Development

MySQL 5.0 Preview

Since the announcement went out on December 24th, many may have missed the release of MySQL 5.0 while they were on holiday. The 5.0 release is the next stage in MySQL evolution, and includes a few "enterprise" features that may be of interest. The release is considered alpha-quality, and is mainly targeted at developers. However the announcement does note that "all old features should be reasonable [sic] stable."

The most interesting feature for many will be stored procedures. A stored procedure is a statement that is stored in the database server. This means that a series of SQL statements need only be issued once, and then clients can refer to that stored procedure rather than re-issuing the commands each time they need to be executed. This feature is already included in the MaxDB product from MySQL (formerly SAP DB) and other open source databases like PostgreSQL.

This release also includes server-side cursor support, new functions, and a new binary log format. According to the MySQL documentation, it should be possible to upgrade from a current version of MySQL to 5.0 to take advantage of stored procedures with existing databases. The MySQL website has binaries available for a number of platforms, including tarballs with pre-compiled binaries for Linux on x86, Alpha, S/390, AMD's X86-64, IA-64, and RPMs for x86, IA64 and X86-64. There are also pre-compiled binaries for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X and a number of other *nix platforms, and Windows. Source is also available, though MySQL AB recommends using the provided binaries.

If history is any guide, it will be some time before 5.0 is declared production-ready. The 4.0.0 alpha release was made available October 16, 2001, the 4.0.x release declared production-ready was the 4.0.12 release about a year and half later on March 18, 2003.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

ALSA 1.0.1 released

Version 1.0.1 of the ALSA sound driver has been released. "This is our first final ALSA release with number 1.0.1. As you all expected, there are only minor fixes against 1.0.0rc2."

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JACK 0.94.0 released

Version 0.94.0 of JACK, the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is available with "Mostly minor, internal changes".

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Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include new versions of Muse, Chaos, Pd Cxc, and Pd Creb.

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Backup Software

Bacula: Cross-Platform Client-Server Backups (O'Reilly)

Dan Langille reviews Bacula, a cross-platform backup utility. "When people ask around about open source backup solutions, Amanda usually comes up first. I started there, but before I finished my implementation, I found what I think is a much better solution: Bacula. It may sound campy, but it works well."

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Database Software

The Effective Use of Joins in Select Statements (O'ReillyNet)

Satya Komatineni illustrates the database join construct in Java. "A join construct helps you effectively use select statements to mine relational databases. This article examines syntax, surprises, and rules of thumb for the use of joins."

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MySQL Crash Course, Part 2 (O'Reilly)

John Coggeshall introduces MySQL in part two of an O'Reilly series. "The previous article explained how to use the SELECT statement to retrieve data from a table within the database. As you may have suspected, the SELECT statement is much more complex. There are several different clauses that can control exactly what data you will retrieve from a table. The first of these is the WHERE clause."

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ZODB3 3.3 alpha 2 released

Version 3.3 alpha 2 of ZODB, the Zope Object DataBase, has been released. "This release includes support for new-style persistent classes and multi-version concurrency control. It's an alpha release, so we could use feedback on the new features and helping testing them."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The January 12, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is available for your consumption. Take a look for the latest PostgreSQL database news.

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Filesystem Utilities

gnome-volume-manager lands in CVS (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org reports on the availability of the GNOME Volume Manager. "GNOME Volume Manager is a simple GNOME daemon that acts as a policy agent on top of the Project Utopia stack, which includes the kernel, hotplug, udev, and HAL. GNOME Volume Manager listens for HAL events and responds with user-configurable reactions. Currently it supports automount of new media and hot-plugged devices, autorun, autoplay of CDs and DVDs, and automatic camera management."

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Libraries

GTK+ Apps Get Free Reign on KDE Technology

KDE.News covers recent developments with the QtGTK library. "Integration of GTK+ applications in KDE has taken another leap forward. This has historically been a bit of a problem; the fact that Qt and GTK+ rely on different event loops was making it impossible to, for example, use dialogs from one toolkit while building the GUI in another. QtGTK is a library which integrates the Qt event loop in the Glib event loop. This makes it possible to freely use KDE dialogs, DCOP, KDE IO and other KDE technology in any GTK+ application just like they would be native."

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Mail Software

Mobile Email with UUCP (O'Reilly)

Sean Reifschneider explains the use of UUCP for email. "I have found that UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) provides a compelling alternative to the more typical email solutions for mobile users. I converted over to a laptop as my primary machine back in January of 2000, and UUCP was an important part of that setup. Without it, I'm sure I wouldn't have been as happy with my untethered lifestyle."

