, an organ with auto-accompaniment.
Uses MIDI and the ALSA sequencer for play the rhythm patterns.
Styles, patterns and sounds, the mixer settings, can be edited
and saved."
Full Story (comments: none)
Version 1.4.2 of JACK Rack has been released and features a
Russian translation as well as some bug fixes.
Full Story (comments: none)
Musik is an open-source,
multi-platform multimedia library that supports mp3 and ogg formats.
"
New features include: unicode support, threaded operation, smoother playback, faster mp3 and ogg tagging, better drag and drop support, less flashing, new selection schemes, new user interface preferences, a profanity filter, and the beginnings of a web based interface to "remote control" playback."
Comments (none posted)
Version 2.0.0 of Tkeca, the Tk GUI for Ecasound, has been released.
Full Story (comments: none)
Desktop Environments
GnomeDesktop.org
covers
the release of the GNOME Development Series Desktop 2.3.3.
"
This release is a feature-frozen, development series snapshot.
It is used by developers and testers as their day-to-day working desktop,
nd is ready for wider testing by our user community."
Comments (none posted)
Gnomedesktop.org has
the announcement and feedback for the July 1-6, 2003
GNOME Summary.
"
So once again we are out with a new GNOME Summary, this time we
look at some really cool new stuff like Nat Friedmans Dashboard and
Jeff Waugh's new planet."
Comments (none posted)
The July 2, 2003 issue of
KDE Traffic is out.
Topics include: KDE Release Plan take 2, KDE 3.1.3, Hex Editor Widget,
System Modules for Control Center, and Privacy Control Center Module.
Comments (none posted)
The July 4, 2003 edition of the
KDE-CVS-Digest
is out. "
This week in KDE-CVS-Digest: News about a new patch
collection in qt-copy module, the Darwin port of KDE and
Quanta. Optimizations in KSVG, listview and iconview modes."
Comments (none posted)
GUI Packages
Version 2.0 alpha 4 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful ToolKit,
has been released
and features a number of bug fixes.
Comments (none posted)
Interoperability
Issue #177 of
Wine Traffic is out.
Topics include:
Updated DLL Status Page, DirectShow / Quartz Patches,
Fix For Kazaa Lite, Clipboard Problems, Wine Keyboard Handling,
and Printing Out the Wine Version.
Comments (none posted)
Mail Clients
Version 0.11.0 (Unstable) of Columba
is available.
"
Columba is an email
client written in Java, featuring a user-friendly graphical interface with
wizards and internalionalization support. Its a powerful email management
tool with features to enhance your productivity and communication."
Comments (none posted)
Office Applications
Issue #151 of the
AbiWord Weekly News is out. The summary says:
"
Tomas expands the clipboard capabilities, MailMerge to become a new animal, Windows gets several big boosts and Beta2 soon to arrive. Also, one of the more productive weeks for the user discussions, on our mailing list and at FootNotes."
Comments (none posted)
Volume 1 of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter has been published.
Take a look for the latest OpenOffice.org development news.
Full Story (comments: none)
Versions 2.2.1 of StarDict, an international dictionary for GNOME,
has been announced.
Comments (none posted)
Web Browsers
The July 4, 2003
Mozilla Status Update has been published.
Topics include: Mozilla 1.4, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firebird,
Mozilla Calendar, Relicensing Scripts, CSS3 Support, Tree Status,
and Staff Meeting Minutes.
Comments (none posted)
The latest round of
Mozilla Independent Status Reports are out.
The MozillaZine summary says:
"
The latest set of status reports includes updates from mozdev, Mnenhy, Mozex, MessageID-Finder, Tinderstatus, XULMaker and NeedleSearch."
Comments (none posted)
Miscellaneous
Version 0.8.2 of ReciteWord
is available.
"
reciteword is education software developed using GTK 2 to help
people study English and recite English words. It has a very beautiful
interface to make reciting words an interesing thing. It can change
skins, and comes with many sound events, including over 400 books for
you to choose. It also includes a dictionary, which can also run
separately."
Comments (none posted)
GnomeDesktop.org has
an announcement for version 0.116 of Terminal Server Client.
"
A new release of Terminal Server Client, a frontend for rdesktop
and other remote desktop tools, has been unleashed. Version 0.116 fixes
a lot of bugs that have been reported."
Comments (none posted)
GnomeDesktop.org has
an announcement for a new version of gnome-jabber.
"
Anonymous George writes "The first ever version of gnome-jabber has now been released making full use of Gnome2 and GTK2. Gnome-jabber is an Instant Message Client for Gnome using the Jabber Protocol (which supports all major IM protocols, like ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc)."
Comments (none posted)
GnomeDesktop.org has
an announcement for version 0.3 of
Gossip.
"
Imendio is proud to announce the first release of Gossip, an
easy to user Jabber client for the magnificent GNOME platform.
What is Gossip? Gossip aims at making Jabber easy to use and
tries to give GNOME users a real user friendly way of chatting with
their friends."
