Development

The BitTorrent File Copying Tool

BitTorrent is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file distribution system. It is designed to provide better download speed if you are willing to dedicate more bandwidth to uploading.

The project description on the GNU directory page says:

The software is written in Python2 and C. BitTorrent runs on a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac OS-X, and Windows. BitTorrent is distributed under the MIT License.

The BitTorrent introduction document and the BitTorrent FAQ have more information about the project.

The BitTorrent Protocol Specification explains how the system works. As with other peer-to-peer systems, BitTorrent needs to have its incoming port enabled on your local firewall.

The value of such a system is mostly dependent on the availability of files, Smiler's BitTorrent site has a lengthy list of BitTorrent links.

One interesting site that is using BitTorrent is bt.etree.org. "This site is provided by the etree.org community for sharing the live concert recordings of trade friendly artists. Please tell your friends and family about new bands that catch your ear, and support these artists by going to see them live and buying their CDs!"

Stable version 3.4 of BitTorrent, "with lots of bug fixes and tracker bandwidth savings", was released this week. This version was not quite ready for prime-time, the download page notes: "The 3.4 release turns out to be buggy. We'll push out another release very soon, in the meantime this page has been set to point to the 3.3 release."

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alsa-lib 1.0.3a released

Version 1.0.3a of alsa-lib is available on the ALSA sound driver site. The notice says: "it fixes again the dmix/dshare/dsnoop poll() problems".

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Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include the addition of two new mirror sites, and new CDROM images containing all of the recent audio application additions.

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knoda 0.6.3-test3 released

Version 0.6.3-test3 of Knoda, a database front end for KDE, is out. "Besides a lot of bugfixes knoda now supports local sql statements in forms and reports."

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PostgreSQL 7.3.6 Update Released

Version 7.3.6 of the PostgreSQL has been announced. "After several fixes were backpatched to the 7_3_STABLE branch, we have now released a 7.3.6."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

This week the PostgreSQL Weekly News looks at the new features going into the 7.5 tree, packaging problems in 7.3.6, and the upcoming release of 7.4.2.

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New mail filters

Several new mail filters are available on milter.org. Milter-greylist, milter-regex, and milter-sender/0.51 have been announced.

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Cooking with sendmail, Part 2 (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has published part two in a book excerpt series from the sendmail Cookbook. "This week, we offer two more configuration recipes from the book: the first on configuring sendmail to offer STARTTLS service, and the second on limiting the SMTP command set."

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Connecting Your Network to the IPv6 Internet with Linux (O'ReillyNet)

Ibrahim Haddad discusses IPv6 and Linux on O'Reilly. "IPv6 is coming. In fact, you can encourage its adoption by using it right now. Ibrahim Haddad demonstrates how to connect your local network to the IPv6 Internet by configuring Freenet6's TSP on a Linux router."

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siproxd-0.5.4 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.5.4 of Siproxd is available. "Siproxd is a proxy/masquerading daemon for the SIP protocol. It allows SIP clients (like kphone, linphone) to work behind an IP masquerading firewall or router. This release includes bugfixes in the area of proxy authorization, registration and SUBSCRIBE handling. Also minor documentation and FAQ updates have been made."

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Animal Shelter Manager 1.32 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.32 of Animal Shelter Manager has been announced. "The installers have been rewritten to work better in a *nix environment (and under Kaffe/GIJ). Many new features added, including better embedded diary support, membership expiry, declawed flag and new shortcut bar on find animal screen."

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eGroupWare 1.0 RC4 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.0 RC4 of eGroupWare, a web-based groupware suite, is available. "eGroupWare 1.0 RC4 released with a lot of bugfixes. When you update from RC3 you must make a database update."

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UnCommon Web 0.2.0 released

Version 0.2.0 of UnCommon Web, a lisp-based web application framework, is out. "This version adds a protocol for defining how the phases of the request-response loop work, initial support for i18n, session expiration/transactions, and a much more capable and faster CPS transformer. The component library features a new tabbed pane, and improved inspector and range views. Lisp expressions in TAL attributes are supported, and TAL files are now XML."

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ZopeMag Weekly News

The February 27 - March 3, 2004 edition of ZopeMag Weekly News is out with articles on Zope and related topics.

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TightVNC 1.3dev4 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.3dev4 of TightVNC, a free virtual network console package, is available. "Version 1.3dev4 is a development version introducing support for RFB 3.7 protocol with or without TightVNC protocol extensions. Also, it has a number of bugfixes and minor feature enhancements."

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Timemachine 0.2.4 released

Version 0.2.4 of Timemachine, A JACK application that lets you save audio that was recently played, is out with several new features.

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JGraphT 0.5.2 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.5.2 of JGraphT has been announced. "The new version delivers a cumulative update of new developments, bug fixes, and improvements. JGraphT is a free Java class library that provides mathematical graph-theory objects and algorithms."

