Development

KBarcode - the open-source barcode solution

The KBarcode project is a GUI-based barcode creation application for KDE 3:

Some of the KBarcode features include:

• Creation of 1D and 2D barcodes.
• Contains a rich text editor and has graphical drawing capabilities.
• Has optional database support, works with mySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.
• Outputs to printer, image files, and Cut/Paste to other KDE applications.
• Has support for batch printing of labels.
• Contains built-in label definitions.
• Supports user-defined label definitions.
• Can act as a replacement for xbarcode.

KBarcode supports a lengthy list of barcode types by acting as a front end to several barcode back ends including GNU Barcode, PDF417 Encode, and the commercial TBarcode.

The complete documentation for KBarcode is available in PDF formatted files.

For a better understanding of the capabilities of KBarcode, see the screen shots of the GUI and some online examples of the software's output.

KBarcode version 1.6.2 (stable) was recently released. "This release fixes a major bug, which prevented correct creation of UPC-A barcodes. Also a Greek translation was added."

KBarcode dependencies include KDE 3.x, GNU Barcode, ImageMagick, and if SQL support is needed, QT SQL Tools and mysql or PostgreSQL. KBarcode is available for download here.

Some user feedback shows what people are doing with the software.

If you have access to the hardware, the Linux CueCat driver may be a useful resource for reading back your new barcode labels.

Comments (2 posted)

System Applications

CORBA

CLORB 0.5 released

Version 0.5 of CLORB, a Common Lisp CORBA 2 Object Request Broker, is out. "This version provides Valuetype, a new IDL parser, improved ports, and a new stub and skeleton implementation."

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Database Software

Firebird 1.5 Release Candidate 9

Version 1.5 RC 9 of the Firebird Database is available. "The 1.5 release is the first version based on new, cleaned and improved C++ source code tree with many new features and bugs fixed."

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MySQL 4.0.18 has been released

Version 4.0.18 of the MySQL database is out. "This is a bugfix release for the current production version."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The February 16, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is available with the latest PostgreSQL database information. "Another exciting, action-packed week of PostgreSQL development has come and gone. Work included a number of cleanup improvements to recent changes, some work on new features, and bug fixing at a minimum; but enough generalizing, let's get to it."

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ZODB 3.2.1 and 3.1.5 released

Two new releases of ZODB, the Zope Object DataBase, came out this week. "These releases correspond to the Zope 2.7 and 2.6.4 releases made yesterday. They are bug fix releases, and users of earlier versions are encouraged to upgrade. There are no significant changes since the release candidates of three weeks ago."

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Mail Software

Three new milters

A bunch of new email filters are available on milter.org. The new filters include milter-sender 0.50, milter-spamc 0.14, milter-date 0.7, milter-ahead 0.2, and milter-7bit 0.1.

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Web Site Development

KimDaBa version 1.1 released.

Version 1.1 of KimDaBa, the KDE Image Database, is out. "KimDaBa version 1.0 was announce early December last year. Lots of users started using KimDaBa back then, and lots of feature requested came in. This version tries to honor the most wanted features, and thus makes it an even more attractive application."

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Two new versions of Zope

Versions 2.6.4 and 2.7.0 of the Zope content management system are available.

Comments (none posted)

Web Services

Tip: Passing files to a Web service (IBM developerWorks)

Benoît Marchal works with binary data and SOAP on IBM's developerWorks. "In this tip, Benoît discusses the different solutions available for passing binary data (typically files) to a Web service."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

jackEQ 0.4.0 released

Version 0.4.0 of jackEQ, an equalizer application for the JACK Audio Connection Kit, has been released. The changes are summarized as: "Fixed the rc file so the io menu displays the checks properly. General tidyups which I have forgotten."

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Zinf 2.2.5 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.2.5 of the Zinf audio player has been announced. "This is the first version of zinf to use GTK2 for it's interface. This is good news for those of us who don't really get on with RB, but want to rid the world of GTK1. As always I'm sure the Zinf developers would appreciate user feedback (and of course more people willing to help)."

Comments (none posted)

Desktop Environments

GNOME Development Release 2.5.4 (GnomeDesktop)

Development Release 2.5.4 of the GNOME desktop environment has been announced. "This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes."

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GNOME Development Release 2.5.5 (GnomeDesktop)

The GNOME developers have been busy this week, development version 2.5.5 of GNOME was announced. "The latest GNOME Development Release is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure!"