Comments (none posted)
Languages and Tools
Caml
The July 1-8, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the
latest Caml language news.
Full Story (comments: none)
The latest Caml language additions on the
Caml Light / OCaml Hump
include CDuce: A strongly typed higher-order functional programming language for XML documents, IBAL: A general-purpose language for probabilistic modeling, parameter estimation and decision making, Fresh Objective Caml: An extension of OCaml with facilities for correctly manipulating object-language syntax involving alpha-convertible names and binding operations, and Flow Caml: A prototype implementation of an information flow analyzer for the Caml language.
Comments (none posted)
FORTRAN
Linux binaries of
GNU Fortran 95 (G95) are available.
"
These include a complete FORALL implementation and some support for internal IO, amongst other things."
Comments (1 posted)
Java
Version 0.8 of Java-GNOME Bindings
has been announced. This version features support for
GTK+ 2.x and GNOME 2.x.
Comments (none posted)
O'Reilly has published
an excerpt from the book
Java Data Objects.
"
In this excerpt from Java Data Objects, authors David Jordan and Craig
Russell provide a high-level overview of the architectural aspects of JDO,
as well as examples of environments in which JDO can be used."
Comments (none posted)
Yannick Saillet
covers GUI accessibility issues on IBM's devloperWorks.
"
One of the main characteristics of the JFC/Swing framework is its ability to use pluggable look-and-feel designs. The same application can be run with different look-and-feel designs without requiring any modification. In this article, Software Engineer Yannick Saillet explains the mechanism behind the Metal look and feel -- one of the standard look and feel designs provided with the J2SE platform -- and demonstrates how to modify it into a universal, customizable look and feel to accommodate special user needs, such as high contrast or large fonts for the visually impaired."
Comments (none posted)
Perl
Use Perl has
announced
the PerlBugAthon.
"
cwest writes "There are currently around 1450 open tickets in the perlbug
database. Many of these are years old. Others are already resolved in current
versions of perl. Some might not be bugs at all.The goal of the PerlBugAthon
is to reduce the number of open tickets by 500. We have a week to make it
happen."
Comments (none posted)
The June 30 - July 6, 2003 edition of
This Week on perl5-porters is online.
"
As the next maintenance release of perl is getting closer, the porters are still fixing bugs. Among the subjects that have been investigated this week, we can remember some hash-ordering-dependent bugs, process name problems, and more syntactic issues."
Comments (none posted)
The July 06, 2003 edition of
This week on Perl 6 is out with lots of Parrot information.
Comments (none posted)
UsePerl
reports on Larry Wall's new Ponie project.
"
acme writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly
Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere
within his legendary humorous presentation).
Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on
Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make
existing XS code work."
Comments (none posted)
PHP
The
PHP Weekly Summary for July 7, 2003 is out. Topics include:
PHP 5 beta 1 comments, TODO list for Beta 2, Reflection API, Renaming php4*
to php5*, PCRE extension changes, No official PHP 5 documentation yet,
SQLlite and sessions.
Comments (none posted)
Python
SourceForge has
an announcement for Python version 2.3b2.
"
Python 2.3b2 has been released (29-Jun-2003). We encourage you
to test your applications with this release, as we plan on a final
Python 2.3 release by early August."
Comments (none posted)
The July 7, 2003 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out with
the week's Python language development news.
Full Story (comments: none)
Ruby
Dmitry Borodaenko has sent us an announcement for a project called RJNI
that involves mapping the JNI API as an extension to Ruby.
"
Combining the vast set of Java libraries with the
power of Ruby language has all the potenti[al] to become a serious
breakthrough in application development."
Full Story (comments: none)
Scheme
The July 7, 2003 edition of the Scheme Weekly News
is out with the latest Scheme language developments.
Full Story (comments: none)
Tcl/Tk
The July 7, 2003 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!
is available for your reading pleasure.
Full Story (comments: none)
XML
David Cummings and Collin VanDyck
introduce Cocoon in part 1 of a 2 part series on O'Reilly.
"
Apache Cocoon is an XML-publishing framework that allows you to
uild powerful applications from customized components. Yeah, that's a
mouthful. Collin VanDyck and David Cummings demonstrate Cocoon's sitemap
and XML generation capabilities."
Comments (none posted)
Uche Ogbuji
continues
his series on XML Data Bindings in Python with part 2.
"
In my last article I started a discussion of data bindings for Python with a close look at generateDS.py. This time I'll look at another package, gnosis.xml.objectify from David Mertz's Gnosis Utilities."
Comments (none posted)
Frank Cohen
writes about SAML on IBM's developerWorks.
"
At the beginning of 2003, the OASIS group approved the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) specification. With 55 individuals from 25 companies participating, one would think SAML does everything and would be well understood. Instead, misconceptions about SAML exist in the software development community. In this article, Frank Cohen details and debunks many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding SAML."
Comments (none posted)
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