RSS feeds from around the web

Boston Globe

Van driver's work in Mass. aided Nobel winners Boston Globe - 3 hours ago HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—When two American scientists won a Nobel Prize this week in chemistry, the driver of a car dealership's courtesy van had reason to take special interest. A shaving-free, Palin-free day Financial Times Comment by Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D., Director National Institute of General Medical Sciences The Daily Yomiuri - The Associated Press - WTEN - Ars Technica all 1,250 news articles

PC Perspectives

Apple Migrating to NVIDIA Chipsets in new MacBooks Mac Rumors - 4 hours ago Appleinsider reports that they have "confirmed" that the new MacBooks will utilize NVIDIA's new MCP79 platform. While Intel will continue to supply the main processor for Apple's notebooks, the underlying support chips will be made by NVIDIA: Kept … Apple dumping Intel chipsets for NVIDIA's in new MacBooks Apple Insider Apple will repair MacBooks that have faulty Nvidia GPUs CNET News Wall Street Journal - Slashdot - BetaNews - PC Magazine all 65 news articles

BlizzCon 2008: Modeling the depths of hell GameSpot - 5 hours ago By Tom Magrino, GameSpot Diablo III lead world designer and lead exterior environment artist walk the Anaheim imports through the art and lore of Blizzard's seminal dungeon-crawler. Blizzcon 08: Wizard Announced for Diablo III IGN Video: Diablo III's Wizard Wired News Gamespy.com - MTV.com - G4 TV - Allakhazam all 25 news articles

dominique_cimafranca writes “The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system. Apart from the large drawing area, the tablet software looks very intuitive to artists. From the site: ‘The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linguistic Tree Constructor is an application for
drawing linguistic syntax trees. Its main strength
is assisting in data production by quickly
analyzing large amounts of text. “Generic” trees
are supported, as well as RRG and X-Bar trees.
Node-categories are user-definable, and additional
user-definable labels can also be applied to each
node. Publication-quality, high-resolution,
horizontal trees can be drawn. The file format is
based on TIGER-XML.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
Several bugs which could lead to a crash were
fixed. These are usability fixes, not security
fixes.

phpSchedule’Em is a Web application to streamline employee scheduling for small businesses. Permissions can be customized for each employee and group. Employees can be imported en masse. The fields for describing entities are highly customizable. Custom schedule templates can be created for generating default schedules. Schedules can be set as viewable or not. Employees may be assigned to different departments for different days. PDF documents may be generated from both the schedules and daily assignments. Email notifications can be sent when schedules or assignments are updated or added.

---

License: GNU General Public License v3

---

Changes:
A few major bugs with the viewing of schedules
were fixed. A bug where the title summaries would
not include titles that were not included by
default was fixed. A bug in the timeline where the
timeline was inaccurate if two or more employees
with conflicting schedules were under one parent
template was fixed. A toggle title summary feature
was added. An option to show or hide titles in the
title summary was added. Icons are no longer being
used against their license. All icons were changed
to the Crystal Project icons, which are released
under the LGPL.

Squirrel Shell is a cross-platform alternative to system shells like bash in *nix and command.com (cmd.exe) in MS Windows. It is based on a powerful scripting language named “Squirrel”.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
The installation procedure on *nix systems was
fixed. PCRE and Squirrel libraries were updated to
the latest available versions.

Pantry is a command line nutrient analysis
program. It will help you track your food intake
and analyze recipes for their nutrient content.
Because it works entirely from the command line,
it is very fast to use, powerful, and flexible.

---

License: MIT/X Consortium License

---

Changes:
This version is much more efficient with memory
usage and disk usage for data files.
Unfortunately, this also changes the file format,
so files created with Pantry 25 (and earlier
versions) are incompatible with Pantry 26. Also,
the latest food database (SR21) from the USDA was
incorporated. There are some other minor changes.

Submin provides a Web-based admin interface to
your subversion repositories. Its features
include user/group management, path permission
management, and the ability to add repositories.
It uses htpasswd/svn authz for authentication, so
it can use the same login information as
apache2/svn (and trac).

