See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Michal Zalewski has released what appears to be an interesting new project, Fenris. Fenris is a combined tracer, stateful program analyzer, and partial GCC decompiler. The program is intended to discover information that conventional analysis and debugging tools miss. Fenris can be used to analyze executables, project source code is optional.

"This is not an interactive debugger, and it is not intended to find problems, bugs or security vulnerabilities automatically. But it is supposed to be a reliable, useful tool that works in real world and can deliver valuable information which can be used to detect known problems, but also to spot unique or not so obvious dynamic conditions."

The Fenris README file describes the operation of the tool in detail.

"Fenris is not supposed to find vulnerabilities or bugs, or to guess algorithms or describe protocols. It is supposed to report and analyze the execution path - detect and describe functional blocks, monitor data flow in the program, marking its lifetime, source, migration and destination, analyze how functions work and what conditions are evaluated."

The README file also makes note of the current state of the project:

"While functional, it is probably not tested sufficiently, there are many issues to fix, several known bugs, some portability issues. It is primarily being released to get user feedback, comments, and, most important, to request development support, as my resources are very limited, both in terms of available time and development platforms. This project is and will be distributed as a free software, regardless of projected use, accompanied by complete sources."

Fenris produces its output in a browsable form, analysis of the executed code is provided in a number of different tables.

Fenris has been released with a GPL license. The source code is available here. See the Fenris home page for more information.

Audio Projects

Alsa packages 0.9.0beta11 released. A new release of the Alsa sound driver has been released. Version 0.9.0beta11 contains a new directory tree that is synced with the Linux 2.5 kernel.

Databases

Knoda relational database GUI for KDE. Horst Knorr has announced Knoda 0.5, a GUI for accessing relational databases in KDE. "It comprises a Form generator, a Table and Query generator and a Report Designer. The introduction of the Report Designer is the central highlight of version 0.5. With just a few mouse-clicks it is possible to design reports, optionally including grouped data and subreports, and then print those reports." Knoda currently only supports MySQL, a Postgres driver is planned.

Education

Seul/EDU report for February 18, 2002. The February 18, 2002 edition of the Seul/EDU report is out. Topics include how British closed-source software companies are banding together to fight non-proprietary resources in schools, a report from the Debian-jr project, the Java Interactive Learning Environment, and more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Feb. 14, 2002. This week's Embedded Linux Newsletter is out. Topics include Sun's Linux announcement, the preemptible Linux kernel patch, installing Linux on a Palm OS device, and more.

Printing Software

CUPS v1.1.14 released. A new version of the CUPS printing system is available. Version 1.1.14 is mainly a security release that fixes several buffer overflow vulnerabilities.

Science

polyXmass: a scientific project for mass spectrometry of all polymers. PolyXmass is a new project that aims to build a set of Gtk/GNOME tools for working with mass spectrometry data. "This project aims at creating an entirely free (GNU GPL) framework where the users will be able to define brand new polymer chemistries and next use these definitions in order to simulate mass data and/or to analyse mass spectrometric data experimentally acquired on these polymers."

MedZope Explained (LinuxMedNews). LinuxMedNews talks about MedZope, a medical record system that is expanding into the areas of web sites and intranets.

FreePM 1.0 beta 6 available (LinuxMedNews). A new version of FreePM, the open source medical practice management system, has been announced. This release fixes some bugs and adds support for Zope 2.5.

System Administration

Understanding NFS (O'Reilly). Michael Lucas introduces NFS, the Network File System, on O'Reilly's onlamp site. "NFS intimidates many junior system administrators, but it's really quite simple once you know what's going on."

Web-site Development

February Zope News available. The Zope News for February 18 is available. It includes coverage of the Tenth Python Conference and many other items of interest to Zope developers and users.

This week's Zope Members News. This week, the Zope Members News mentions Zope book discounts for user groups, a call for papers for the Zope BBQ Europe gathering, and a number of new Zope packages.

ASPSeek 1.2.8 released. A new version of the ASPSeek web site search engine is available. The changes in version 1.2.8 include new Apache module support, bug fixes, and lots more.

