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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


News and Editorials

Mark Dufour sent a note to LWN announcing the Kascade project. Kascade is an Internet search engine that is based on the Open Directory principle. With Kascade, it is possible to build decentralized collections of information. "The distributed nature and lack of central control facilities make for a system immune to company or government control, much like Gnutella and the Internet itself." Kascade uses a a mini-browser to look at directories from the net and can transfer the item of interest to a web browser. The mini-browser has a built in chat feature so that users can communicate with other people who are browsing the directory. This looks to be an interesting project, the developers are seeking contributors to help build directory structures.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux In Education Report for December 4. Issue 34 of the SEUL/edu Linux In Education report has been released. Features include retrieving weather information for schools, the reappearance of KDE-EDU, and searching for the roots of words.

French translation of Freeduc FAC (Ofset). The Ofset Project has announced a French Translation of the Freeduc FAQ by Guillaume Allegre. The Freeduc project is a Free Education software database.

Games

Latest news from WorldForge games. The WorldForge project continues on its quest to make open-source "massively multi-player online roll playing games". The latest news from the site includes articles on collision research and rendering Variable Terrain Height in an isometric client.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter - November 30th, 2000 (LinuxDevices.com). The Embedded Linux Newsletter is out for the week of November 30th. Topics include embedding Linux on the M-System DiskOnChip and a browser controlled MP3 player mini-howto.

AbsoluteX X Window System toolkit (LinuxDevices). AbsoluteX is an LGPL-licensed class library for use with the X window system that was introduced at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. Linux Devices has run an article that discusses AbsoluteX. The source code is now available for download.

The Embedded Linux Quick Reference Guide (LinuxDevices). LinuxDevices has published two new parts in the online series on Embedded Linux, see The Embedded Linux Overview Quick Reference Guide and The Embedded Linux Distributions Quick Reference Guide for lots of useful information on embedded Linux.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for December 4, 2000. The December 4, 2000 issue of the Wine Weekly News is out. News includes the release of Wine-20001202 which features a new winemaker script, new DLL import mechanism, and internationalization and portability bug fixes.

Mail Software

Mailman 2.0 released. The 2.0 release of the Mailman mailing list manager has been announced. "Mailman has most of the features that people want in a mailing list management system, including built-in archiving, mail-to-news gateways, spam filters, bounce detection, digest delivery, and so on."

Network Management

OpenNMS Update. The OpenNMS update for December 5 is out. It covers the new "Testdrive" release, which is apparently aimed at inclusion in a forthcoming release from "one of the major Linux distributions." If you're curious about what's inside OpenNMS, this update is a good place to start.

Office Applications

Free Photoshop for the people (Salon). Salon has run an article about the Berkeley eXperimental Computing Facility, where the GIMP was born. "'It's almost like it's our duty to create cool things for the world,' says Spencer Kimball, who co-wrote both the GIMP and the Unix versions of Gnutella." The article has lots of interesting trivia on the group.

On the Desktop

KDE 2.0.1 Available. The latest release of KDE, version 2.0.1, has hit the streets. This release is primarily a bug fix release with the goal of more complete documentation and language translations, so there were relatively few code updates. Some of those changes include:

  • Japanese language support added, Chinese language support improved.
  • KMail's compatibility problem with some POP3 servers has been fixed
  • lots of fixes for the KDE web browser, Konqueror

Alpha Blending (KDE Dot News). KDE Dot News posted some screenshots of alpha-blended icons on the KDE desktop and the Konqueror web browser. The Linux desktop just keeps looking better and better.

Keith Packard is also working on the addition of anti-aliased text to KDE, the code is not ready for prime time yet, but the screenshots look good.

The People Behind KDE: Matthias Elter. This week's "The People Behind KDE" features an interview with Matthias Elter.

Programming GNOME Applications with Perl, Part Two (Perl.com). The second part in the series on programming GNOME applications with Perl has been published on Perl.com. "When designing user interfaces, we need to consider what provides users with the most useful and intuitive view of their data, without overcrowding them. What do we need to be able to get at easily when we're using the application? There are two parts to this question: actions that we can perform, and data we can see."