---

License: Other/Proprietary License with Source

---

Changes:
The interface was changed. More features were
added. Installation was improved. Stability was
increased.

TinyMUX is a text-based game server in the MUSH
family. It is a platform that allows several
thousand players to connect to a single
text-driven environment, and interact with each
other and with the environment (which is
maintained in a database). The rich programming
environment can be used to build almost anything,
limited only by the developer’s imagination.

---

License: Artistic License

---

Changes:
SSL, Unicode, and dynamically-loadable modules are
supported.

Cego implements a relational and transactional
database system with support for the SQL query
language. The current release contains the most
common database features for basic table
manipulation and data retrieval. Indexes, foreign
keys, views, and stored procedures are also
implemented. Future releases (2.0 and above) will
support a multi-node database concept with log
file shipping for an automatic database
application failover.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
The program was changed to use logical logging.
Minor fixes and extensions were added.

FET (free timetabling tool) automatically schedules the timetable of a school, high school, or university. It aims to have the same functionality as expensive scheduling programs.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
A small bug was fixed in the statistics exported
as HTML.

Qore is a modular, multi-threaded, SQL-integrated, weakly-typed scripting language with procedural and object-oriented features, powerful and easy-to-use data types, structures, and operators, and a clean and easy-to-learn/read syntax. Qore supports safe signal handling, exception handling and exception-safe programming, XML and JSON integration as well as TLS/SSL socket support, HTTP, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC communication, easy date arithmetic, strong encryption, and deadlock detection. It was designed for SMP scalability.

---

License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

---

Changes:
This release is a major release, featuring a
stable and documented API with public C++ header
files as well as major performance and memory
usage improvements. The library may now be used
under either the LGPL or GPL. Support for run-time
closures was added, along with many new classes,
functions, methods, and some support for
quasi-functional programming (with the new map,
foldl, foldr, and select operators). Support for
bz2 compression and the SHA224, SHA256, SHA384,
and SHA512 digest methods was added. Many big
fixes were made; modules are now delivered
separately from the library.

OCaml Batteries Included serves the following
purposes: define a standard set of libraries that
may be expected on every compliant installation of
OCaml, organize these libraries into a hierarchy
of modules with one source of documentation, and
provide a consistent API for otherwise independent
libraries.

---

License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

---

Changes:
Plenty of additional functions and bugfixes were
added, in addition to several syntax extensions
for auto-opening Batteries, making code clearer.
Serialization and deserialization can be done to
human-readable formats. Unicode strings and ropes,
new examples, new test-cases, and lots of
documentation were added.

DictEm is an extremely customizable DICT client
for (X)Emacs. It implements all functions of the
client part of the DICT protocol (RFC-2229).
Unlike dictionary.el, it widely uses
autocompletion that is used for selecting a
dictionary and search strategy. It provides
several hooks that may be used for buffer
postprocessing. Built-in hyperlinking and a
highlighting mechanism are based on this ability.
It supports the mechanism of virtual dictionaries
that can be used for grouping dictionaries from
different DICT servers into the client-side
virtual dictionary.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
Running dictem-initialize every time your network
or Internet connection is up is a bit annoying. To
avoid this, dictem is (re)initialized (if needed)
automatically from the dictem-select-strategy and
dictem-select-database functions. As a result,
running dictem-initialize in .emacs becomes
unnecessary.

SILVERCODERS DocToText is a powerful utility that
can convert MS Word binary format (DOC), Rich Text
Format (RTF), OpenDocument (also known as ODF and
ISO/IEC 26300), and Office Open XML documents
(ISO/IEC 29500, also called OOXML, OpenXML, or
MSOOXML) to plain text. Extracted plain text from
doc, rtf, odt, ods, odp, docx, xlsx, and pptx
files can be used for a lot of things like
searching, indexing, or archiving. DocToText can
be also used as a fast console viewer.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
In addition to bugfixes and optimizations, Office
Open XML (ISO/IEC 29500, also called OOXML,
OpenXML, or MSOOXML) documents are supported.

nagios-notify is a template-based notify script
for Nagios. The templates can be easily edited in
a text editor. You can change templates without
restarting Nagios. With advanced templates, you
can send richtext (even images) over jabber if you
use nagios-notify-jabber. It depends only on basic
Unix utilities.

