From the JSch page:
JSch allows you to connect to an sshd server and use port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc., and you can integrate its functionality into your own Java programs. JSch is licensed under GNU LGPL.
JSch 0.0.9 was released. The freshmeat page says that this version added support for SSH2 through a SOCKS 5 proxy. Just a heads up for anyone looking to incorporate SSH tunneling into their projects. Requirements are JDK1.4+. Excellent project!
Access an amazon detail page from your local library’s website, or any website with an ISBN in the url.
A quick URL replacement in Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup program allows you to go an amazon detail page from any url with a single ISBN number in it. This was a request by one of Jenny (the shifted librarian)’s friends. So anyway, here it is:
AmazonLookup (Redirect)
The usual: drag it to your ‘Links’ bar on internet explorer, go to a URL with an ISBN in it (a library page for example), click AmazonLookup, and you’re there. I wondered how fun it would be to transport yourself from Amazon’s page about a book to Barnes and Noble’s page about the same book. A little more URL tweaking, and we have:
BNLookup (Redirect)
Feel free to pop by your local library’s website, pop over to Amazon, to Barnes and Noble, back to your local library, and so on.
Update: It should now open full screen in a new window with toolbars and all that good stuff. I have tested it with IE6, Phoenix 0.5, and Mozilla under windows. Let me know if you have any problems. I have licensed AmazonLookup and BNLookup under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The original work (and all of the heavy lifting) was done by Jon Udell. These two scripts are merely a quick hack on Jon’s awesome idea. See Jon’s recent post for details. Redirect version added at Dan Gillmor’s request.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Matt mentioned it earlier, but the release is official:
The Tomcat Team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 4.1.17 Stable. Tomcat 4.1.17 includes many bugfixes and performance tweaks over Tomcat 4.1.12. Please see the release notes for a complete list of the changes. [Download]
LinuxDevices interviews Jon Anderson about the MeshBox, a Mini-ITX-based hardware/software solution using Linux or a freely downloadable software system that you can run on your own hardware. Here’s a blurb from the beginning of the article:
Originally released as a bootable CDROM called “MeshAP,” MeshBox is now implemented as an under-32MB system image which can fit within a small CompactFlash card. But despite its small size, MeshBox extends the basic access point and mesh routing functionality of the original MeshAP. MeshBox now provides the capabilities of a set-top box Internet Appliance, wireless mesh router, connection to remote windows terminal servers (or other PCs), web browsing, mp3 audio and mpeg video streaming, connection to multiple peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging network chat, and file exchange.
We’re talking top shelf stuff here. A minimal Linux install with an impressive list of software (scroll down the article) and available as an out-of-the-box system. Jon’s website, Locustworld has a listing of lots of subprojects, and the article also has some general info on mesh networking.
Rich Corbridge at NewsForge goes over what’s in his toolbox. What’s in yours? I remember when Minicom was my only option for dialing up to my ISP (CAIS before it sucked and the CapAccess freenet before that, in addition to BBSes) in Linux. I used ProComm on the dos/(and later win) side of course.
Ethereal is the hammer in my toolbox. If nothing else works I go for the hammer. It is a full-featured open source sniffer available for *nix and Win32.
From watching the tomcat-dev mailing list, I’d expect a Tomcat 4.1.17 release either today or tomorrow. The website files have been updated in CVS to indicate this.
RootPrompt.Org points to a LinuxWorld article about X-oops and E-Xoops, two PHP-based object-oriented portal packages. It looks like both of their websites try really hard to look like *Nukes, which is unfortunate, but varlinux uses E-Xoops to look a little more unique.
Back in June I installed both PHP-Nuke and PostNuke on my Westhost (I’m quite happy with them) account while trying to find my geekblog voice. I liked the administration interface and it was set up great for a community weblog/news site, but it was missing something. Perhaps it was because it looked like every other *Nuke site out there. I tried a few non-default themes, as I was too lazy to create my own from scratch, but it still looked stock *Nuke to me. I downloaded Radio Userland in early July and fell in love with Aggregation and the more personal approach that the software allowed me to take to geekblogging.
Just for the googlers in the house, Red Hat’s PPP DialupServer Quick Setup Tips got me up and running a PPP server on my Linux box so I could act as a free ISP to my friend who is in town on winter break. I used the directions to get everything up and running on a Red Hat 7.2 box, though I’m sure it would work on 7.3, 8.0, or (somewhat) earlier versions. We’re talking less than 10 minutes from figuring out which tty my modem was to having everything set up and ready to rock.
