Development

Thanks!

With the future of LWN being highly uncertain at this point, I'd like to take the opportunity to say thanks to all of the LWN readers, people who have submitted material to us, and those who were kind enough to shower us with praise and donations over the years. It certainly has been an interesting and educational journey. Hopefully our efforts have helped to move Linux and open-source software forward. This grand experiment is a long way from being over.

Meanwhile, I will personally continue to ponder the discorporate similarities between open-source software, solar and wind energy, homebrew beer brewing, non-commercial music, concert tape trading, and micropower radio. Open-source software will no doubt play a big roll in my future endeavors.

So long and thanks for all of the fiche. (and other forms of media)

-- Forrest Cook

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Valgrind memory debugger 1.0.0

Developer Julian Seward has released version 1.0.0 of the Valgrind memory debugger for x86-GNU/Linux with the following inspirational note:

By intercepting a number of memory related system calls, Valgrind can detect the following problems:

• The use of uninitialised memory.
• Reading and writing of freed memory after it has been free'd
• Reading and writing past the end of malloced memory.
• Reading and writing of inappropriate areas on the stack.
• Memory leaks involving lost pointers to malloced blocks.
• The passing of uninitialized and/or unaddressible memory to system calls.
• The mismatched use of malloc/new/new and free/delete/delete.
• Some possible misuses of the POSIX pthreads API.

Valgrind is supposed to be able to check any dynamically-linked ELF x86 executable, without modification or recompilation, and it can fire up GDB when errors are encountered. Valgrind also has built-in cache profiling, which can be useful for enhancing the performance of code.

The current 1.0.0 release has undergone a feature-freeze testing phase and it is considered to be stable code at this point. It has successfully been used to check a number of large applications such as KDE3, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and MySQL, to name a few applications. See the Valgrind user manual for the full documentation. Valgrind has been released under the GPL license.

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System Applications

Electronics

Icarus Verilog snapshot 20020728

A new snapshot of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation language compiler has been announced. The release notes are not yet available.

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Web Site Development

Zope Members' News

The latest Zope Members' News items include announcements for ZWeatherApplet v1.0, the Zediscuss product, ZopeTestCase 0.5.0, SlideShow V0.1, My Zope 0.1, the new TriZPUG: North Carolina Zope/Python user group, and Interbase / Firebird Database Adapters.

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Improving mod_perl Sites' Performance: Part 4 (O'Reilly)

Stas Bekman gives some tips on the use of shared memory to improve the performance of mod_perl. "If your OS supports sharing of memory (and most sane systems do), you might save a lot of RAM by sharing it between child processes. This will allow you to run more processes and hopefully better satisfy the client, without investing extra money into buying more memory."

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Miscellaneous

Koha 1.2.2 released

Version 1.2.2 of the Koha open-source book library management system has been released with lots of bug fixes. Click below for more information.

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Desktop Applications

Desktop Environments

Kernel Cousin KDE #41

The July 24, 2002 Kernel Cousin KDE covers Konq/E Updates, KOrganizer and Exchange compatiblity, MMB opens in Konqueror tabs, Fractions In KDE 3.2, and the KSVG viewer.

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Sebastien Biot: KDE Usability - First Steps

KDE.News points to a study by Sebastian Biot on KDE Usability issues. "This test conducted in early July 2002 with four participants outlines of some of KDE 3.0's shortcomings including inconsistencies in KFileDialog and the difficulties of working with Konqueror's embedded viewers."

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Interoperability

Kernel Cousin Wine #130

Issue #130 of Kernel Cousin Wine includes threads on Wine in China, Flow Control in Wine, Overlapped I/O, Coding Debug Breakpoints, and Imports in Winelib.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News #102

Issue #102 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out, the bug fixing effort continues. Cheers to editor Jesper Skov for his last issue, and welcome to the new editors.

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Miscellaneous

GnomeICU 0.98.3 Released (Gnotices)

Version 0.98.3 of the internet chat utility GnomeICU has been released. "This is the latest version of GnomeICU for the Gnome 1.4 desktop platform, and probably the last release for this desktop platform. You should only get this if you are still running Gnome 1.4 instead of Gnome 2, as we are gonna have a Gnome 2 preview release real soon from now ;)" Lots of bug fixes and improvements have been added, see the GnomeICU home page for more information.

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Languages and Tools

C

GCC 3.1.1 released

Version 3.1.1 of GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection, has been released. The changes include bug fixes, improved Java compile time, Java support for parallel make, and better floating point support for mips*-*-netbsd*. A number of other improvements have been added as well.