---

License: GNU General Public License v2

---

Changes:
The $(encode_mime_header:CHARSET,DATA) handler was
added. A charset header was added to email
templates.

mumpot is an application for viewing, simple editing, and routing of OpenStreetMap data. It loads the tiles@home and mapnik tiles, can print the maps at some fixed scales, and has some tools for route planning. Without OSM vector data, lines can be drawn onto the map; with vector data, real shortest paths searches can be done. The route can also be calculated from the current position. OSM vector data can be loaded to do routing and editing tags. Some live editing is possible under good GPS conditions.

Apache Lucene is a high-performance,
full-featured text search engine library written
entirely in Java. It is suitable for nearly any
application that requires full-text search,
especially cross-platform.

---

License: The Apache License 2.0

---

Changes:
InstantiatedIndex was added. IndexWriter constructors now default autoCommit to false. The commit() method was added in IndexWriter. TimeLimitedCollector adds a timeout to searches. Documents can be deleted by Query in IndexWriter. Pure boolean indexing can be done. A new Directory implementation, NIOFSDirectory, was added. IndexWriter.expungeDeletes() was added. Searching with a Filter is more efficient. IndexReader can be opened with the new readOnly=true mode. Many bugs were fixed.

XHTML indent takes an XHTML file via standard input and outputs an indented version of the XML. It also adds comments to the end of closing tags so that you can quickly pick up on the opening tag without having to jump to the appropriate line. This does not convert bad code like HTML tidy does. It works with any XML formatted file, but has features designed for XHTML developers. This program works well as both a standalone tool or an external filter for a text editor.

Ocrad is the GNU OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program, implemented as a filter and based on a feature extraction method. It reads images in pbm (bitmap), pgm (greyscale), or ppm (color) formats and produces text in byte (8-bit) or UTF-8 formats. It also includes a layout analyzer that is able to separate the columns or blocks of text normally found on printed pages. Ocrad can be used as a stand-alone console application, or as a backend to other programs.

---

License: GNU General Public License v3

---

Changes:
The new option “–quiet” has been added. Verbosity
control of messages has been modified.

Lynkeos processes astronomical webcam images. By
stacking the best images, the signal to noise
ratio is increased, and details lost in the noise
of individual images become visible in the
resulting image. This software accepts, as input,
QuickTime sequences or still images, in any image
format supported by its active plugins and Cocoa.
It generates a 16-bit RGB TIFF image as output, to
be further processed with some all-purpose image
processing application.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
The European Southern Observatory algorithm was
added to the wavelet tool. Parallelization (for
multiproc/multicore) and vectorization (for
Altivec/SSE) were implemented on most of the image
processes. A LynkeosCore framework was created to
allow external processing plugin developement. A
RAW conversion preference pane was added. Many
bugs were fixed.

Vobcopy copies DVD .vob files to hard disk (thanks to libdvdread), decrypting them on the way (if libdvdcss is installed) and merges them into 2 GB files (or larger) with the name extracted from the DVD. It checks for enough free space on the destination drive and compares the copied size to the size on DVD (in case something went wrong during the copying). It can also mirror a whole DVD video part and copy single files.

---

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

---

Changes:
Small fixes were made, especially for *BSD.
Messages were localized for en and de. The -x
option was added to overwrite existing files.

Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard is a MIDI event
generator and receiver. It doesn’t produce any
sound by itself, but can be used to drive a MIDI
synthesizer (either hardware or software, internal
or external). You can use the computer’s keyboard
or mouse to play MIDI notes. You can use the
Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard to display the played
MIDI notes from another instrument or MIDI file
player.

