Development

The Dasher Project

The Dasher Project is working on a new type of computer interface, with the goal of replacing the traditional keyboard as a text input device. According to the project summary:

Dasher is designed for use on palmtops and wearable computers. It supports one-handed and hands-free operation. One-handed input may be performed via a conventional pointing device such as a mouse, joystick, or touch screen. Hands-free operation involves the use of a head-mouse or eye-tracker.

The Dasher documentation includes a three page explanation on the use of the software. Operation looks a bit like running a video game, a few example movies of Dasher in operation are included, they illustrate the use of Dasher nicely.

The Tips for Novices section compares the input method to driving a car:

The intended audience for Dasher is for people with disabilities, the software could also be useful to a wider audience. Decent typing speeds can apparently be achieved fairly quickly:

This looks like fun and useful software.

Version 3.2.0 of Dasher has been announced. "This version is the first release of the new stable branch, and is aimed at the GNOME 2.4 and 2.5 desktops (but will continue to work happily under 2.2). New features include integration with the GNOME accessibility framework and gnome-speech, and the ability to enter text directly into other applications."

Dasher is a cross-platform project, the code is available here.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Alsa 1.0.0pre1 available

Version 1.0.0pre1 of the development version of the Alsa sound driver is available. "This release is intended for wide testing."

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JACK 0.90.0 Released

Version 0.90.0 of the JACK Audio Connection Kit is out. "Buffers can resize during operation. This can be triggered by the user or by the function jack_set_buffer_size(). See the documentation for details. It is new code and still needs a shakedown."

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Database Software

PostgreSQL 7.4 Released

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) has announced the availability of version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS). Version 7.4 includes a host of new features, including AMD Opteron optimization, improved index maintenance tools, and enhanced support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets.

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The PostgreSQL Weekly News for November 14, 2003 is out with more PostgreSQL database news.

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Python Database Objects (PDO) 1.2.0 Released

Version 1.2.0 of Python Database Objects is out. "This new release adds support for the cx_Oracle, DB2 and adodbapi modules, allowing users to use PDO with a variety of database systems. 9 different DBAPI modules are now supported, allowing for PDO to be used with almost any RDBMS. Additional features, such as query parameters, have also been added in this release, as well as the usual bug-fixes."

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Quick and Dirty RDBMS Tuning (O'ReillyNet)

Steven Hauser writes about database tuning on O'Reilly. "You'd like to tune your database, but don't have much time. The point of this article is to find quick and effective results, not the optimum effect. Application design is not covered in detail. Here is how to tune with the least effort."

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Mail Software

milter-sender 0.43 released

Version 0.43 of milter/sender, a spam filtering application, has been announced. "This is a quick follow-up release to address some non-portable issues with the previous release that affected Solaris types. I also took the oppurtunity to fix Dns lookups to use one UDP socket for many DNS servers, which reduces the number of file descriptors required by the milter; also implement the AnyMX: access database tag, which allows for -A behaviour on selected domains without having to specify -A."

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Web Site Development

Enterprise Application Integration using Apache Cocoon 2.1 (O'Reilly)

Tony Culshaw works with Apache Cocoon on O'Reilly. "Apache Cocoon has typically been categorized as a web publishing framework, but since the release of version 2.1 is has started to look more like an XML application server. I've just completed a project with a travel company to build a web-based travel agency desktop which integrates several common backend systems. These systems are ones that a typical agent would use in day to day business and were chosen to demonstrate a variety of integration techniques. In this article I outline how Cocoon 2.1 was the key to building this product, including both advantages and disadvantages."

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QueryParser Rules (O'Reilly)

Erik Hatcher discusses search techniques and Lucene, a Java-based search engine package for Apache. "First we'll see what is involved to use QueryParser in an application. Then, Lucene's Query API is shown in relation to the corresponding QueryParser syntax. Elaboration on the details of QueryParser syntax is then followed by how QueryParser's features can be customized."

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Zope 2.7.0 beta 3 released

Version 2.7.0 beta 3 of the Zope web development platform is available. "Zope 2.7.0 represents a concentration on software configuration and installation improvement over older versions."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

jackEQ 0.3.6 released

Version 0.3.6 of jackEQ, the audio equalizer for the Jack Audio Connection Kit, has been released. The notes say: "Added monitor buttons for aux channels. Pre gain."

Version 0.3.5 of jackEQ was also released this week with these changes: "Added 2x stereo aux send/return channels with one touch assignable inputs (like monitor but for aux send). Useful for external fx processing. Cleaned up gui a little in preparation for internally assigning jack ports."

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WaveSurfer 1.5.7 released

Version 1.5.7 of the WaveSurfer audio file editor is available. See the changes document for information on what's new.

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Desktop Environments

New release of YaGnoBS (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.7 of YAGNobs (Yet Another GNome build script) has been released. "The major additions are some stripping down to remove unnecesary packages and some more flexibility in the scripts."