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The latest Gnome Summary

The GNOME Summary covering developments through February 14 is available. This issue looks at the 2.5.4 development release, Gcalctool, and several other topics.

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Bag of Software (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has a multiple announcement for several utilities. "New releases of a GTK partitioning tool, USB Storage device manager and pppoe configurator...."

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Quickies: Kuake, Scribus, GTK-Qt, KDE Web Dev, KimDaba (KDE.News)

KDE.News has a multiple announcement for a bunch of new KDE software and information. Read about Kuake, Scribus, GTK-Qt, KDE Web Dev, and KimDaba.

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KDE-CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The February 13, 2004 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is online, here's the summary: "The LDAP kio-slave is improved with TSL and SSL for secure connections and SASL for authentication. KDEPIM has a new certificate manager. Work proceeds apace on the khtml XML parser and xpath libraries. Plus a large number of bug fixes in Kopete. Whenever someone does any changes in the name of Usability, it seems to generate much discussion."

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XFree86 4.4.0 Release Candidate #3

Release Candidate #3 of XFree86 version 4.4.0 has been announced. "In what is hoped to be the final showing of our Release Candidate Series, RC3 is finally tagged! Well, this certainly took long enough, but there were a lot of bugs, even some security ones, trapped during this delay of the Great Licence Debate, so it was well worth it."

Comments (34 posted)

Electronics

gEDA News

The latest releases from the gEDA project include new versions of the Covered Verilog code coverage analysis tool, and the Icarus Verilog compiler.

Comments (none posted)

PCB 20040215 released

The Open Collector site mentions the availability of a new snapshot of PCB, a printed circuit board CAD program. This version features new library additions, lots of bug fixes, and more.

Comments (none posted)

Financial Applications

SQL-Ledger 2.2.4

Version 2.2.4 of SQL-Ledger, a Perl-based accounting system, has been announced. Changes include updated translations, a new customer and vendor history report, a patchlevel check for Apache 2.0, and more.

Comments (none posted)

Games

New Pygame Releases

New Python-based games on the Pygame site include Solarwolf 1.5, Pycadia 0.5.1, and Pydance 0.9.1.

Comments (none posted)

wftk version 0.7.0 released

Version 0.7.0 of the WorldForge game project's wftk library has been announced. Change information is in the source code.

Comments (none posted)

Graphics

Inkscape 0.37 Officially released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.37 of Inkscape, a drawing package, has been announced. "Inkscape 0.37 includes many major new features, numerous bug fixes, and extensive codebase cleanup." Also, boolean operations can be applied to graphics.

Comments (none posted)

Sodipodi 0.34 released

Version 0.34 of Sodipodi, a drawing package, has been announced. "This release incorporates for the first time path composition operations (union, intersection and subtraction) and new, calligraphic pen based freehand drawing. Plus many bugfixes and smaller features, as usual."

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GUI Packages

New software for FLTK

The latest releases for FLTK, the Fast Light Toolkit include version 2.9.1 of FLU, small collection of FLTK Widgets, and version 0.3 of FL_Signal, a callback and signal/slot library.

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Interoperability

Samba 3.0.2a Available for Download

Samba version 3.0.2a has been released. "Samba 3.0.2a is a minor patch release for the 3.0.2 code base to address, in particular, a problem when using pdbedit to sanitize (--force-initialized-passwords) Samba's tdbsam backend. This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes."

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Wine 20040213 released

Release 20040213 of Wine has been announced. Changes include screen resolution change improvements, shell32 improvements, Winelib compatibility fixes, bug fixes, and more.

Comments (none posted)

Wine Traffic

Issue #210 of Wine Traffic is out with the latest Wine news.

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Music Applications

BEAST/BSE 0.6.0 is released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6.0 of BEAST/BSE, a music composition and modular synthesis application, has been announced. "Outstanding new features include support for skins, many sample file formats, MIDI file import abilities, an improved piano roll widget, the track editor which allows for easy selection of synthesisers or samples as track sources, loop support in songs and unlimited Undo/Redo capabilities."

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Horgand 1.06 released

Version 1.06 of Horgand, an organ synthesizer, is available with lots of new changes.