In case you were ever wondering why anyone would bother to port C#: Tipic to Build Cross Platform Instant Messaging Applications Using Mono. via protocol7.
So there.
A Security Alert from O’Reilly and a similar piece from Infoworld note a potentially DoSable vulnerability in MySQL. The O’Reilly piece also notes some more obscure vulnerabilities recently discovered for other programs.
Speaking of Eclipse, CNet reports some news:
The Eclipse development tools consortium gained momentum Monday with the announcement of 13 members to its board of stewards and the introduction of three new open-source projects.
As is being reported everywhere, Creative Commons has officially launched their licensing tools:
Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the creative reuse of intellectual works, launched its first product today: its machine-readable copyright licenses, available free of charge from creativecommons.org. The licenses allow copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free for copying and other uses under specific conditions. These self-help tools offer new ways to distribute creative works on generous terms – from copyright to the public domain – and are available free of charge.
Maverick is another web application framework. It’s a cross between Struts, WebWork and Cocoon. The authors have tried to blend the most important aspects from all three frameworks while attempting to keep the maverick framework as simple and unintrusive as possible. From my initial reading it looks like webwork with simplifed cocoon pipelines. Very interesting. Now I just have to find a reason to try it out.
Here is a little blurb from the project’s main page:
Maverick is a Model-View-Controller (aka “Model 2”) framework for web publishing using Java and J2EE. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies.
Yep. I followed Colin Fahey’s guide and got his “Hello World” app to run on an emulator. That emulator is officially the ugliest phone on earth, don’t you think? Everything was really easy to do, and pretty much just worked. I set up a file called “j2me.bat” which sets the environment variables that I need, and when compiling, I had to substitute “-classpath” for “-bootclasspath.” Overall it was an extremely pleasant experience. Maybe it’s time to take PocketBlog to the next level.
I want to state for the record that I glanced at Kablog the other day, though I did not look at it in depth. I feel that this is a neccesary statement because I might end up with something similar in one way or another to Kablog, and I want to come up with something from scratch. What I end up with will be released with source (license TBD), and I don’t want to be ripping off a well done commercial product, I want to end up with my own thing.
Of course, I’ll keep you updated with my findings.
Kevin O’Neill points to Jakarta’s Java Caching System (which looks like a useful project/tool) and says that he has found a potentially nasty bug in the ReadWriteLock class. Hopefully a JCD submitter will stumble upon the buzz generated by Kevin’s post and fix it. Or perhaps someone knows a perfect solution, fixes the problem and emails it off. I like Kevin’s concluding thought:
This hilights both the problem and the power of open source code. The problem is that you can never be quiet sure of it’s quality (though I have mostly found it to be high, and yes I know that the same could be said for closed sourced code); the power is that you can look at the code and make your own assessments/adjustments.
Cool stuff for Linuxers: JPackage Project, RPM packages of loads of java applications and libraries. I’ve always missed such a site.
That’s a pretty sweet idea, and it looks like there are tons of java projects prebuilt or in source RPM form. Most of my recent Jakarta-related installations have been from the binary tgz, which is simple enough, but having good fairly current stuff in RPM form should lower the threshold for others. Of course, this doesn’t solve your classpath huntdown problems for you, nor does it allow you to experiment with bleeding-edge stuff (that depends on other bleeding-edge stuff), but it’s a great start.
I have also been dissapointed with how stale the freebsd/netbsd/openbsd ‘ports’ of many of the Jakarta projects are. I wanted to use a *bsd for Tomcat 4.x testbed a few months ago, but unfortunately Tomcat 3.x was the latest ‘port.’ I know that this means that I should get off my butt and modernize a few programs for a particular *bsd, but that pesky time thing keeps smacking me down.
BrainSplatPHP 0.7.1:
BrainSplat was originally conceived to scratch my itch for a journal program that I could use to replace LiveJournal.It is a simple blogging program that has support for comments. The recent additions is a client interface and a forum like code for formatting BSPHPCode. The reason I made my own was simply because all the scripts I found were generally made for multiple users. And thus, I made my own. I started originally in Perl, but I found that PHP makes a much better interface for these type of programs.
Changes:
Some more themes were added to the distribution, and the BSThemes Web site was created.
Ximian Evolution 1.2.1 has been released. I remember looking into building Evolution when Red Hat 8.0 had just come out, and it wasn’t ready. 1.2.1 officially supports Red Hat 8.0 now. Sweet!