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The November 14, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is available. Here's the summary: "A deeper freeze is called for in preparation for release. Kexi, a graphical database application now has gui and non-gui parts. Many bug fixes, including searching and sorting fixes in Juk, topmenu fixes in KWin, CSS and Javascript fixes in Konqueror."

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KDE Traffic #68

Issue #68 of KDE Traffic has been published. The KDE.News summary and reader feedback page says: "KDE Traffic #68 has been released, covering topics ranging from toolbars (1, 2), KMail and Kontact fun, to a change in the KDE 3.2 release schedule. Enjoy!"

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XFce 4.0.1 is out.

Version 4.0.1 of the XFce Desktop has been released. "This is a bugfix release and all users of 4.0.0 are e[n]couraged to upgrade to this version."

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Electronics

Covered 0.2.2 released

Version 0.2.2 (stable) of Covered, a Verilog code coverage analysis tool, is available. "This release is a repackaged version of the 0.2.1 release with the 0.2.1 patches applied to it. If you are using the 0.2.1 release without the available patches, please download this version and use it instead." A new development release of Covered is also available.

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XCircuit 3.1.27 released

Version 3.1.27 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing package, is available. Change information is in the source code.

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Financial Applications

Release of GnuCash stable version 1.8.8

Version 1.8.8 (stable) of GnuCash has been released. This version features new translations, bug fixes, and more.

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Games

Solving Puzzles with LM-Solve (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has published an article by Shlomi Fish on puzzle solving with Perl. "Suppose you encounter a (single-player) riddle or a puzzle that you don't know how to solve. Let's also suppose that this puzzle involves moving between several states of the board with an enumerable number of moves emerging from one state. In this case, LM-Solve (or Games::LMSolve on CPAN) may be of help."

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GUI Packages

New FLTK software

New software for FLTK, the Fast Light ToolKit, includes version 181103 of the Table widget, and version 2.1 alpha 4 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful ToolKit.

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Instant Messaging

Gossip 0.6 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6 of Gossip, an instant messaging client, has been announced. See the Gossip Homepage for change information and screenshots.

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Interoperability

Samba 3.0.1 pre3 released

Version 3.0.1 pre3 of Samba is available. "This release does fix a few core dumps in the 3.0.1pre2 release and corrects point-n-print for Windows 2K/XP clients."

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Music Applications

pianokeys 0.3 released

Version 0.3 of pianokeys is available. "Next mockup of this kind will be about to become pretty more realistic."

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QSynth 0.0.1 released

The first release of QSynth, a Qt-based front-end to the fluidsynth software audio synthesizer, has been announced.

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Digital Photography

GNOME Photo Printer V0.6 (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6 of GNOME Photo Printer has been announced. "This program is intended to make printing pictures/photos easy. It does all the calculation, transformation and arrangements of your pictures on a sheet of paper. There have been lots of improvements and bug fixes because of user suggestions."

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Science

MayaVi 1.3 released

Version 1.3 of MayaVi, a scientific data visualizer, has been released.

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Web Browsers

Minutes of the mozdev Admin Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes are available for the November 17, 2003 mozdev Admin Meeting. "Issues discussed include mozdev's non-profit status, date/time standards, email aliases and the site redesign."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the November 10, 2003 mozilla.org staff meeting have been published. "Issues discussed include releases, how much driving time there should be for a rel[e]ase, the new Roadmap update, the new website, Netscape email addresses in important documents and Boris Zbarsky's suggestion about flag policy at release time."

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Word Processors

AbiWord Weekly News

The November 16, 2003 edition of the AbiWord Weekly News has been published. Here's the summary: "TextBoxes get richer, BeOS finally sees some action and preparations for 2.1.0 Some technical notes on how Abi renders a document, bugs on the rise, more news on Abi's Relatives OTS, libWPD, gnumeric and conglomerate. Also, lots of hinting for 2.1.0!"

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Miscellaneous

Informant 0.01 Released (GnomeDesktop)

The first release of Informant has been announced. "Informant is a set of utilities for keeping a user informed of events. It consists of an informant -- currently implemented as Gnome Panel applet or standalone Gtk program -- and a different sources that "whisper" alerts to the informant."

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The November 11-18, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language news.

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Java

Java-Gnome 0.8.1 (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.8.1 of the Java-Gnome library, which is used for creating GTK and GNOME applications in Java, has been announced. "The Java-Gnome project is proud to announce the recent releases of java-gnome 0.8 and 0.8.1 bringing full support for gtk/gnome 2, many bug fixes and performance enhancements. These latest releases represent major progress for the Java-Gnome project. Some reasonably large applications have already been developed with Java-Gnome and there has been much interest from new Java-Gnome developers."

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Inside Class Loaders (O'ReillyNet)

Andreas Schaefer looks at Java class loading details on O'Reilly. "Class loading is a topic that separates the Java Jedi from his or her apprentice. Until you start working with multiple -- and potentially incompatible -- class loaders, you don't realize the trickiness of keeping classes straight."

