Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Open Source

  • CodeCon 2003

    Advogato:

    The CodeCon 2003 program is now announced, and registration is open.

    CodeCon 2003 will be February 22-24, noon-6pm at Club NV in San Francisco, California.

    Here is a list of presentations:

    • Advogato – Good metadata, even when under attack, based on a trust metric
    • Alluvium – p2p media streaming for low-bandwidth broadcasters
    • Bayonne – Telephony application services for freely licensed operating systems
    • Cryptopy – pure [unadulterated] Python crypto
    • DeepGreen – Agent Oriented investment analysis designed to be self-funding
    • GNU radio – Hacking the RF Spectrum with Free Software and Hardware
    • HOTorNOT – People submit their picture for others to rate from 1 to 10
    • Hydan – Steganographically conceal a message into an executable application
    • Khashmir – A distributed hash table library upon which applications can be built
    • Mixminion – A next-generation anonymous remailer
    • Neurogrid – Decentralized Fuzzy Meta-Data Search
    • OpenRatings – An open source professor ratings engine
    • Paketto Keiretsu – Interesting and Useful Techniques for TCP/IP Networking
    • YouServ – A communal web-hosting system for the masses

    This sounds like one of the best (open source) hacker cons that will be held this year.  I really hope that I’m able to stumble to a con like this someday.  I have a feeling that this will be one of the biggest open source events that you (and I) didn’t go to this year.

  • TurboPower Open Source

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    A long-time Windows component library developer is leaving that business and releasing many of its products as open source. TurboPower will publish the products on SourceForge and provide initial guidance.

    Very cool pointer, and I like the site redesign.  The redesign probably happened a long time ago, but I’m an RSS junkie, so I didn’t notice.

  • No Fluff, Just Stuff

    Erik Hatcher will be speaking at a No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium in Northern Virginia in late March.  I’ll try to rustle up the cash to attend.

  • Mono Debugger Released

    Here’s the scoop from the mono site:

    • After six month of extensive development, Martin Baulig has released the first version of the Mono debugger. The Mono debugger is written in C# and can debug both managed and unmanaged applications, support for multiple-threaded applications and should be relatively easy to port to new platforms.
    • Details of the release are available in post.
    • The debugger contains both Gtk# and command line interfaces. The debugging file format used in Dwarf (its already supported by our class libraries and the Mono C# compiler; To debug C applications, you need a recent GCC, or to pass the -gdwarf-2 flag to gcc).

  • Phoenix Themes

    Wow, there are a lot of themes available for Phoenix. [via Sean & Scott]

  • Secure Mail Relaying

    Jeremy Zawodny has set up a mail relay using Exim that he can access from anywhere using SSL.  Nice!

  • Mono Update

    Mono News:

    • Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 System.Data client.
    • MacOS X support on the runtime has been integrated into the distribution, and MCS works with it.
    • Zoltan has managed to get IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) to run with Mono. The HelloWorld.class runs with the Mono runtime.

  • GNU Source-highlight

    Mental Note: GNU Source-highlight 1.6.2 is out and looks like a good tool for highlighting c/c++/Java/perl/Python/php(3 only) for the web/weblogs.

  • Freshmeat Roundup

    Here are several programs that I think are worth mentioning or taking a look at.  These have been released or updated in the last day or so.  I regularly try to point out notable freshmeat releases in individual posts, but there are a bunch today:

    fn 0.0.1 was announced on freshmeat today.  Here’s the project description:

    fn (FetchNews) is a non-interactive command-line tool for downloading and aggregating xml-based newsfeeds from web sites. It is suitable for use in a cron job to gather newsfeeds and generate reports at regular intervals.

    It looks like this bad boy is written in C for the following reason:

    A program like this should really have been done in a scripting language like perl or python, but when I started writing it I was bored with both those languages and was looking for a challenge.

    Good stuff.  The author has made some output from his program available.

    pycURL 7.10.3 (and the underlying cURL/libCURL 7.10.3) has been released.  Looks like a bugfix/tweak release from here.

    JCTerm, a Java SSH2 terminal emulator, 0.0.2 has been released:

    New features include sftp support, function keys and arrow keys support, and improved rendering speed.

    TkVNC, a VNC viewer written in pure Tcl/Tk (!!!), 0.9 is out.

    Qt# 0.6 is out:

    This version improves support for Portable.NET and Ximian Mono, corrects the ctor signature for QTabWidget, now explicitly names all anonymous enums, includes boxing constructor access modifiers, adds missing methods to QComboBox, corrects ctor syntax for the examples, adds byte[] to QByteArray conversion, adds a new qmake-based build system for qtc distributions, adds a new csant-based build system for Qt# distributions, and includes a QFractals sample, a port of a Java quantum fractal generator to C#.

  • LinuxWorld Blogger Meetup?

    Update: Please go to my wiki page on this subject.

    I’ll be in New York City to attend the LinuxWorld Expo for probably one (perhps more if it’s worth it, though this poor compsci student only has an expo pass) of the following days:

    • Jan 22 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 23 – Matt Croydon?
    • Jan 24 – Matt Croydon?