The Evolution of Evolution: Steady Progress (LinuxPlanet). LinuxPlanet's Michael Hall writes about his experiences with Evolution. "The last time I looked at Evolution, the hackers at Helix Code were putting it in front of the public as an actual release for the very first time. As a functioning mock-up, it showed a lot of promise, but there was no way I was letting it near my mail. Since then, we're a few preview releases down the road and it's conceivable that if you're a GNOME fan who's curious about the project, and you can put up with the rough patches Evolution will still throw at you, you could probably start using it today on at least a limited basis."

Science

Journal of Open Source Medical Computing First Call (LinuxMedNews). Linux Med News announced the existence of the Journal of Open Source Medical Computing The Journal is "an electronic forum for disseminating information on free and open source medical computing. Scholarly work on any aspect of free and open source medical computing will be considered for peer-reviewed publication." The new journal has announced its first call for papers.

Web-site Development

new ZODB project on SourceForge. Andrew Kuchling has announced the creation of a new Zope Object Database project on SourceForge. He followed the announcement up with this note that describes some recent changes to the code.

Feasting on life with veteran programmer Ken Manheimer (NewsForge). NewsForge takes a look at Ken Manheimer, who is currently working for Digital Creations. "Like most, he started with BASIC and FORTRAN and since has: Worked with LISP, contributed to emacs (including incorporating icomplete.el and allout.el), studied Scheme, researched and developed Knowbot, resurrected Mailman after the original was decimated in a systems crash, contributed to and administered Python, enhanced ZWiki, a Zope-based Wiki clone, and so far, while at Digital Creations, has developed an issue tracking system for Zope which passed the first round at the Software Carpentry Competition (had to withdraw after that because of lack of time). "

Section Editor: Forrest Cook


December 7, 2000


Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

   

 

Programming Languages


C

The future according to Dennis Ritchie (LinuxWorld). LinuxWorld has run an interview of Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of C and Unix. "What is changing is that higher-level languages are becoming much more important as the number of computer-involved people increases. Things that began as neat but small tools, like Perl or Python, say, are suddenly more central in the whole scheme of things. The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central."

ERLANG

Erlang patch release R7B-1 is out. Patch release R7B-1 of ERLANG has been released. See the readme for details, the source can be downloaded here.

Perl

Perl5-porters for December 4, 2000. The December 4, 2000 issue of Perl5-porters is out. This edition covers regression testing, regular expression bugs, PerlIO news, and Dodgy Function Names, as well as other topics.

Perl Module Advent Calendar. See the Perl Module Advent Calendar to get a new Perl module each day in December through Christmas day. Now we have proof that Perl hackers are truly religious about their favorite language.

Beginner's Introduction to Perl (perl.com). Doug Sheppard has published the second and third articles in his Beginner's Introduction to Perl series on perl.com. If you have not seen it yet, you may want to start with the first article in the series.

Python

Python-dev summary. Here is A.M. Kuchling's Python-dev summary for November 16-30. It covers the need (or lack thereof) for Python standards and a few other development topics.

Dr Dobb's Python-URL!. The December 4, 2000 issue of the Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out. Among other things, dealing with Linux sound in Python is discussed.

Wiki Python (Python News). O'Reilly's Python News has an article by Stephen Figgins on various Python Wiki programs. Wikis are web sites which are built up from user contributions. The article gives a good overview of the various Wiki projects that are being developed.

Smalltalk

Making Smalltalk (Linux Gazette). In a recent article on Linux Gazette, Jason Steffler discusses Smalltalk and object-oriented programming in general.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

 
Language Links
Caml
Caml Hump
Tiny COBOL
Erlang
g95 Fortran
Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC)
Gnu Compiler for the Java Language (GCJ)
Guile
Haskell
IBM Java Zone
Jython
Free the X3J Thirteen (Lisp)
Use Perl
O'Reilly's perl.com
Dr. Dobbs' Perl
PHP
PHP Weekly Summary
Daily Python-URL
Python.org
Python.faqts
Python Eggs
Ruby
Ruby Garden
MIT Scheme
Schemers
Squeak
Smalltalk
Why Smalltalk
Tcl Developer Xchange
Tcl-tk.net
O'Reilly's XML.com
Regular Expressions
 

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