Analog version 5.21. Version 5.21 of the Analog web log analyzer is available. This version adds a few minor changes.

Introducing Cocoon 2.0 (O'Reilly). O'Reilly's XML.com site features an article on the Cocoon 2.0 documentation system by developer Stefano Mazzocchi. "Cocoon was designed as an abstract engine that could be connected to almost anything, but it ships with servlet and command line connectors. The servlet connector allows you to call Cocoon from your favorite servlet engine or application server. You can install it beside your existing servlets or JSPs. The command line interface allows you to generate static content as a batch process. It can be useful to pre-generate those parts of your site that are static, some of which may be easier to create by using Cocoon functionalities than directly"

Documentation

LDP Weekly News for February 12, 2002. The Linux Documentation Project weekly news shows no new documents, several updated documents, and sadly, many unmaintained documents this week.

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

Web Browsers

Mozilla Development Roadmap. Brendan Eich has published the latest Mozilla development road map, proposing a release schedule for the post-1.0 releases. There is life after 1.0 -- stay tuned!

Mozilla 0.9.9 Tree Closes (mozillaZine). MozillaZine has announced the closure of the Mozilla 0.9.9 tree. "Mozilla 0.9.9 is the last major milestone prior to 1.0, and includes numerous bugfixes in composer, history, and other areas. Along with this, likely new features that will be in the milestone include a new full screen window mode, set image as wallpaper, and composer publishing."

Desktop Environments

Cooperation with KDE. Gnotices features a discussion on the sharing of themes between KDE and Gnome, and the possible benefits from such cooperation.

Second KDE 3.0 beta available. The second beta of KDE 3.0 has been released; see the announcement for details. It's getting close to the last chance to find problems for the real 3.0 release comes out.

People of KDE: Dwayne Bailey. This week, the People of KDE series focuses in on Dwayne Bailey. Dwayne has worked on the translation of KDE into the eleven languages of South Africa.

Gnome and Slackware. For those of you who want to run Gnome under the Slackware distribution, a gnome-slackware mailing list has been announced. "The goal of the list is to provide an help for using gnome in slackware. It will also be the coordination place of the gnome packaging effort."

Understanding the KParts component architecture (IBM developerWorks). David Faure writes about KParts on IBM's developerWorks. "This article discusses KParts, an architecture for graphical components, found in KDE, the K Desktop Environment. KParts allows applications requiring the same functionality to share a component by embedding the graphical component into the application's window. This article compares KParts with other component models, such as CORBA, and describes the main concepts used in KParts, including actions, plug-ins, part managers, and GUI merging."

Games

New Flightgear flight simulator. A new version of the Flightgear open-source flight simulator project has been released. The changes include some bug fixes and documentation work. (Thanks to Alex Perry.)

Perl Chess Mailing List Created (use Perl). To support the recent activity in the Perl Chess::* hierarchy, a Perl Chess mailing list has been created.

GUI Packages

Colored MultiTabs widget for FLTK. Alexey Parshin has released version 0.8 of his Multi Row Tabs widget package for FLTK.

Interoperability

Wine license change clarification. Jeremy White has clarified his position on the recent Wine license change to the LGPL. "So, with each and every one of my major customers over the past three years, I have had a major, knock down, drag out fight over licensing. I have always insisted that changes we make to Wine be returned to Wine. This has meant (while in a sales situation) explaining the complexities of BSD versus GPL licenses."

Alexandre Julliard has posted the results of a vote taken in the Wine community, the majority of respondents support the switch to a Copyleft license.

Multimedia

First Broadcast 2000, now Cinelerra. Cinelarra is (or was) a product used in producing motion pictures on Linux PCs. Now the Cinelerra website simply says, "It's not here anymore. Why don't you go to this award winning page.", with a link to Microsoft.com (of all places). Cinelarra was a product of Heroine Virtual who may have simply wrapped Cinelarra code into other products.. "As the size and complexity of our software has grown, it is no longer possible to release it under individual's names because of these privacy issues. Credit is given as dictated by the GPL but our original code is released under the name Heroine Virtual Ltd." (Thanks to Wes Felter)

We're still hoping that someone will carve the excellent audio recorder/editor software out of Broadcast 2000 and make a new project. The Broadcast 2000 source code is still available here.