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wigwamjam proof of concept

Wigwamjam is a proof-of-concept implementation of a genetic programming synthesizer. "The idea behind genetic interfaces is to grow complex functions merely by choosing from a range of options (or a population of genomes). each genome represents a function to create a sound, each iteration of the process of growing a sound, you choose the best one from the population which is then reseeded with mutants of that sound."

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Office Suites

OpenOffice.org Newsletter

Volume 1, Issue 8 of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is available with the latest OpenOffice.org office suite news.

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Digital Photography

Digikam 0.6 Released (KDE.News)

Version 0.6 of Digikam has been announced. "After nearly one and half years of development Digikam 0.6 and its plugin package have been released. Digikam is a simple digital photo management application which makes importing and organizing digital photos a "snap". The photos can be organized in albums which are automatically sorted chronologically. An easy to use interface is provided to connect to your camera and preview images and download and/or delete them."

Comments (1 posted)

Science

GRAMPS 1.0.0 ''Stable as a Tombstone'' released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 1.0.0 of GRAMPS, the Genealogical Research And Management Programming System, has been announced. "The GRAMPS project is pleased to announce the 1.0.0 ("Stable as a Tombstone") release of GRAMPS, the Genealogical Research And Management Programming System. After more that 2 1/2 years of development, GRAMPS is leaving the "beta" stage with its first "stable" release."

Comments (none posted)

Web Browsers

Galeon 1.3.13a released

Version 1.3.13a of Galeon, a minimalist web browser, has been announced on the heels of version 1.3.13. The earlier release was dubbed "Lets try that again". "I suppose you can say we were asking for it with a release name like that... I used the shiny new automake 1.8.2 when building the tarballs and that was obviously a mistake. It fails to include a helper script needed to make installation succeed. I've readded this file and pushed out 1.3.13a tarballs."

Comments (none posted)

Mozilla Links Newsletter

The Mozilla Links Newsletter for February 17, 2004 is available. "Along with the new name and version, a definitive logo for Mozilla Firefox was released. A new image featuring an agile firefox (red panda) surrounding a globe, a product slogan ("The browser, reloaded") and a marketing slogan ("Take back the web") were unveiled, as well as buttons you can use to let your web visitors know about this terrific product."

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Independent Status Reports (MozillaZine)

The Mozilla Independent Status Reports for February 15, 2004 are out. "The latest set of status reports includes updates from MSDbar, DownloadWith, the Mozilla-Delphi Project, MozManual, mozCC, Launchy, Reload Every and Dictionary Search."

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mozilla.org Status Update (MozillaZine)

The mozilla.org Status Update for February 16, 2004 has been announced. "It includes news on Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, junk mail detection, browser data migration, popup blocking, SVG, new mail notification, permissions and more."

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Miscellaneous

BloGTK 0.9 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.9 of the BloGTK web logging client is out. "This version has been thoroughly injected with Botox so that unnecessary lines no longer uglify the interface. Also character handling has been improved so that Unicode characters can be properly escaped for non-Unicode blogs."

Comments (none posted)

Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The February 10-17, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language news.

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Java

Approaches to Mocking

Simon Stewart writes about mock objects on O'Reilly. "Everyone knows what a mock is, just from the name, but as with many seemingly simple ideas, there is more to them than first meets the eye. This article explores the two types of mocks that exist and covers some of the problems inherent in their use. Finally, it considers the reason why a developer might chose to use mocks. After all, common understanding holds that mocks are used for unit testing, a key part of Test Driven Design, but that isn't necessarily about testing at all."

Comments (none posted)

JSP

Six Cool New JSP and Servlet Features

Bruce W. Perry introduces new JSP and Servlet Features on O'Reilly. "If you use a web container such as Tomcat 5.x, which supports Servlet API 2.4 and JSP 2.0, then you can use a number of useful new features. These include: 1. Using a servlet as a welcome file. 2. Mapping filters to RequestDispatchers. 3. The new ServletRequestListener and ServletRequestAttributeListener interfaces. 4. Using Expression Language (EL) code within template text, not just as tag attribute values. 5. Writing tag files. 6. Writing Expression Language qualified functions."

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Lisp

OpenMCL 0.14.1 released

Version 0.14.1 OpenMCL, a Common Lisp implementation, is out. "This version provides better integration of Objective-C objects into CLOS, bundles some popular system building tools, makes REQUIRE more flexible, and more."

