See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Sweetcode has started off with a nice selection of open-source programs, here's a small sample:

• the Tulip Project is a graphical visualization system which is useful for plotting very complex images.
• Picker is a Java program that is used to derive data points from gif images of graphs, it is apparently useful for reverse engineering scientific publications.
• Jazz is a toolkit for building zoomable user interfaces. Jazz is based on the Java 2D API. "Imagine that the computer screen is a section of wall about the size of a typical bulletin board or whiteboard. Any area of this surface can then be accessed comfortably without leaving one's chair. Imagine further that by applying extraordinarily good eyesight and eye-hand coordination, a user can both read and write as comfortably on any micron wide section of this surface as on any larger section."
• Tempest For Eliza is a program by Erik Thiele that causes your video card to generate dot clocks at specified frequencies, for the purpose of making your monitor generate short wave radio signals. Apparently, the program broadcasts a Beethoven piece.
• Swirlies are "algorithmically generated images which look continuous when tiled", interesting eye-candy, indeed.

Audio Projects

New releases from the Alsa project. The Alsa sound driver project has announced several new releases, the 0.9.0beta9 version of the development release and the 0.5.12 version of the stable release. The Linux Music site features a detailed review of the Alsa changes.

Databases

New #gnome-db IRC channel. A new IRC channel has been announced for discussing GNOME-DB issues.

pyPgSQL 2.0 released. Version 2.0 of pyPgSQL is available. PyPgSQL is a Python based interface to PostgreSQL databases. The release notes indicates that this is the first "real" release of the package.

Introduction to Native XML Databases (xml.com). Kimbro Staken introduces Native XML Databases on O'Reilly's xml.com. "The term "native XML database" (NXD) is deceiving in many ways. In fact many so-called NXDs aren't really standalone databases at all, and don't really store the XML in true native form (i.e. text). To get a better idea of what a NXD really is, let's take a look at the NXD definition offered by the XML:DB Initiative, of which the author is a participant."

Electronics

Icarus Verilog snapshot released. A new snapshot of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation language compiler has been released. The release notes mention new support for multiple root modules, improved port error checking, and bug fixes.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Nov. 1, 2001. The November 1, 2001 edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter is available. Stories include LinuxDevices.com's 2nd birthday, a review of the Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA, Commercial YOPY PDAs about to ship, and more.

Network Management

gnutellavision: Real Time Visualization of a Peer to Peer Network . Rachna Dhamija, Danyel Fisher and Ka-Ping Yee have published a paper on gnutellavision, a network monitoring tool for monitoring Gnutella usage. The paper is part of a collection of works on information visualization that were done at UC Berkeley.

Science

Live from the AMIA conference in Wash. D.C.(LinuxMedNews). LinuxMedNews' Ignacio Valdez reports on the open-source side of the American Medical Informatics Association conference.

Web-site Development

Midgard Weekly Summary for October 30, 2001. A new Midgard Weekly Summary is out. Topics include a discussion of scripting foundations, a Midgard FAQ system, a command line interface for client/server administration, and more.

PHP Review Development Version 1.0.1. In what they are calling a milestone release, version 1.0.1 of the PHP Review book reviewing project has been released. The WHATSNEW file documents all of the changes.

mnoGoSearch-php-3.2.0.beta0. Version 3.2.0.beta0 of mnoGoSearch-php, a PHP search front end, is available. The ChangeLog file lists a number of changes including support for mnogosearch-3.2.x, Unicode support, word highlighting, and bug fixes.

Zope 2.4.3 beta 1 released. Zope 2.4.3 beta 1 has been released. The changes include WebDAV mods, ZCatalog fixes, and other bug fixes.

The latest Zope Members News. The most recent items from the Zope Members News include a Comdex Zope BOF, Zope 2.4.3 beta 1, CMF Tracker, and CMFGUM.

Miscellaneous

This week in DotGNU number 3. The third This week in DotGNU has been published. Topics include the Mercury programming language, GNU Common C++, webservices, and cashbox, an ecommerce webservice application.

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

Desktop Development

Browsers

Mail/News Performance Effort Underway (mozillaZine). Seth Spitzer has posted an update that describes the Mozilla Mail/News work that is needed prior to the release of Mozilla 1.0 and the preceding milestones. Footprint and performance issues will be the main focus, as will crashes and data loss issues.

Desktop Environments

GNUstep weekly editorial for November 2, 2001. A new GNUstep weekly editorial has been published, with all of the latest news from that project.

Kernel Cousin KDE For 2 November, 2001. The November 2, 2001 Kernel Cousin KDE is out. Topics include C Bindings for KDE3, Power Management at KDE Shutdown, DCOP Gets Major Facelifts and Additions, Alsa 0.9 Support in aRts, CSS Media Support, Synchronous KIO, Konqueror Context Menu Plugins and KPilot Releases for KDE2 and KDE3.

