Development

Urwid, a Console UI library for Python

Urwid is a terminal-based user interface library for the Python language that is reminiscent of the old Unix curses terminal control library. Urwid is used for implementing user interfaces that work with simple ASCII terminals.

The basic Urwid feature set includes:

• A list box mechanism with support for scrolling.
• An edit box for entering and modifying text.
• Pushbutton, check box, and radio button widgets.
• Simple character-style graphical capabilities.
• The ability to adapt to a dynamically resizeable terminal window.
• Support for capturing the screen.
• Support for embedded tables of widgets.
• Support for UTF-8, 8 bit ASCII, and other character encodings.
• Includes a text attribute markup language.
• Support for multiple text alignment and line wrapping modes.
• Support for user-defined text layout classes.
• Support for a web-based Apache/CGI display mode.
• Runs on Linux, OSX, Cygwin-based, and other systems.

Urwid documentation is thorough, an online Reference Manual explains the programming interface and the online Tutorial gives some example uses of the software.

There is also an online web_display module live demo site for those who wish to test Urwid in action.

Installation is quite simple, packages are available for Debian-based systems, and a simple setup.py script is provided for other platforms. A number of useful demo programs are included for testing and reference. Demos include a directory browser, a numerical calculator, a text editor, a test suite, a fibonacci generator and a package tour, see the screenshot and programming examples for some images. Your author was able to run all of the demos with no trouble.

Version 0.9.0 of Urwid was released this week: "This is the first release of Urwid with UTF-8 input and display support. A new raw_display module was added to enable UTF-8 display. This module also fixes the "dead corner" in the bottom right of the screen and improves legibility of bright text in some terminals."

Urwid is a useful tool for applications that need the portability offered by a text-only user interface, it fills a void between full-fledged GUI applications and a simple command line interface. Being Python-based, it is portable, easy to install, and simple to use.

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The February 19, 2006 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with the latest PostgreSQL database articles.

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Sussen 0.15 released

Version 0.15 of Sussen is out with multiple enhancements. "Sussen is a tool that checks for vulnerabilities and configuration issues on computer systems. It is based on the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language."

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Speex 1.1.12 released

Version 1.1.12 of Speex, an audio CODEC, is available. Changes include: the echo canceler has been converted to fixed-point, improvements have been to the experimental Vorbis-based masking model, and several bugs have been fixed.

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Midgard 1.7.4 released

Version 1.7.4 of the Midgard web development platform has been released. "Midgard's 1.7 branch is a major overhaul of the whole Content Management System. Besides the stable and mature Content Management features of first generation Midgard, it also ships a preview version of second generation Midgard capabilities, allowing developers to have a glimpse at the new day of Midgard2. 1.7.4 is maintenance and bugfix release."

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mnoGoSearch 3.2.37 released

Version 3.2.37 of mnoGoSearch, a web site search engine, has been released with numerous bug fixes. See the Change Log file for release details.

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jack_capture 0.2.3 released

Version 0.2.3 of jack_capture, an application for copying JACK audio stream data to a file, is out with minor enhancements. Also, The initial release of das_watchdog has been announced.

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mp3splt-gtk 0.3 and libmp3splt 0.3 released (SourceForge)

Versions 0.3 of mp3splt-gtk and libmp3splt are out with various improvements. "mp3splt is a free utility to split mp3/ogg files (without decoding), selecting begin/end time; if file is an album, you can get splitpoints automatically from internet or a local cue/cddb file. It splits also Mp3Wrap and AlbumWrap archives."

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Rivendell version 0.9.66 is out

Version 0.9.66 of Rivendell, a radio automation system, is out. Changes include CD ripper enhancements, new build targets, RDCatch enhancements and more.

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RUNA WFE 2.0 RC4 is released (SourceForge)

Version 2.0 of RC4 RUNA WFE is available with new features and performance improvements. "RUNA WFE is a workflow/BPM environment for JBOSS JBPM engine (written in Java). It is a cross-platform end user solution for business process management. It provides rich web interface with tasklist, form player, graphical process designer, bots and more."