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KDE 3.2.1 is Released (KDE.News)

The KDE project has announced the release of KDE 3.2.1. This is a maintenance release with lots of bug fixes.

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GNOME 2.6-Beta1 Released! (GnomeDesktop)

The beta 1 release of GNOME 2.6 has been announced. Many of the underlying GNOME components have evolved, see the change log for details.

GnomeDesktop.org also links to a fairly in-depth review of GNOME 2.6.

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GNOME Platform Bindings 2.5.6 (Beta 1) (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.5.6 Beta 1 of the GNOME Platform Bindings are out. "Please note that the GNOME Platform Bindings are now in API freeze, so only very important API changes will be allowed before the fully-frozen GNOME Platform Bindings 2.6.0 release, 2 weeks after GNOME 2.6.0."

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This Week's GNOME Summary

This week's GNOME summary has news about Robert Love's presentation at FOSDEM, a preview of GIMP 2.0, Evolution UI updates, a look at CVSGnome, and more.

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KDE-CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The KDE-CVS-Digest for March 5, 2004 is online. Here's the content summary: "Ruby bindings now have DCOP support. Reaktivate, a konqueror module for embedding ActiveX controls, is improved. RealRekord, an application to record Realplayer streams, is imported. Kconfedit adds a property editor."

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Quickies: Google Search Bar, Icons, KolourPaint and more (KDE.News)

KDE.News has a Quickies article that lists a bunch of new software including the Google Search Bar, a new icon guide, KolourPaint, and Digikam. Also, the KDE developer websites are being redesigned.

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Qt Quickies: Qt 3.3.1, Qt Developer Conference, QicsTable, Independent Qt Tutorial (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports on a bunch of activity in the Qt world. "Trolltech has released Qt 3.3.1 with many bugfixes. A Qt Developer Conference for Northeast USA has been announced to be held in Boston on May 10th with Trolltech in attendance."

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SQL-Ledger Version 2.2.5

Version 2.2.5 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, is out. New features include a new AR/AP aging summary report, and an updated Estonian translation.

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Making Screen-Capture Movies (O'Reilly)

Robert Bernier shows how to make a movie from an X window system display on O'Reilly. " Ideally, we can make a movie with tools that don't take long to learn and use. The technique demonstrated in this article shows how to capture screen shots in rapid succession. These screen shots are then converted into a single file that can be read by nothing more complicated than a browser."

Comments (2 posted)

GTK+-2.3.6 Released (GnomeDesktop)

GTK+ 2.3.6 is out. "Version 2.3.6 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango) is now available. This is likely to be the last release before 2.4.0 is released."

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Developers: Qt Signal-Safety (KDE.News)

Justin Karneges mentions a new article that he wrote on Qt signal handling. "After many years of writing Qt code, most of which has been non-GUI-based, I've gained a great deal of experience with signals and slots. One tricky issue about signals is that they are generally emitted when the QObject is not in a safe state to be deleted. This can often bite the user of such an object unexpectedly, especially when performing resets or invoking QMessageBox. The simple solution is to write all QObject classes in such a way that they are deletable as the result of any signal they emit."

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New FLTK software

New software for FLTK includes version 2.1 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful ToolKit, and version 0.44 of vtkFLTK, "a small C++ class library easing development of FLTK event-driven interfaces for use with VTK."

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GIMP 2.0pre4 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.0pre4 of the Gimp has been announced. "More than 40 bugs have been fixed since the last pre-release!"

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BEAST/BSE 0.6.1 released

Version 0.6.1 of BEAST/BSE, the BEdevilled Audio SysTem and the Bedevilled Sound Engine, is out. "This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from all GUI activities."

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ClockLoop announced

Clockloop is a new primitive GPL'd command line loop player for audio data with MIDI control.

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galan 0.3.0 beta 5 released

Version 0.3.0 beta 5 of galan, a modular synthesizer, is out. "One of the new features include cloning. you can now select a bunch of components and clone them. (This will be changed to a full blown copy/paste mechanism soon) And the polyphony option will be added soon."

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OpenOffice.org 1.1.1rc is available

For those of you who love testing early releases, version 1.1.1rc of OpenOffice.org is out. "This build is a release candidate and so far in English only; it is meant for all contributors to test it and find (and file) issues. It is not intended for the casual user wanting to update his or her version of OpenOffice.org."

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GenChemLab 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of GenChemLab is out. "GenChemLab is an OpenGL-based application intended to simulate several common general chemistry exercises. It is meant to be used to help students prepare for actual lab experience. It could also be used in cases where laboratory facilites are not accessible, for instance in K-12 schools or home schooling. At present, supported experiments include titration, calorimetry, freezing point depression, vapor pressure, and spectrophotometry."