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Caml

The Objective Caml distribution Version 3.05

Version 3.05 of Objective Caml is available. Pre-compiled Binaries are available for a number of Linux platforms.

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The Caml Hump

The latest Caml Hump entries include the OCaml'OLE OLE binding for OCaml, the MLGMP extended precision computation library, the caml_vrml VRML library for OCaml, the MLChat chat application, and Yaxpo, a nonvalidating XML 1.0 + XMLNS processing suite.

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Java

New Blackdown Java-Linux releases

The Blackdown Java-Linux Team announced the availability the Java 2 Standard Edition v1.4.1-beta for Linux on ix86 and SPARC.

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Thread pools and work queues (IBM developerWorks)

Brian Goetz illustrates Java thread pool techniques on IBM's developerWorks. "One of the most common questions posted on our Multithreaded Java programming discussion forum is some version of "How do I create a thread pool?" In nearly every server application, the question of thread pools and work queues comes up. In this article, Brian Goetz explores the motivations for thread pools, some basic implementation and tuning techniques, and some common hazards to avoid."

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XML Basics for Java Developers, Part 2 (O'Reilly)

Jonathan Knudsen and Pat Niemeyer show how to work with SAX on O'Reilly's OnJava.com site. "SAX is a low-level, event-style mechanism for parsing XML documents. SAX originated in Java but has been implemented in many languages."

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Lisp

GNU CLISP 2.29 released

Version 2.29 of GNU CLISP has been announced. "This version mostly fixes a number of bugs and improves portability by making it possible to be built with gcc 3.1 out of the box. See the GNU CLISP home page for more information. Thanks to Paolo Amoroso.

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Perl

This week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The July 22-28, 2002 edition of This Week on Perl 5 Porters is available on Use Perl. Topics include New regexp metacharacters, A PerlIO / binmode() bug, a Trailing slash problem, Crypt::SSLeay build problems, the end of non-perlio smoke tests, Memory benchmarks on threads, and more.

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Perl 5.8.0 Press Release (The Perl Foundation)

The Perl Foundation has put out an official press release for the recently released Perl 5.8.0. "The Perl Foundation today announced the release of Perl 5.8, the latest version of the Perl programming language. It features better support for cutting-edge computing platforms, unrivaled ability to deal with international character sets and numerous new modules and performance enhancements."

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New Pumpking is Crowned (use Perl)

Use Perl covers the selection of Michael Schwern as the new Perl Pumpking.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary #96

Topics for the July 29, 2002 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary include 4.2.X Security issues, manual translations to Slovak/Czech,Swedish, and Dutch, the 4.3.0 release process, Bugpacks, www.php.net, OpenSSL functionality, an RPC extension, and the PECL distribution.

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Pear Weekly News

This week's Pear Weekly News is out. "Considering the summer holidays, PEAR has had another extremely busy week with 10 stable releases, 4 beta releases, and discussions ranging from PEAR in Gentoo, new categories, a new Manual, and a powered by PEAR icon."

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Python

Daily Python-URL

This week, the Daily Python-URL takes a look at the Python-LZO data compression library, SimpleParse 2.0.0, the EuroZope Foundation, and Processing SOAP Headers, and more.

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Ruby

The Ruby Weekly News

This week's Ruby Weekly News looks at a Vim compiler plugin for Ruby, YAML4R 0.26, OpenSSL for Ruby 0.1.2, and RADIUS for Ruby.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The July 29, 2002 edition of Dr. Dobbs' TCL-URL is out with the latest TCL developments.

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XML

Adventures in high-performance XML persistence, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)

Cameron Laird addresses XML storage issues with part 1 in a series on IBM's developerWorks. "XML storage is too sprawling a topic to offer easy answers. There's no one fastest XML database, nor fastest XML processing language. Still, it's helpful to understand the basic concepts of XML persistence so you can apply them to your specific situation. This article begins a new developerWorks series on high-performance XML by offering an explanation of common industry practices in XML persistence -- that is, storage of data beyond the lifetime of a single process."

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Look Ma, No Tags (O'Reilly)

Kendall Grant Clark explores YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) as an alternative to XML on O'Reilly. "In rummaging around for a plain, concise description of YAML, I kept stubbing my toe on a felt need to define it by referring to XML in some way. That was a mistake. YAML stands on its own very nicely, even if its most immediate point of contrast is XML."

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Profilers

OProfile 0.3 has been released

Version 0.3 of the OProfile profiler has been released. "OProfile 0.3 has been released. OProfile is still in alpha, but has been proven stable for many users. Click below for more details.

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Page editor: Forrest Cook
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