Graphics

ivtools-1.0 released. A commercial company, Vectaport, has released version 1.0 of its open-source ivtools graphics package. The ivtools drawtool is based on an ancient, but powerful and easy to use drawing package, the Interviews idraw program.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for November 2, 2001. The November 2, 2001 edition of the Wine Weekly News is available. This week's topics include problem With VirtualDub, Borland OWL, and WINE and Haxial programs.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 0.75 released. Gnumeric 0.75 has been released. They're looking for the last bugs before they can put out a stable gnumeric release; if you can make it crash, they'll buy you "a beverage of your choice."

AbiWord Weekly News. The AbiWord Weekly News for November 1, 2001 has been released with the latest info and stats from the AbiWord project. The November 6 issue is also available.

Miscellaneous

Gnome-pilot 0.1.63 released. Version 0.1.63-1 of gnome-pilot has been released. This version fixes a bug in the previous version that caused the pilot to crash in some situations. Upgrades are advised. The code is available here.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News for November 6, 2001. The November 6, 2001 issue of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include new versions of the shared library patch and the real arithmetic module for ocaml.

The latest from the Caml Hump. The latest articles in the Caml Hump include pointers to PsiLAB and Creal, two Objective Caml based mathematical tools.

Lisp

Free The X3J Thirteen! for October, 2001. The October, 2001 edition of Free The X3J Thirteen! is out, with lots of Common Lisp news. Topics include: "a release roadmap for Maxima, initial work on a Simple-streams implementation for CMU CL and the MorphiCL user interface, the releases of OpenMCL 0.8 and LISA 1.1, open projects related to ECLS and a list of new packages in cCLan (C[T|P]AN for Common Lisp). It also includes a review of the Eclipse window manager written in Common Lisp."

Perl

The Lighter Side of CPAN (O'Reilly). Alex Gough reviews some fun Perl modules from the CPAN site. Learn how to use weird dates, turn error messages into haikus, and more.

The Perl Journal back issues. The Perl Journal has put all of their back issues online. Twenty one issues are currently available.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for November 5, 2001. The November 5, 2001 issue of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. Topics include fixes to MySQL 4.0.0 and phpinfo(), the empty ("0") bug, Windows XP, new Clibpdf function, echo vs. html output, new dbtcp extension, and PCRE stack overflows.

Python

Python-URL for November 1, 2001. The November 1, 2001 Python-URL has arrived. Topics include a new Python Eggs page, SkunkWeb 3.1.3, selecting random items from a list, and more.

Python Cookbook online. ActiveState and O'Reilly have built a collaborative website called the Python Cookbook. The site contains a lot of example Python code. "This living collection will allow programmers to be more productive with Python, and will provide a dynamic space for the rapid content development of a cookbook."

Ruby

The latest from the Ruby Garden. This week, the Ruby Garden features a discussion of a draft Ruby Coding Convention by Takahashi Masayoshi, as well as articles on other Ruby topics.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for November 5, with the usual collection of interesting happenings from the Tcl/Tk community.

XML

Building an XML-based message server (IBM developerWorks). George Franciscus talks about the development of an XML based message server on IBM's developerWorks. "This article shows how to code a lightweight, transport-protocol-agnostic, XML-based message server that not only allows clients to place and pick up messages on queues, but also transform messages using XSL. Written in the Java language, eight code listings take you from opening a client connection to invoking XSL transformations on messages."

XML::Checker::Parser (use Perl). Redsquirrel discusses Perl based XML tools. "Once I had a few XML documents under my belt, I headed off to CPAN to pick up some tools. XML::Parser was the first module I came across. Due to my laziness, though, I quickly became disheartened at the number of styles, handlers, and constructor arguments I had to deal with."

Asmo XML taglib processor 1.0 released. Version 1.0 of Asmo, a Python based simple XML taglib processor, has been released. "Asmo is a simple XML taglib processor. It reads in an XML document and, based on XML namespaces, chooses a library to handle the part of the XML tree within that namespace. The result is an XML document containing whatever data output by the libraries chosen. You can optionally perform XSLT processing on the output."

Building XML-RPC Clients in C (xml.com). Joe Johnston takes a look at Eric Kidd's XML-RPC C library in an O'Reilly xml.com article. "XML-RPC is a wire protocol that describes an XML serialization format that clients and servers use to pass remote procedure calls to each other. There are two features that make this protocol worth knowing. The first is that the details of parsing the XML are hidden from the user. The second is that clients and servers don't need to be written in the same language."

Miscellaneous

Linux System Failure Post-Mortem (O'Reilly). Jennifer Vesperman writes about debugging Linux system crashes on O'Reilly's OnLamp site.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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