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Printing

Jipsi 0.1.2 announced

Version 0.1.2 of Jipsi (in German), an implementation of the Java Print Service API for the CUPS printing system, is available.

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Web Site Development

Release of ht://Check version 1.2.2

Version 1.2.2 of ht://Check, which is "more than a link-checker", is out. "New features include document type recognition (DOCTYPE) and storing, as well as META description and keywords of HTML documents. Sources have been strongly modified in order to be more robust and to support latest releases of the autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool)."

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Automating Perl Database Applications (Linux Journal)

David Simpson explains the use of Perl and CGIScripter on Linux Journal. "This article describes how Perl is used to generate Perl CGI code using the multi-platform CGIScripter application. The resulting output code automates SQL table creation commands (in this example, for a MySQL database), HTML pages and Perl code. Web security issues, data validation and image handling functionality are incorporated into the resulting Perl code. By automating the development of Perl CGI scripts, even entry-level developers can create CGI scripts that contain most of the commonly requested features in a short period of time--without manually writing any code."

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Zope 2.6.3 released with security fixes

Zope Corp. has announced the release of Zope 2.6.3. Included in this release is a set of fixes for security problems found in a detailed audit of the code, so upgrading is probably a good idea.

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Zope 2.7.0 beta 4 Release and Security Update

Version 2.7.0 beta 4 of Zope is available. "Zope 2.7.0 beta 4 contains a number of security related fixes for issues resolved during a comprehensive security audit conducted n Q4 2003."

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Miscellaneous

GNOME System Tools 0.31.1 is out! (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.31.1 of the GNOME System Tools has been announced. "This release mostly wants to amend some building failures shipped in 0.31.0, but also adds support for mandrake-9.2, improves services-admin support for slackware and provides basic network support for slackware (eth and eth-like wireless devices at the moment)".

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RTAI 3.0 released

Version 3.0 of the Real Time Application Interface (RTAI) has been released. There are many changes in 3.0, including new architecture support, emulators for several commercial real-time systems to ease migration, new development tools, and much more.

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Glame 1.0.2 released

Version 1.0.2 stable of Glame, an audio file editor, is available. "This is a bugfixing release focussing on fixing the known issues with the New Posix Threading Library (NPTL) shipped with recent libc and 2.6 Linux kernel (and unfortunately also with RedHat 9.0 and Fedora distributions). Apart from this you'll notice some improvements in the importing of Mp3 and Ogg files, namely, you can cancel them now."

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WaveSurfer 1.6.0 released

Version 1.6.0 of WaveSurfer, an audio file editing package, is out. One new feature is a Python API for adding plugins. See the change history for more information on what's new.

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Desktop Environments

GNOME Platform Bindings 2.5.2 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.5.2 of the GNOME Platform Bindings has been released. "Here is another scheduled release of the GNOME Platform Bindings, which provide a GNOME development platform for programming languages other than C, in the style of those languages. This release set gives some bindings a schedule and rules to work within, so we can endorse those bindings."

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GTK-Qt Theme Engine Does Cross-Desktop Styling (KDE.News)

David Sansome explains the GTK-Qt theme engine. "The GTK-Qt theme engine is a nifty hack for GTK+ applications that uses the currently selected KDE/Qt style to do its drawing in a very similar fashion to the recently announced KDE Native Widget Framework for OpenOffice.org. Basically, what this means is that it will make your GTK apps look just like KDE/Qt ones and hence integrate better into your desktop."

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This Week's Gnome Summary

The January 4-10, 2004 GNOME Summary is available. Take a look for the week's GNOME desktop news.

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KDE 3.1.5 Released

Version 3.1.5 of KDE has been announced. "KDE 3.1.5 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and a vulnerability in the .VCF file information reader."

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The January 9, 2004 KDE-CVS-Digest is available. The summary says: "Many changes in KDE-PIM; gpgme now used in KMail. Knode integration in Kontact completed. A KPilot plugin for Kontact. IMAP addressbook resources, used in Kolab, is complete. And an initial version of a PIM configuration wizard. In Kexi, read-write queries are supported and dragging relations together now works. An KJSEmbed envelopemaker example is available. FileLight can be used in Konqueror. And the usual bugfixes."

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XFce 4.0.3.1 released

Version 4.0.3.1 of the XFce lightweight desktop environment has been released. "It's a small bug fix release for xfwm4 that ships with xfce 4.0.3. It fixes a focus problem when using multiple screens (not using Xinerama). xfwm4 is the only package impacted by this release."