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Accelerated Indirect GL X

Now there are two 3D-enhanced X servers available: some Red Hat hackers have released some code which they call Accelerated Indirect GL X, or AIGLX. "We have a lightly modified X server (that includes a couple of extensions), an updated Mesa package that adds some new protocol support and a version of metacity with a composite manager. The end result is that you can use GL effects on your desktop with very few changes, the ability to turn it on and off at will, and you don't have to replace your X server in the process." Much of this code will ship with Fedora Core 5; for the impatient, there are some packages available which will make AIGLX work on the just-announced FC5t3 release. The site includes the obligatory demo animations and a few digs at Novell's competing XGL work.

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GARNOME 2.13.91 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.13.91 of GARNOME is available for testing. "We are pleased to announce the release of GARNOME 2.13.91 Desktop and Developer Platform. This release includes all of GNOME 2.13.91 (aka 2.14.0 Beta 2) plus a whole bunch of updates that were released after the GNOME freeze date."

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GNOME 2.14.0 Beta 2 Released

Version 2.14.0 Beta 2 of GNOME has been announced. "We are pleased to announce the delicious release of tasty GNOME 2.14.0 Beta 2 (2.13.91). This is one of the last delicate releases in the delectable 2.13 development series and represents a toothsome release that is now API/ABI, feature, string and UI frozen. This means that we're pretty close to the succulent final 2.14.0 release. The delightful GNOME contributors are now busy fixing the most important nectareous bugs that are still out there, localizing the whole pleasant-tasting desktop or updating our scrumptious documentation."

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A Look at GNOME 2.14

GNOME hacker Davyd Madeley has posted a look at the upcoming GNOME 2.14 release, with lots of highlights and screen shots. "One application that got a lot of attention is GNOME Terminal which can now display the entire contents of the dictionary on the screen literally in a second, or in under 2 seconds using antialiased fonts (using antialiased fonts it took xterm 1m 13s to do the same!)."

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GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:

• Celestia 1.4.1 (new features and bug fixes)
• Eye of GNOME 2.13.91 (bug fixes and translation work)
• Fantasdic 1.0-beta1 (initial release of DICT client)
• Glom 0.9.6 (new features and bug fixes)
• GNOME User Documentation 2.13.1 (documentation work)
• GnuCash 1.9.1 (unstable testing release)
• Gossip 0.10 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gparted 0.2.1 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gst-plugins 0.10.1 (new features and bug fixes)
• gst-plugins 0.10.2 (bug fixes)
• kiwi 1.9.6 (new features and bug fixes)
• nautilus-python 0.4.3 (new features and bug fixes)
• Pango 1.11.6 (unstable development release)

You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

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KDE Software Announcements

No KDE software announcements were received this week, you can find other KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

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Covered 20060218 released

Development version 20060218 of Covered, a Verilog code coverage analysis tool, is out. Here is a change summary: "A lot of work has gone into adding a lot more Verilog-2001 support, added Verilog-1995 support, GUI improvements/fixes, user documentation additions/updates, adding LXT dumpfile support and the usual bug fixes. I have also removed the diagnostic directory from the Covered tarball and am making it available as its own tarball since it is growing by leaps and bounds these days. "

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XCircuit 3.4.14 released

Stable version 3.4.14 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing package, is out. Changes include new key bindings.

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Circuit Design on Your Linux Box Using gEDA (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews gEDA, a collection of electronics tools. "A lot of attention-and hype-has focused on bringing traditional office-productivity programs, such as the OpenOffice.org suite, to Linux. However, another important-and far less-hyped-area where Linux's desktop abilities come to the fore is in engineering software, and in particular, CAD (computer-aided design). Non-engineers tend to think of the term CAD as referring to mechanical design software, and they are partially right. We are used to seeing complicated drawings of mechanical assemblies appearing on computer screens in advertising and television. However, CAD doesn't mean only mechanical design. Electronics designers also long have used computer-based design tools to help them perform their design tasks."

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KMyMoney 0.8.3 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.8.3 of KMyMoney is available. "KMyMoney is the Personal Finance Manager for KDE. It operates similar to MS-Money and Quicken, supports different account types, categorisation of expenses, QIF import/export, multiple currencies and initial online banking support. The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the availability of Release 0.8.3. This is an update to our latest stable release, and contains several bug fixes and some improvements to the user interface."

