The
KBarcode
project is a GUI-based barcode creation application for KDE 3:
KBarcode is a barcode and label printing application for Linux and KDE 3. It can be used to print everything from simple business cards up to complex labels with several barcodes (e.g. article descriptions).
KBarcode comes with an easy to use WYSIWYG label designer, a setup wizard, batch import of labels (directly from the delivery note), thousands of predefined labels, database managment tools and translations in many languages.
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
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
Database Software
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."
Comments (none posted)
Version 4.0.18 of the MySQL database is out.
"
This is a bugfix release for the current production version."
Full Story (comments: none)
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
Mail Software
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.
Comments (none posted)
Web Site Development
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
Versions 2.6.4 and
2.7.0 of the
Zope content management system are available.
Comments (none posted)
Web Services
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."
Comments (none posted)
Desktop Applications
Audio Applications
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
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
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."
Comments (none posted)
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!"
Comments (none posted)
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.
Full Story (comments: 1)
GnomeDesktop.org has a
multiple announcement for several utilities.
"
New releases of a GTK partitioning tool, USB Storage device manager and pppoe
configurator...."
Comments (none posted)
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.
Comments (none posted)
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."
Comments (none posted)
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
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)
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
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 Python-based games on the
Pygame site include
Solarwolf 1.5, Pycadia 0.5.1, and Pydance 0.9.1.
Comments (none posted)
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
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)
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."
Comments (none posted)
GUI Packages
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.
Comments (none posted)
Interoperability
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
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)
Issue #210 of Wine Traffic is out with the latest Wine news.
Comments (none posted)
Music Applications
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."
Comments (none posted)
Version 1.06 of Horgand, an organ synthesizer, is available
with lots of new changes.
Full Story (comments: none)
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
Office Suites
Volume 1, Issue 8 of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is available with
the latest OpenOffice.org office suite news.
Full Story (comments: none)
Digital Photography
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
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
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)
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
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."
Comments (none posted)
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."
Comments (none posted)
Miscellaneous
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
The February 10-17, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out
with the latest Caml language news.
Full Story (comments: none)
Java
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
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."
Comments (none posted)
Lisp
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."
Full Story (comments: none)
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"."
Full Story (comments: none)
Richard Gabriel's
book
Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems
is available in PDF format for download.
Full Story (comments: none)
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."
Comments (none posted)
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."
Comments (none posted)
PHP
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)
The
PHP Weekly Summary for February 16, 2004 is out. Topics include:
Deprecate dl(), PHP beta 4, Exceptions change.
Comments (none posted)
Python
Version 2.2.3 (stable) of
DrPython,
a Python language editing environment, is out.
See the
Change Log
for details.
Comments (none posted)
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".
Comments (none posted)
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)
Issue #5
of PyZine, an online Python magazine is out with several interesting
Python articles.
Comments (none posted)
The February 17, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!
is available with links to many Python language articles.
Full Story (comments: none)
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! for February 16, 2004 is available with the
week's Tcl/Tk article links.
Full Story (comments: none)
XML
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."
Comments (none posted)
Miscellaneous
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)
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."
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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