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Educational Software

Gretools released -- GNOME vocabulary builder (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for gretools, a vocabularity building tool for GNOME. "Gretools consists of a synonym quiz and a word guessing game and also allows you to look up words. It automatically remembers the words you got wrong and helps you revise those words."

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Electronics

XCircuit 3.1.34 released

Version 3.1.34 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing application, is available. Change information is in the source code.

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Games

New Pygame releases

The Pygame project has released new versions of the games SolarWolf and Pydance

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Graphics

GIMP 2.0 pre1 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.0 pre1 of the GIMP has been announced. "Not everything is in its final state, but we think this is close to a final 2.0 release. Your feedback will help make the 2.0 release even better, and we particularly appreciate testing efforts. New bugs can be reported to us at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/".

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Release of Thuban 1.0

Version 1.0 of Thuban, a GIS Data Viewer, has been announced. "Thuban is an interactive viewer for geographic data layers. It can handle Shapefiles, PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial databases and raster data. The user interface makes data exploration easy. Notable features are the legend editor with some automatic classification, projection support and management of attribute tables."

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Instant Messaging

New Gaim release (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org covers the release of Gaim version 0.75. "Gaim 0.75 has just been released for public consumption. Yahoo! works in it (again), and it has a bunch of real important fixes you should grab."

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Interoperability

Samba 3.0.2pre1 Available for Download

Version 3.0.2pre1 of Samba has been released. "This is a preview release of the Samba 3.0.2 code base and is provided for testing only. This release is *not* intended for production servers. However, there have been several bug fixes since 3.0.1 that we feel are important to make available to the Samba community for wider testing."

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Music Applications

JAMin 0.8.0 released

Version 0.8.0 is the first stable release of JAMin, the JACK Audio Mastering interface. "JAMin is a GPL licenced, state-of-the-art realtime mastering processor designed to bring out the detail in recorded music and provide the final layer of polish. Every effort has been made to ensure a clean, distortion-free signal path. All processing elements use linear-phase filtering, ensuring that no phase distortion is introduced."

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Rosegarden 4-0.9.6 released

Version 4-0.9.6 of Rosegarden, an audio and MIDI sequencer and score editor, has been released. "This release is primarily to address a significant problem with 0.9.5 that was seriously affecting sequencer timing performance for some users. For this reason we strongly recommend an upgrade."

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Office Applications

Gnome-vim project enables using Vim in Evolution (GnomeDesktop)

The Vim editor can be used under Evolution. "Jason_Hildebrand writes "In the last few months (off and on) I've done a lot of work and it's now possible to use Vim within Evolution. Thanks to the people who sent encouragement."

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Office Suites

kde.OpenOffice.org: KDE Native Widget Framework available

An OpenOffice.org Native Widget Framework for KDE has been announced. "A development version of the OOo KDE Native Widget Framework is now available for download. So far, it can draw KDE-styled push buttons, radio buttons, check boxes and list boxes (screenshot1, screenshot2, Plastik)."

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Web Browsers

Minutes of the mozdev Admin Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the January 9, 2004 Mozdev Admin Meeting are online. The MozillaZine summary says: "Issues discussed include the splitting of mozdev services, mirrors, abandoned projects in category listings, site statistics, newsfeeds, the home page redesign and meeting times."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes of the January 5, 2004 Mozilla.org staff meeting are available. "Issues discussed include Mozilla 1.6 final, Mozilla Firebird 0.8, CD status, the new Talkback server, plans for the next few months and public relations."

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Securita Project Seeking Developers (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on a plea for developer help for the Securita project. "Robert Accettura writes: "The Securita project is looking for help and leadership, as it attempts to restart." Securita is a project to build a word filter extension for Mozilla, allowing parents and the like to restrict the sites their children go to."

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Word Processors

AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #178 of the AbiWord Weekly News is available, here's the summary: "New AbiDevelopers and an AbiTranslator with positive attitudes shine on this week, while the ability to translate the Windows installer has already been taken advantage of, and MacOS X gets an automatic builder. Also included is an exclusive present for AbiLovers from FootNotes' own stro! Additionally AbiWord 2.0.3 is anticipated to be tagged this Wednesday! See! You wouldn't know that if this came out on time!"

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Miscellaneous

Linux Brochure Project (LBP) version 1.2.0 released

Version 1.2.0 of the Linux Brochure Project has been released. This version "includes a simplified build process, Western European language build support, and an improved look for the generated brochures."