Gnome-Media 1.176.0 released. A new version of Gnome-Media has been released. Version 1.176.0 features improvements to Gnome-CD, CDDBSlave2, and GMix.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News for February 12-19, 2002. This week's Caml Weekly News looks at Ocamlcl, packaging, Active-DVI, mlgmp, and a WDialog license change.

This week's Caml Hump. This week, the Caml Hump looks at an OCaml Regexp library, an OCaml/Java interface called CamlJava, the WDialog web applications framework, the ActiveDVI TeX slide presenter, and the ThreadSocket server and client project.

Java

Java finally catches up to Perl (and Python, Tcl) (use Perl). Use Perl reports on Sun's Java 2 SDK version 1.4, which now features native support for regular expressions.

XML in Java: Java document model usage (IBM developerWorks). Dennis M. Sosnoski discusses techniques for the creation of XML from Java. "In this article, XML tool watcher Dennis Sosnoski compares the usability of several Java document models. It's not always clear what the tradeoffs are when you choose a model, and it can require extensive recoding to switch if you later change your mind. Combining sample code with analysis of the model APIs, the author gives recommendations for which models may really make your job easier. Includes code samples that show the methods for the five different document models."

Expiring Data with Hashbelts (O'Reilly). William Grosso writes about the use of Hashbelts in Java. "In this article I will show you how to use the hashbelt algorithm by using two distinct examples: implementing session keys and reimplementing the RemoteStubCache class from my previous articles on command objects in RMI. By the end of this article, you should feel comfortable using hashbelts in your code and understand when it is appropriate to do so."

Lisp

Two Lisp updates. Paolo Amoroso has sent us two new items from the world of Lisp, CL-PDF version 0.45 is an update to the Common Lisp PDF generation library, and CLAWK is a common Lisp superset of AWK functionality.

Perl

Rindolf - A Perl Dialect (use Perl). Use Perl looks at Rindolf, a dialect of Perl 5 that Shlomi Fish is working on. "What is Rindolf? Rindolf to Perl 5 is like Java is to C++, or Arc is to LISP. I.e: not as much a revolution but rather a re-organization of the language to make it cleaner, more consistent and more fun."

perl-i18n Mailing List (use Perl). A new mailing list has been created for discussion of internationalization (i18n) issues in Perl.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for February 18, 2002. The latest PHP Weekly Summary contains articles on a number of bug fixes, Sybase formats, PHP streams, reference macros, and a number of new extensions.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. This week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out. Topics include reports from the 10th International Python Conference, Python/Java benchmarks, and much more.

Stackless Reincarnate (O'Reilly). Stephen Figgins delves into the issues behind stackless Python. "Stackless was a controversial modification to Python, separating its execution stack from the C execution stack, the C-stack. With Stackless you could set up multiple execution chains, switch between them, change them, or restart them. Uncoupled from the C-stack, you could capture the control flow of your Python program and manipulate it any way you wanted to."

This week's Daily Python entries. The latest Daily Python contents include articles on Zope, the PyTheater media player, the tdmagic procedural modeling and animation library, an object-oriented persistent storage system called OOPS, ACS templating, the Gnosis XML Utilities, and more.

pySerial multiplatform serial port library. Chris Liechti has released pySerial, a multi-platform Python library for accessing serial ports.

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week's Ruby Garden looks at Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder's amusing article on the Big Ball of Mud coding system. Also, the hunt is on for a Powered by Ruby Logo.

Ruby Weekly News. The February 18, 2002 Ruby Weekly News looks at the Ruby Documentation Extractor for C (RUDE4C), RDoc, REXML, and RubyStudio, among other things.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for February 19. Here is the latest Tcl-URL! with news and links for the Tcl/Tk community.

Integrated Development Environments

Anjuta 0.1.9 released. A new version of the Anjuta Integrated Development Environment (IDE) has been released. This version features a new message manager, an embedded terminal, a project import wizard, a new application wizard, support for libglade, bug fixes, and more.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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