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Epiphany 1.1.12

Epiphany version 1.1.12 has been announced. This version features several bug features and improved translations.

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Mozilla Backup 1.3a Released (MozillaZine)

Version 1.3a of Mozilla Backup, a utility for backing up browser profiles, has been announced. Apparently, work is underway for a Linux version.

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Mozilla Ready to Navigate to Internationalised Domain Names (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on the addition of support for internationalised domain names to Mozilla. "A week ago, the German registry for .de names started accepting applications for internationalised domain names (IDNs), which can feature characters such as umlauted letters. Germany's DENIC follows in the footsteps of registries such as the Japan Registry Service, which has been operating IDNs since last July."

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Mozilla Firefox Adds Support for Importing Settings from Other Browsers (MozillaZine)

The Mozilla Firefox browser now has the ability to migrate profiles from other browsers. "Similarly on Linux we can only import from Seamonkey/Netscape 4/Opera... eventually we will also import from Konqueror, Galeon, Epiphany."

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AbiWord v2.0.4 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.0.4 of the AbiWord word processor has been announced. "This is a mostly a bugfix release, and fixes some important issues reported by our users."

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AbiWord v2.0.5 Released (GnomeDesktop)

AbiWord 2.0.6 was also released this week. "This is a 100% bugfix release, which fixes some issues recently discovered by our developers and users. Furthermore, the packaging issues that were plaguing the 2.0.4 release have been resolved."

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AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #180 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out. "AbiWord 2.0.3 released and also successfully ported to Irix, pre- built binaries for Mandrake users now available, lots of users assisting and considering development, Martin begins work on Table of Contents, and now you can meet our own Tomas Frydrych at the LinuxUser and Developer Expo in the UK!"

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BloGTK 0.95 Is Out! (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.95 of BloGTK, a web log client, is out. "This version adds substantial new posting options including extended entries, excerpts, and better support for MovableType posting options. The post retrieval system has been written to be more usable, and several other bug and UI fixes have been included."

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New DOSEMU releases

Two new versions of DOSEMU, the DOS emulator, are out. Stable version 1.2.1 and development version 1.3.0 were released, along with the dosemu-freedos beta9 rc4 operating system. Change information is in the source code.

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Caml Weekly News

The March 2-9, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is available with the latest Caml language articles.

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GCJ adds java.util.regex support

The Gnu Compiler for Java (GCJ) now supports java.util.regex. "Thanks to Wes Biggs and the other GNU Regexp authors, Mark Wielaard (for merging into Classpath) and Anthony Green (for merging into libgcj), we now have support for java.util.regex. This arrives a little too late for gcc 3.4, but it will appear in the next release."

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STAF V2.6.0 and STAX V1.5.1 are now available (SourceForge)

Version 2.6.0 of STAF, the Software Testing Automation Framework, and version 1.5.1 of STAX have been announced. "One of the features added to STAF 2.6.0, and the primary reason for providing new versions of most of the STAF Java services, is to provide diagnostics data to help current STAF 2.x customers prepare for migrating to STAF 3.0, the next major release of STAF."

STAF is described as such: "The Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) is a framework designed to improve the level of reuse and automation in test cases and test environments. The goal of STAF is to provide a complete end-to-end automation solution for testers."

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Design cross-platform Java UIs with native performance (IBM developerWorks)

Vladimir Silva develops cross-platform GUI code on IBM's developerWorks. "Can you write Java code that compiles across several platforms but still performs as fast as native code? This is a problem that has vexed Java developers, particularly when it comes to applications with complex UIs. In this article, developer Vladimir Silva proposes an interesting solution to this problem. You'll learn how to use JNI to access SLIK, a cross-platform C API that offers native performance on both Windows and UNIX."

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Cooking with Java Servlets & JSP, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly has published part two of their excerpt from the Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook. "In this second and final batch of recipes excerpted from Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook, author Bruce Perry shows you how to access an EJB from a servlet on WebLogic, and how to connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a servlet or JSP."

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Another Java Servlet Filter Most Web Applications Should Have (O'Reilly)

Jayson Falkner explores client-side caching on O'Reilly. "In this article, we will code a filter that can modify HTTP response headers with the intention of using it to modify the client's web browser's cache. Client-side caching isn't as obvious as server-side caching, but it can be incredibly helpful, and it's near-trivial to implement."

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The March 1-7, 2004 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is available. " This week was one of those weeks where the bug reports outnumbered the bug fixes. Hopefully in the future the perl 5 porters will be able to keep perl 5 on the right track, as they continue to do, week after week."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The February 29, 2004 edition of This week on Perl 6 is available. "As Leapday had been chosen as the release date for Parrot 0.1.0, the week was mostly spent getting things ready for release. A case in point was the PLATFORMS file which lists those platforms on which Parrot is known to compile and run, which (at the beginning of the week) was short several platforms and generally out of date. So everyone manned the pumps and sent in reports of success and failure."