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Small Mono Status Report (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org mentions Miguel De Icaza's latest Mono status report. "Miguel de Icaza has written a little status update on the progress of Mono. Lots of bug fixing and performance optimizations happening. Also much progress on a port of SharpDevelop to GTK#".

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The January 6-13, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with several new Caml language articles.

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Java

Apples and Oranges (and the Java Units Specification) (O'ReillyNet)

Ori Kushner writes about the Java Units Specification on O'Reilly. "This article discusses JSR-108, the Java Units Specification, which allows developers to create systems of units and to define conversion and representation rules in Java. Using an implementation of the Java Units spec, you would be able to attach a unit to a number so that when defining a rectangle in your program, it is clear that its length equals six feet, six meters, six miles, six light years, or some other standard unit of length, rather than just six."

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2D animation with image-based paths (IBM developerWorks)

Barry Feigenbaum and Tom Brunet program 2D animations with Java on IBM's developerWorks. "Why code your animated sequences when you can draw what you want and let a program do the rest? In this article, Barry Feigenbaum and Tom Brunet show you how to combine lossless images, Swing technology, and the authors' own Java-based animation engine to generate movement sequences for fixed objects in 2D animation."

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Lisp

Planet Lisp

Paolo Amoroso mentioned the creation of the new Planet Lisp site. "Planet Lisp is a new site that aggregates via RSS the weblogs of Lisp users, and is inspired to similar aggregation pages in the Open Source world."

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Pascal

Free Pascal 1.9.2 is available

Version 1.9.2 of Free Pascal has been released. "Compared with 1.9.0 there are a lot of bug fixes as well as some new features like register calling for i386 or a powerpc compiler."

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Perl

Perl 5.8.3 RC1 is out (use Perl)

Release Candidate #1 of Perl 5.8.3 is available. "This is a regular maintenance release for perl 5.8.x, providing bug fixes and integrating module updates from CPAN."

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The State of Perl (O'Reilly)

Adam Turoff covers the state of Perl on O'Reilly. "I repeated the same answer I've used for years when people ask me if Perl has a future: Perl certainly is alive and well. The Perl 6 development team is working very hard to define the next version of the Perl language. Another team of developers is working hard on Parrot, the next- generation runtime engine for Perl 6. Parrot is being designed to support dynamic languages like Perl 6, but also Python, Ruby and others. Perl 6 will also support a transparent migration of existing Perl 5 code."

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TPJ Article on Perl Certification Available for Download (use Perl)

Use Perl mentions the availability of an article on Perl certification in The Perl Journal. "YUMPY writes "Did you miss the panel discussion on Perl Certification at TPJ 7.0, which ended with the audience voting strongly in favor of the development of a certification procedure for Perl programmers? Did you miss the October article called "Is it Time for Perl Certification?" in The Perl Journal? If so, thanks to the generosity of the TPJ folks, you can now catch up on these developments by reading the TPJ article for free."

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PHP

PHP 4.3.5RC1 released!

Version 4.3.5RC1 of PHP has been released. "This is the first release candidate and should have a very low number of problems and/or bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on real-life applications to uncover any remaining issues."

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Python

Python-dev Summary

The Python-dev Summary for December 1-30, 2003 is out with a summary of the python-dev mailing list traffic.

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Rapid Application development using PyQt and Eric3

Roberto Alsina explains how to develop a PyQt application using Eric3. "Hello, I am Roberto Alsina and I will be your host for this evening's demonstration. I will develop a useful application using PyQt and Eric3, and document the process here. In realtime."

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is available for January 12, 2004. Take a look for the latest Tcl/Tk news.

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Miscellaneous

Q 4.6 released

Version 4.6 of the Q language has been released. "Q is a multi-platform functional programming language based on term rewriting, which comes with a collection of useful addon modules for system, scientific and multimedia programming. Release 4.6 of Q is now available, along with Q-Audio 1.2 and Q-Midi 1.12."

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The art of writing Linux utilities (IBM developerWorks)

Peter Seebach explains the process behind the creation of generic Linux tools. "As a developer, you may have found that existing utilities don't always solve your problem. While you can solve many problems easily by stringing together existing utilities, solving other problems requires at least some amount of real programming. These latter tasks are often candidates for creating a new utility that, when combined with existing utilities, will solve the problem with a minimum of effort. This article looks at the qualities that make for a good utility and the design process that goes into it."

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