    I know that there are several NY local bloggers out there and I’m sure that many more will be converging on the Javits center for one or more of these days.  Shall we arrange a weblogger meetup/dinner/gathering?  Something like Spicy Noodles or RTP Lunch for the Linux blogging crowd that will be on hand?  How does does 6ish (1 hour after exhibit hall closes) sound?  Somewhere, I’m not sure where.  Suggestions?

    If you’ll be around one or more of these days in the general LinuxWorld Expo/New York area, drop me an email with when you’ll be around and I’ll add you to the list.

    Any RTPers?  Anyone traveling from the west coast?  Any fellows?  Any Senior Editors at Linux Journal?

    Yeah, yeah, I know this should be done wiki-style.  Perhaps this will be motivation to set one up.

  • PostgreSQL and OS X

    X-Archetypes:

    Apple’s Internet Developer has an interesting article on PostreSQl and Mac OS X. The PostgreSQL installation on OS X is examined and well as interaction with Java, Perl and PHP.

  • Revocable Open Source Licenses

    Nathan Myers thinks out loud about the revocable nature of open source licenses:

    A quick scan through the Free Software licenses I have immediately on hand showed one thing in common: none say the rights are waived perpetually or irrevocably. On the face of it, it seems, I could release a program under the GPL, and then announce five years later that it and all derived works are under my private control again.

    The rest of the article goes into ways to resolve this sticky issue.  IANAL so most of this stuff flies over my head.

  • Red Hat 8.1 In April

    LinuxToday confirms what I suspected: Hat 8.1 is due in April:

    Linux software vendor Red Hat plans to fortify its desktop Linux lineup by shipping Red Hat Linux 8.1 in April, a 32-bit technical workstation this quarter and a full-fledged corporate desktop in the next six to 12 months, the company confirmed.

    Today’s Linux Celebrity Deathmatch: UnitedLinux vs. Red Hat Corporate Linux.

  • Microsoft .NET Connected

    Phil Wainewright:

    How long before some version of Linux earns the “Microsoft .NET Connected” badge? That day may be closer than anyone expects — I predict it will be in the first half of 2004.

    Bold prediction.  I’d love to see it happen.

  • OutBlog 0.1 Released

    Ingo has released OutBlog:

    Let’s spread the word: Version 0.1 of my highly anticipated (well, at least by the two people who read this weblog) Outlook and Exchange 2000 powered weblog toolkit OutBlog has been released. More information (and a sample blog & download package including source code) is available at http://OutBlog.IngoRammer.com.

    Amazing, Ingo.  Wickedly amazing.

  • Creating a Web Application with Ant and Tomcat 4

    Paul Wood has put together an article for O’Reillynet that looks like it may be that perfect length: long enough and in depth enough without being too much for an online article.  Here’s the lead in:

    I have decided to use Tomcat 4 Servlet/JSP Container technologies to implement a Web application. This still leaves many options, and choosing between the various available technologies is not easy. For this article, I have chosen to keep it simple and use Java Server Pages (JSPs) in combination with Java classes.

  • mod_rendezvous

    Will Cox points to mod_rendezvous by Eric Christopher Seidel.  It adds Rendezvous support to Apache 1.3.x under OSX 10.2 or greater.  I really can’t wait to post an entry about a cross-platform mod_rendezvous.

  • Open Source OPML Directories?

    Dave thinks we should write directories in OPML and publish them on the web.  I wonder if there is any software out there set up to publish directories using OPML in a hosted (php/perl/python/jsp/asp etc) environment, preferably released as open source.  I’ll look around later this afternoon.  I’ve taken a look at an open source OPML module for Python.  To get your head around the module, the source for Straw, an RSS aggregator for Gnome2 should help. 

    I’m not sure if there are similar modules or classes available for perl (didn’t see any at CPAN) or PHP, but there might be.  It would take at least these (free/open source) building blocks for OPML-based directories to take off.  I see that I can do OPML directories in Radio as well as Manila, but not everyone owns that software.

    I keep invoking my imaginary free time, but I’ll try my best to look into it.

    Further Thoughts: I think it would be really cool to take a blosxom approach.  Just drop your .opml files to a directory on your web host and the cgi will take care of the rest.  Of course it would probably be easier (for me) to take a command-line approach, but producing dynamic directories by dropping .opml files would be so sexy.

    Also check out Rick’s implementation.

  • Questions about X11

    Matt Raible has some questions about Apple’s X11 release:

    So now that Apple has released a beta of it’s X11 X Window System, I have a question for you? Do you use this? I downloaded and installed XDarwin, but have never used it (similar experience to OpenOffice. What can I do with X11? Can I run Gnome using X11? Do I have a use for it at all?

  • Confessions of a Mozillian

    Excellent!  Dave Hyatt, a member of the Safari team has a weblog and responds to Mark’s post on rendering quirks.  RSS subscribed, baby!