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Source code for searchable CPAN database (use Perl)

The PERL archive search code is now available. "As part of an update of our site for searching CPAN at http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/cpan-search.html, I've repackaged things so that it should be installable on other machines. The (alpha) source code is available from the CPAN-Search-Lite project on SourceForge."

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PHP Weekly Summary for March 9, 2004

The PHP Weekly Summary for March 9, 2004 is out. Topics include: PHP 5 RC 1 (again :) and 4.3.5, Adding Debug functions to PHP 4, New Perl extension in PECL.

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Using Smarty Templates With PEAR HTML_QuickForm

Keith Edmunds has written a tutorial called Using Smarty Templates With PEAR HTML_QuickForm. "This page is a simple introduction to using Smarty templates with the PEAR HTML_QuickForm classes. It is by no means exhaustive; in fact, it covers a very small fraction of the total functionality of Smarty templates. It is also not definitive: that role is taken by the source code itself, which is of course always right. However, for the newcomer to Smarty templates, the following should be a useful foundation to build upon."

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Ruby-GNOME2 0.9.0 released! (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.9.0 of Ruby-GNOME2, a set of Ruby language bindings for the GNOME 2.x development environment, has been announced. "This release features a binding for the ATK library, support for custom Libglade widgets, auto-conversion to (and from) Ruby types for Libgda, a better support for Ruby 1.8.1, a GStreamer tutorial, and many more enhancements in other libraries."

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Tcl/Tk 8.4.6 released (SourceForge)

Version 8.4.6 of Tcl/Tk has been announced. Change information is in the source code.

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Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The March 9, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with lots of new Tcl/Tk article links.

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From Wiki to XML, through SGML (O'Reilly)

Rick Jelliffe shows how to convert Wiki data into XML on O'Reilly. "Wikis are nice for typing. XML is nice for processing. SGML is a standard compiler compiler language for specifying conversions from one to the other."

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When to use elements versus attributes (IBM developerWorks)

Uche Ogbuji explains when to use XML elements and when to use attributes on IBM's developerWorks. "The oldest question asked by adopters of XML is when to use elements and when to use attributes in XML design. As with most design issues, this question rarely has absolute answers, but developers have also experienced a lack of very clear guidelines to help them make this decision. In this article, Uche Ogbuji offers a set of guiding principles for what to put in elements and what to put in attributes."

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LSB-VSX2.0 Beta 2 Release Available

The beta 2 release of the Linux Standards Base VSX test suite has been announced. "The key changes over the first beta are introduction of an alternate test strategy for handling the large NGROUPS_MAX value returned by 2.6 kernels."

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Comments on OSS/FS Software Configuration Management (SCM) Systems

David A. Wheeler has sent us a pointer to an article he wrote on version control systems. "With the release of Subversion 1.0, lots of people are discussing the pros and cons of various software configuration management (SCM) / version control systems available as open source software / Free Software (OSS/FS). Indeed, the problem is now an embarassment of reasonable choices: there are several OSS/FS SCM systems available today. Here's some information about SCM systems that I've learned that you may find helpful; I'll discuss three popular choices (CVS, Subversion, and GNU arch), the differences between centralized and decentralized SCM, using arch to support centralized development, and a few links to other reviews."

Comments (6 posted)

Distributed Version Control with svk (O'Reilly)

Chia-liang Kao explains the use of svk, a version control tool. "I started to use Subversion one year ago and liked the elegant file-system design a lot. Soon it became impossible for me to go back to CVS. This means that I felt uncomfortable whenever I was working on projects using CVS, and I wanted to see a tool to keep my Subversion repository in sync with a CVS repository."

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Bfr 1.6 beta released

Version 1.6 of bfr, a Pipe Buffer, is out. The description of bfr says: "This speeds up certain procedures, such as creating a tar file, gzipping it, and putting it through a program such as "netcat". It boosts performance by allowing a certain level of detachment between the two... allowing tar and (especially) gzip to do its work at the same time the network is doing its work, so you're not sending one packet and THEN seeing gzip kick in to create the next."

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Bugzilla 2.17.7 and 2.16.5 Released (MozillaZine)

Two new versions of the Bugzilla bug-tracking system have been released. "The Bugzilla team released yesterday two new versions: the 2.17.7 developer snapshot, based on the CVS trunk, and the 2.16.5 stable version, based on the stable branch. Those releases cover 4 months of development since the previous versions and are available for download from the Bugzilla website. "Bugzilla also released a new status update, which contains details about the releases and the upcoming features."

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MonoDevelop 0.1 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.1 of MonoDevelop, a project to port SharpDevelop to Gtk#, has been announced.

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