---

License: GNU General Public License v3

---

Changes:
This is a maintenance release, fixing a crash in
Windows when playing certain MIDI files and
connecting a player output to VMPK input. The
reset all button now also resets the internal
controllers’ states. The number of keys is now
constrained to reasonable limits within the MIDI
notes range. The “grab keyboard” feature is now an
optional runtime setting, as a workaround for some
broken X11 window managers.

Nephthys provides a Web interface to create
file-sharing “buckets”, through which data can be
shared. Nephthys handles the buckets in the local
filesystem of the server. Access and data transfer
is made via FTP and WebDAV. Nephthys itself does
not provide the access protocol, but relies on
well known projects like Apache HTTPD (WebDAV) and
ProFTPD (FTP).

---

License: GNU General Public License v3

---

Changes:
This release contains Russian, Italian, Spanish,
and Dutch translations. The local address book
provides an additional field to store the full
name of contacts. The auto-suggestion feature now
works for multiple receivers as well. A new
“deny-password-change” flag has been introduced to
hide the password-change options for
automatically-created, server-authenticated users.
Clicks on the “Notify” links now get confirmed
with a dialog message.

Fire.fm is a Firefox extension to access the extensive music library on Last.fm. It lets you listen to music related to your favorite artist and discover new artists and music in the process. It can also be used to listen to your friend’s favorite music and to find Last.fm users with musical taste similar to your own. Your favorite stations can be accessed quickly by typing a few letters into the location bar. The auto-play feature begins playing the last station you played when you closed Firefox.

---

License: BSD License (revised)

---

Changes:
This release fixes interaction problems with
Flashblock and NoScript. It fixes a status bar bug
with Foxytunes.

SQLite Diff is a tool for comparing SQLite
database schema and data. It is a graphical
application that enables developers to easily drag
and drop two SQLite databases onto the application
to start the comparison process. SQLite Diff uses
a high performance in-memory store of both SQLite
schemas to perform most comparisons within in a
few seconds. The data comparison feature
optionally compares each record within the dropped
files using the ROWID as the primary key.

The Amahi Home Server is a Linux Home Server based
on Fedora (and later on Ubuntu). Your machine
becomes a “Home Digital Assistant” or HDA after
the installation. Each HDA is a Fedora-based
server targeted for home and home office
environments. It provides an iTunes server,
calendaring, a wiki, shared network storage,
network backups, a printer server, VPN, and a
plug-in architecture built on Ruby on Rails.

---

License: GNU General Public License v2

---

Changes:
“Fixed IPs” and “Fixed Aliases” were added to the networking tab. Views of the these tables were much improved. A security issue with new user creation clashing with existing/priviledged users was fixed. More informational messages were added for an empty Web apps table and for editing the fields for hosts and aliases. Shares, users, and Web apps were improved to check for proper names that are legal in the Linux platform. Fixes were made to an artifact that would “nest” tables within tables for users, shares, and Web apps, making them progressively smaller.

IBNLive.com

Bridge directors vote for net to deter suicides San Francisco Chronicle - 19 hours ago (10-10) 13:58 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - — Golden Gate Bridge directors voted decisively Friday to try to stop people from jumping to their deaths from the landmark bridge by hanging nets along the sides of the span. Golden Gate Managers Vote to Build Suicide Net New York Times Golden Gate Bridge Slated To Get A Net To Catch Would-Be Jumpers AHN Los Angeles Times - Food Consumer - The Associated Press - San Jose Mercury News all 349 news articles

NewsOXY

Verizon charging content pushers 3 cents per text message IntoMobile - 1 hour ago Times are tough. With the global economy teetering on the brink of disaster, everyone is looking to pinch as many pennies as they can get their hands on. Verizon Wireless Plans to Charge Companies Sending Text Messages New York Times Verizon Wireless considers extra text fee CNET News InternetNews.com - CRN - InformationWeek - TG Daily all 29 news articles