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Subverting Java Access Protection for Unit Testing (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly has published an article on Java unit testing. "Ross Burton describes how to use reflection to subvert Java class-member access protection to improve unit testing, by accessing private and protected members as required."

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Perl

Perl 5.6.2 released (use Perl)

Version 5.6.2 of Perl is available. "Perl 5.6.2 is being released to fix the build issues with the newest compilers, libraries and operating systems that have appeared since the release of perl 5.6.1 (notably gcc 3, AIX 5, Mac OS X). A few modules have been upgraded as well".

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The November 10-16, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters has been published. "For some reason, (maybe the approach of mod_perl 2), one of the main topics this week was interpreter cloning and the problems it may cause. But the release of perl 5.6.2 is an event that is not to be neglected."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The November 09, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 is out with another week's worth of Perl 6 news.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for November 17, 2003

The PHP Weekly Summary for November 17, 2003 is out. Topics include: Benchmarking PHP, PHP 5 roadmap, PHP-IDN extension, Java extension, Upload meter.

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for November 17, 2003 is available with the week's Python happenings.

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paramiko 0.1 charmander released

Version 0.1 (charmander) of paramiko, which implements a Python-based SSH2 communication channel, is available. "The module works by taking a socket-like object that you pass in, negotiating with the remote server, authenticating (using a password or a given private key), and opening flow-controled "channels" to the server, which are returned as socket-like objects."

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Ruby

Announcing Ruby-GNOME2-0.8.0 (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.8.0 of Ruby-GNOME2, the Ruby language binding to GNOME, has been announced. "One step closer the 1.0.0 release (and hopefully only two steps left) of the Ruby bindings of the GNOME2 libraries, 0.8.0 brings you libgda bindings, more classes and methods, and the ability to create GObjects from Ruby."

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The November 17, 2003 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with a new collection of Tcl/Tk article links.

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XML

An Introduction to Schematron (O'Reilly)

Eddie Robertsson introduces Schematron on O'Reilly. "The Schematron schema language differs from most other XML schema languages in that it is a rule-based language that uses path expressions instead of grammars. This means that instead of creating a grammar for an XML document, a Schematron schema makes assertions applied to a specific context within the document. If the assertion fails, a diagnostic message that is supplied by the author of the schema can be displayed."

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SVG and XForms: A primer (O'Reilly)

Antoine Quint writes about SVG and XForms on IBM's developerWorks. "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and XForms are two blossoming technologies that handle what may appear to be two different facets of electronic document publishing. This primer provides an overview of the two technologies and highlights the potential synergies between them."

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More Gems From the Mines (O'Reilly)

Uche Ogbuji covers the use of more Python-based XML tools on O'Reilly. "In a recent article I started mining the riches of the XML-SIG mailing list, prospecting for some of its choicest bits of code. I found a couple of nice bits from 1998 and 1999. This time I cover 2000 and 2001, an exciting period where preparations for Python 2.0 meant that XML tools were finally gaining some long-desired capabilities in the core language. As in the last article, where necessary, I have updated code to use current APIs, style, and conventions in order to make it more immediately useful to readers."

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Debuggers

DDD 3.3.8 is now available

Version 3.3.8 of the DDD Debugger is available. "DDD 3.3.8 contains some important memory corruption fixes, and better interoperation with gdb-5.x, gdb-6.0, and the Perl debugger. In addition, Arnaud Desitter has made literally hundreds of micro-optimisations throughout the codebase. Builds on HPUX-10.20 and NetBSD are improved too. The manual is now distributed in PS, PDF, and texinfo sources in the main distribution tarball (previously, it was a separate bundle). DDD 3.3.8 is the fastest and most stable DDD yet -- I strongly recommend upgrading if you are using an earlier version."

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Editors

First release of Inkscape (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.35 of Inkscape, a full featured open source SVG editor, has been announced. "This is the first release of Inkscape, and it's a great start for the project. Recent additions include new keyboard shortcuts, alternate node joining method, ability to apply text to multiple text objects, an Open Recent menu item, and more."

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Profilers

OProfile 0.7.1 is released

Version 0.7.1 of OProfile is available. "opcontrol now has an "--image" option which takes a comma-separated list of binary images to profile. All others are ignored. This is most useful for reducing the number of profiles generated when using --separate=thread."

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Miscellaneous

Thomas Bushnell is no longer Hurd maintainer

The GNU Hurd page lists Thomas Bushnell as "the primary architect" for the project. No more. Mr. Bushnell has posted a message to the gnu-prog-discuss mailing list saying: "RMS has now 'dismissed' me as Hurd maintainer because I have publicly spoken against the GFDL, saying that a GNU maintainer must support and speak in favor of GNU policies." (Thanks to David Martínez Moreno)

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