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Maintaining Portable Lisp Programs - new paper

Paolo Amoroso has sent us a link to a new paper on writing portable Lisp. "Christophe Rhodes has written the paper "Maintaining Portable Lisp Programs - It's a bug, not a feature". It examines "the use of read-time feature conditionals, with particular emphasis on writing portable Common Lisp code which aspires to both forwards- and backwards-compatibility"."

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Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems released in PDF format

Richard Gabriel's book Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems is available in PDF format for download.

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

February 9-15, 2004 edition of This Week on perl5-porters has been published. "Another quiet week on perl5-porters; but big patches were proposed, demonstrating that the porters are not dead yet. Read about a revamp of the parser, an in-depth modification of the internals, and other bugs and associated fixes."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

This week on Perl 6 for February 8, 2004 is out, here's the summary: "Lots of little clean-ups done to Parrot this week, while the Perl 6 language design focuses on vector operations and Unicode operators."

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PHP

PHP 4.3.5RC3 released!

Version 4.3.5RC3 of PHP is available. "This will be the last release candidate prior to the final release, so please test it as much as possible." PHP 5.0 Beta 4 is also out.

Comments (none posted)

PHP Weekly Summary for February 16, 2004

The PHP Weekly Summary for February 16, 2004 is out. Topics include: Deprecate dl(), PHP beta 4, Exceptions change.

Comments (none posted)

Python

DrPython 2.2.3 released

Version 2.2.3 (stable) of DrPython, a Python language editing environment, is out. See the Change Log for details.

Comments (none posted)

Stackless 3.0 for Python 2.3.3 is ready

Version 3.0 of Stackless Python for Python 2.3.3 is out. Stackless Python does not use the C Stack. "After a longer search for some final bug which applied to both Stackless for Python 2.2 and 2.3, I am releasing a so far final version of Stackless 3.0. There are a couple fo enhancements planned, of course. Some of them will be the theme of the upcoming Sprint on Stackless Python in March 2004".

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What's New in Python 2.4

A.M. Kuchling has released an early version (version 0.0) of the document What's New in Python 2.4. "This article explains the new features in Python 2.4. No release date for Python 2.4 has been set; expect that this will happen mid-2004. While Python 2.3 was primarily a library development release, Python 2.4 may extend the core language and interpreter in as-yet-undetermined ways."

Comments (none posted)

PyZine Issue #5

Issue #5 of PyZine, an online Python magazine is out with several interesting Python articles.

Comments (none posted)

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The February 17, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is available with links to many Python language articles.

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Ruby

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

The Ruby Garden mentions a new online Ruby book, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. "The (Poignant) Guide is a new approach to teahcing Ruby, emphasizing the lingual traits of Ruby and illustrating its uniqueness with comics, visual imagery, and songs with accompanying hand gestures. This date marks the release of the first three chapters."

Comments (3 posted)

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for February 16, 2004 is available with the week's Tcl/Tk article links.

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XML

A survey of XML standards: Part 3 (IBM developerWorks)

Uche Ogbuji continues his series on XML standards with part three. "The world of XML is vast and growing, with a huge variety of standards and technologies that interact in complex ways. It can be difficult for beginners to navigate the most important aspects of XML, and for users to keep track of new entries and changes in the space. XML is a basic syntax upon which you develop local and global vocabularies. The key to its success is that several very important data formats are defined as XML vocabularies. In this article, Uche Ogbuji presents the most important of these."

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Miscellaneous

dejaGnu 1.4.4 (stable) released

Version 1.4.4 (stable) of the dejaGnu software testing framework has been announced. The What's new document says: "This release has a number of substantial changes over version 1.3. The most visible change is that the version of Expect and Tcl included in the release are up-to-date with the current stable net releases. The biggest change is years of modifications to the target configuration system, used for cross testing. While this greatly improved cross testing, is has made that subsystem very complicated. The goal is to have this entirely rewritten using iTcl by the next release."

Comments (none posted)

Rapid application development tools, part 3: More RAD tools (OSDN DevChannel)

Michael Stibane covers several more rapid application development tools in part 3 of an OSDN DevChannel series. "In parts 1 and 2 of this series I discussed database front end development tools and RAD environments for the BASIC language on Linux. I'll conclude by looking at tools for smaller programming languages (I won't talk about C++/KDevelop/Anjuta or Java/Eclipse) and little-known or independently developed languages."

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