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Goblin Exported to Ember (WorldForge)

The WorldForge game project continues to put the Blender animation suite to good use. The game Ember has a new animated goblin: "Exported the goblin out of Blender 2.3. I added a couple of animations, a run and a taunt. The plan for this model is to clean it up when I bring it into Blender 2.41. This is going to happen when the Cal3D or the OGRE scripts are fixed."

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Wine 0.9.8 released

Version 0.9.8 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: Better Web browser support, Beginnings of a Wordpad application, Many richedit improvements, A number of Direct3D fixes, A few more options in winecfg and Lots of bug fixes.

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OpenEHR Release 1.0 published (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews covers the release of openEHR 1.0. "Release 1.0 of openEHR was published on 10/Feb/2006. openEHR is a set of public specifications, tested in implementation, for a distributed EHR/EHR computing platform and is designed for use at all levels of e-Health. It integrates with existing data sources, terminologies and is multi-lingual."

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FreeMED 0.8.2 and REMITT 0.3.1 released (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews covers the release of FreeMED 0.8.2 and REMITT 0.3.1, two medical applications. "The FreeMED Software Foundation is proud to announce the release of version 0.8.2 of FreeMED and version 0.3.1 of REMITT. These releases are stable releases in the FreeMED 0.8.x and REMITT 0.3.x release cycles."

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das_watchdog 0.1.2 announced

Version 0.1.2 of das_watchdog has been announced. "I have fixed up the compilation problems, corrected the DISPLAY environment variable, and let both the program and makefile give warning/error if the softirq-timer/0 or ksoftirqd/0 processes aren't set to have highest priority. It might still not work, but at least you get a message about /why/ it doesn't work, and what you can do to fix it."

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E-Radium V0.61e and Das_Watchdog V0.2.0 announced

New versions of E-Radium, a music event editor, and Das_Watchdog, a realtime process monitor, are available.

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Rosegarden-4 1.2.3 released

Version 1.2.3 of Rosegarden-4 is out with many improvements. "The Rosegarden team are delighted to announce the release of version 1.2.3 of Rosegarden 4, an audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor for Linux. Rosegarden is among the largest and most insanely ambitious Linux music software projects, and is the only Linux application to offer full composition and recording capabilities to musicians who prefer to use classical notation."

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Shelljam 0.0.2 MIDI keyboard

Version 0.0.2 of Shelljam has been announced. "Shelljam is a way of playing electronic music live using standard computer hardware. It is implemented using fast portable libraries. It is designed to be suitable for live performance and studio work."

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OpenOffice.org build oob680.1.0 released

Build oob680.1.0 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is available. "This package contains Desktop integration work for OpenOffice.org, several back-ported features & speedups, and a much simplified build wrapper, making an OO.o build / install possible for the common man. It is a staging ground for up-streaming patches to stock OO.o."

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Democracy Internet TV launches

The "Democracy" Internet television project has announced its existence with a press release proclaiming the availability of its GPL-licensed video player. It is a Windows download for now, though there is a developer release of a Linux-based player available. "Democracy builds on cutting edge RSS, Firefox, and BitTorrent technology to empower anyone to watch, share, broadcast and download video over the internet in a way that enables higher digital resolution, full screen video playback, continuous non-buffered play, and an open standards environment free of adware or spyware -- a much more TV-like experience than traditional web video, and with far more diversity and freedom than traditional TV."

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Minutes of the Firefox Team Status Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the February 14, 2006 Firefox team meeting have been announced. "Issues discussed include status updates on planned Firefox 2 features, list of features to be included in Alpha 1 release, product updates and action items."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the February 13, 2006 mozilla.org staff meeting have been announced. "Issues discussed include Upcoming Releases, Firefox 2, Marketing and Foundation updates."

