Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Open Source

  • Apache Ant 1.5.4

    Apache Ant 1.5.4, the last version that will support JDK 1.1, is out.  Go grab it.

    Yes, Erik has already blogged it.  It is by definition “so earlier this morning”.

  • Realtime Video Editing in Linux: Cinerella

    Cinerella 1.1.7 is out.  It is movie editing on crack for the Linux platform.  Here’s what’s new:

    Improved playback through firewire. Importing of dvgrab and lavtools AVI files. Changing parameters for PCM works more often. A virtual file system for renderfarms. Time stretch based on overlapping windows instead of FFT. Integrated mpeg2enc, toolame, and LAME encoding as libraries. The default configuration should run on a stock Red Hat 9.0 system.

    It requires some beefy hardware, but from the screenshots it looks like it’s all worth it.  The integrated clustering also looks awesome.

  • RSS Owl 0.51b

    RSS Owl is a Java three paned RSS aggregator written using SWT.  The latest version is 0.51b.  I saw this come across the WAP aggregator the other day, but I had no way of blogging it.

  • GCC 3.3.1

    It looks like I missed the release of GCC 3.3.1 the other day.

  • Mono Python Bindings

    Yes, my plane was supposed to be on the ground around 11pm.  Yes it’s about 3:30 and I’m just settling in at home.

    I’m hopelessly playing catchup, but there’s some interesting mono/python news from a few days ago:

    Brian Lloyd has announced the availability of his Python binding to .NET. This works with .NET and Mono. For more information about it, see Brian’s site at http://zope.org/Members/Brian/PythonNet/

     

  • Pre-Flight Roundup

    I’m getting on a plane in a few hours, but I’ve got to clear out some news first:

    • ABCNews: “After at least two months of studying ways to help wartorn Liberia, President Bush has decided to send six to 10 American troops to assist West African peacekeepers, defense officials said Wednesday.”
    • ITWorld: “Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has agreed to purchase the Information Appliance business unit of National Semiconductor Corp. for an undisclosed amount, adding chips for thin-client devices and set-top boxes to AMD’s portfolio, the companies announced Wednesday.”
    • Infoworld: “Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is showing off a reference design for a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on its Alchemy Au1100 processor running Linux at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, according to the company.”
    • TheServerSide: “Macromedia is de-emphasizing and may be planning to drop or sell off JRun Application Server. It has been reported that most of the JRun team in Newton, MA, have been laid off.”
    • Sean Bonner: “This is a simple request to anyone with a blog and an RSS feed. One of the most powerful aspects, as least in my mind, is to run an aggregator, download everything to my laptop, then read much of it a little down the line, perhaps when I go get lunch or when I’m somewhere without an internet connection.”  I’m a full-post kind of guy.  Radio’s aggregator doesn’t handle the <![CDATA[ in Sean’s feed, so I only saw an excerpt.  The data’s there.
    • Via Russ on IRC, VS HTTPD is a web server for your Series 60 cel phone.  Whose phone can we slashdot first?
    • Mobiletracker has the dirt on the NTT DoCoMo 505i series phone.
    • Jeremy notes Google News Alerts, which emails you when new news items are posted on a perticular topic (as defined by a search string).  Rock on!

    Of course the exciting stuff happens while I’m going to have limited connectivity.  It looks like I’ll have quite a bit of catch up to do when I get back.

    I’ll be moblogging at my textamerica moblog, and might even set up a webserver while I’m at the airport.

  • Apache J2EE Project

    An open letter from Greg Stein as posted in The Inquirer:

    The project (tentatively named “Apache Geronimo”) builds upon the many Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, the project is bringing together leading members of the Castor, JBoss, MX4J and OpenEJB communities. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone involved in the J2EE space, both commercial entities and talented individuals, to join the community and build a world-class J2EE implementation.

    This struck my by suprise, but I haven’t been paying too close attention to J2EE rumblings as of late.  It’s an excellent project to undertake, and I wish the Geronimo developers good luck.

  • Mono Apache Module Redesign

    There’s a bit of Mono news today:

    Gonzalo rearchitected our Apache module for hosting Mono and ASP.NET. The previous incarnation hosted a Mono runtime on each Apache process, which lead to a slow setup for webforms. The new setup uses a shared mono process for all the incoming requests. Daniel later improved up the new architecture and added dual support, so now in addition to Apache 2.x, we support Apache 1.3 with the same codebase.

    The new code is available via CVS.  A new module, mod_mono is also available.  Rock on, guys.

  • Syndigator: An RSS Reader

    Via freshmeat, Syndigator is another RSS feed reader in typical three-pane style under Linux.

    I do like the ability to easily validate a feed:

    Three new options were added to feed drop-down menu, including the very useful “Validate RSS”.

  • Loudmouth: Jabber Library in C

    Loudmouth:

    Loudmouth is a lightweight and easy-to-use C library for programming with the Jabber protocol. It’s designed to be easy to get started with and yet extensible to let you do anything the Jabber protocol allows.

  • Novell Acquires Ximian

    This just in via Google News:

    Networking software specialist Novell (Quote, Company Info), once a staunch proponent of proprietary software, continued its waltz into the open source sphere Monday with the announcement that it has acquired Ximian, the company behind the GNOME desktop for Linux.

    At first glance, I’m having a hard time viewing this as a good thing, but one must remain positive.  It’s a good sign that Miguel de Icaza will end up as CTO of Novell.  Hopefully the positive energy will flow from Ximian to Novell, and the stagnance of Novell won’t flow back to Ximian.

    I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

  • Jython 2.2 Alpha

    Sean McGrath, via James Robertson:

    Jython, lest you do not know of it, is the most compelling weapon the Java platform has for its survival into the 21st century:-) Jython 2.2 alpha release now available.

    Also see James’ entry for a minirant on JVMs.

  • Interview with Ralph Meijer

    Jabber.org interviews Ralph Meijer:

    Dutch programmer Ralph Meijer is the creator of the famous Jabber World Map and the lead coder on Idavoll, an implementation of the publish-subscribe protocol.

    The world needs even more cool Jabber stuff.  Make it so.

  • DasBlog Released!

    Clemens Vasters released DasBlog today.  DasBlog is a server-side blogging environment, derived from BlogX.  It is released uner a BSD license, so do with it as you please.  It runs under version 1.1 of the .NET environment.

    Cool, thanks for the donation to the community, Clemens and contributors.

  • Firebird 0.6.1

    I also snagged Firebird 0.6.1 last night and have been using it without issues.

    I like it.

  • Thunderbird 0.1 Released

    Via Slashdot, Mozilla Thunderbird, the lightweight newsreader/mailreader has reached a 0.1 release.  To the right you can see a screenshot of it running on my XP box.

    It seems quite zippy so far with IMAP.  I’ll put it through its paces.  I tend to do a vast majority of my emailing remotely (with Squirrelmail of course), so anything at my desktop is pretty much supplementary.

  • Mono Daily Builds

    The Mono team is now providing nightly snapshots in three different flavours.  They provide release-style tarballs, a tarball of componenets built on that day, and a lightweight distro for bootstrapping.

    Get your daily mono goodness here.

  • News Spotter: RSS Reader

    Via Freshmeat, here’s NewsSpotter:

    News Spotter is an RSS headline viewer. It distinguishes itself from similar applications through its minimalist user interface, which proactively displays an alert upon receipt of additional news items.

    You can snag a tarball or a zip file, or find more info on Sean Gallagher’s blog.  It looks like it is written in Java.  It reminds me of WinAmp for RSS.

  • Parsing RDF Under Mono

    Edd Dumbill has been looking into parsing RDF in C# (under Mono no less):

    So I went looking for a C# toolkit for parsing RDF, and immediately encountered Drive, a 100% C# RDF parser. Drive was developed on Windows .NET but compiled painlessly under Mono. With a small amount of flicking through the API documentation and a test program or two, I was ready to go within the hour.

    Very cool stuff indeed.

  • JEP-0107: User Moods

    JEP-0107, a Jabber enhancement suggestion for user moods, was released yesterday.  Here’s an example of mood showing up in a presence packet:

    <presence>
      <show>dnd</show>
      <status>Wooing Juliet</status>
      <mood value='excited' xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/moods'/>
    </presence>

    I’ve got a knife that’s +9 against ogres!