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OmegaT 1.6.0 RC7 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.6.0 RC7 of OmegaT is out. "OmegaT is a free and open source multiplatform Computer Assisted Translation tool with fuzzy matching, translation memory, keyword search, glossaries, and translation leveraging into updated projects. OmegaT project is proud to announce the 7th Release Candidate of OmegaT 1.6.0. 1.6.RC7 contains more than 50 bugfixes over the 1.4.5.04 release, so we consider it being more stable than 1.4.5.04 in terms of bugs."

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Ultimate++ 602 beta 3 released (SourceForge)

Version 602 beta 3 of Ultimate++ has been announced. "U++ is a complete C++ cross-platform rapid application development suite, where "rapid" is achieved by the 'smart and aggressive' use of C++ features. The new version brings fix of multi-threading issues in Linux, new Report package, fixes and optimization of Assist++ parser and refinements of project organization and build system."

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Caml Weekly News

The February 14-21, 2006 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include: Weblogs 1.2 released, ocaml+twt v0.81, ocaml ncurses bindings, What library to use for arbitrary precision decimals and Menhir available under GODI.

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This week on harmony-dev

The February 12-18. 2006 edition of This week on harmony-dev is online with coverage of Harmony, an open-source Java implementation.

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The LispDoc.com search engine

The LispDoc.com site has been launched. "William Bland has made available online LispDoc.com (The Lisp Dictionary), which is a search engine for Common Lisp documentation and is itself written in Common Lisp. It currently indexes a number of Common Lisp reference documentation sources and books."

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Managing Rich Data Structures (O'Reilly)

Dave Baker uses perl to work with Rich Data Structures on O'Reilly. "If you're like me, you've written plenty of scripts that use simple text files to store snippets of data. Those scripts might have evolved over time into using several snippets of data for each item, which translates into lots and lots of little text files in a data directory somewhere. After reading that Linux doesn't like more than a hundred or so text files per directory, and thinking about the amount of space wasted on my hard drive due to the small size of the snippets compared to the size of a sector and the hassle of all those little files when making a backup, I decided to move from snippets to a single database. Here's how I did it."

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PHP Weekly Summary for February 20, 2006

The PHP Weekly Summary for February 20, 2006 is out. Topics include: C++ extensions, casting and Unicode, iterator usage in PHP classes, asymmetric comparison, zip in 5.1.2, true labelled break, safe_mode gone, Deprecation marker, sys_getloadavg and stream_close.

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flpsed - a pseudo PostScript editor

Version 0.3.6 of flpsed is out with random page access and other new functionality. "flpsed is a WYSIWYG pseudo PostScript editor. "Pseudo", because you can't remove or modify existing elements of a document. But flpsed lets you add arbitrary text lines to existing PostScript 1 documents. Added lines can later be reedited with flpsed. Using pdftops, which is part of xpdf one can convert PDF documents to PostScript and also add text to them. flpsed is useful for filling in forms, adding notes etc. GsWidget is now part of flpsed."

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Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The February 20, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the latest Python language articles and resources.

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Ruby Weekly News

The February 19th, 2006 edition of the Ruby Weekly News looks at the latest discussions from the ruby-talk mailing list.

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Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The February 22, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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GNU HC11/HC12 Release 3.1 is available

Release 3.1 of the GNU Development Chain for 68HC11 and 68HC12 microprocessors is out. Changes include upgrades to gcc 3.3.6 and gdb 6.4, and some bug fixes.

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Integrating Ant with Eclipse, Part 1 (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly presents part one in a series on integrating Ant with Eclipse. "Ant and Eclipse are the top Java build system and IDE, both by wide margins, so it's only natural you'd want to integrate them. In this excerpt from Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition, Steve Holzner shows how to create and run Ant build.xml files from within Eclipse."

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pydev 1.0.2 released

Version 1.0.2 of pydev, a Python IDE plugin for Eclipse, has been announced. Changes include new Jython debugging support, bug fixes and more. (Thanks to Bobby Hesselbo.)

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Interview with Valgrind Author Julian Seward (KDE.News)

KDE.News has an interview with Julian Seward, author of Valgrind. "JS: My background is in compiler technology, having been fascinated by them for a good couple of decades. I've also been interested in issues of software correctness for a long time. Eventually I combined these interests into creating Valgrind, a simulation-based tool which you can use to debug and profile your programs."

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