Ed Finkler's Blog: New Inspekt Build Available
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As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler has posted the latest version of his Inspekt security tool.   Although downloads have been on the Google Code site for a bit, I recently put up a new build of Inspekt. This could probably be described as a late alpha release, with most proposed features implemented.   Also included in this new edition are full API documentation for the application, some documentation on its basic usage and, of course, the source of this latest release.
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Conference Recorder for iChat AV 2.1 has been updated with a new text annotation feature.
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post today points out some Windows builds of some of the more popular PHP-GTK2 widgets she's compiled (including GtkSourceview, GtkHtml, and LibGlade).   I have these extensions building on windows, or have found someone else who is building them for windows. You can find downloads that are either the full distributions (if no one else is building them) and/or the runtimes + items needed to build with PHP-GTK2 at my callicore build site with the other gtk libraries.   She uses the rest of the post getting into some detail on how she compiled the modules, issues she had with some, and what widgets/packages are on the horizon.
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Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.   Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.   He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.
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Judging by the number of hits tallied for Troubleshooting Linux Audio Part 1 it seems the topic is of interest to many readers. Alas, I must apologize to everyone waiting for the next parts of the series. Various events have kept me from completing it in short order, but you may rest assured that it will return in my next installment. Meanwhile, this week we'll look at two excellent applications that are coming into greater use here at Studio Dave, the LiVES video editor for Linux, and Reaper (yes, again), a native Windows audio/MIDI sequencer running under Wine.
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A new version of GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) desktop interfaces is now available for download.
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As Ed Finkler points out there's a new article posted (written by him) on the C7Y site (from php|architect) talking about his Inspekt library - an introduction to the filtering library showing how to help make your applications safer.   Inspekt is a library for PHP4 and PHP5 that aims to make safe input handing easier, and unsafe actions more difficult. Inspekt establishes a new development approach by wrapping input within "cage" objects, and requiring the developer to use validation and filtering methods to test and manipulate the input data. This article provides a brief introduction to Inspekt and its capabilities.   The article covers all of the basics - what the library can do for you, how it integrates into your application and how it helps to protect you from potential problems with the data in your superglobals ($_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST, etc).
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In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).   IÃ¢ÂÂve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, itÃ¢ÂÂs probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.   Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.
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Evan Williams, the Blogger guy and Twitter co-founder, gave a talk at LeWeb3 about keeping software small, and how sometimes you can create a product by removing features from an existing product. He showed how Twitter is less than Blogger, no permalinks, titles, comments, templates, etc. It's almost nothing compared to Blogger, but we're using it and liking it. It's not a new story. When I was coming of age in computer science, the newest computers were minicomputers. They were called that because they were smaller and did less than the mainframe computers that came before. They were followed by microcomputers which did even less and were a lot more popular than minicomputers (which of course were more popular than mainframes). Scaling things down can make them more useful. But it's a paradox because once a feature is in a product you can't take it out or the users will complain so loudly that you put it back in right away. I know, I tried, a number of times to back out of features that I thought of better ways to do. You can always add features to products, it will make the existing users happy. But it often comes at a cost of making the product more complicated for first-time users, and they don't have a voice, they can't complain, they just go somewhere else, usually quietly.  So Evan has a point. Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.  But there are certainly features they could add to Twitter that would have no impact on the steepness of the learning curve (i.e. how easy it is for a new user to get started). For example users are good at skipping over prefs they don't understand. But you have to think carefully about what the default should be, so there's no penalty for not caring.  Also features that only appear in the API have no cost in complexity of the user interface. They might make it possible for a developer to build a new product on top of the existing one. Since the user of the base product can't see the feature, it can't make it harder to learn.  Some users say they don't want new features, but I bet most of them would be very happy to use a new feature that made Twitter more fun or useful. And there are  alot of users who don't say anything about it, and don't think much about it. Most people aren't interested in theories about why products catch on, they like it or they don't, and don't know why they do or don't.  It's always good to ask questions about why things work, but if I could offer the Twitter folk any advice, I'd say don't hesitate too much to put in new features that will make users happy. Ultimately users like new features in products they use a lot. There's a reason why products tend to bloat over time, it's because users demand it. The trick is to not compromise too much on ease of learning.
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I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
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We are proud to announce the release of version 0.9 or LeafRSS! This version includes full smarty template integration, as well as options to embed the articles in another web page, or even to allow the output of the filter as an RSS feed.   A patch file has been included to upgrade from version 0.8 to avoid any loss of data. Please see the PATCH file for details.  This will be the final major release before we release our first stable version.  If you have any questions or discover any bugs in this version, please post them either in the Help section of our sourceforge forums or in our sourceforge bug tracker. We would appreciate any input you could give us to help us test this release in preparation for moving this project to stable status.  More detail is available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/leafrss
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Review Just as ATI's X800 XT PE ships, along comes the next board
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Ilia Alshanetsky has an announcement on his blog today about the release of the next candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.2 series - PHP 5.2.0RC5.    After 2 weeks of inaction 5.2.0 final release is finally in sight. A few minutes ago I've released the last (I mean it this time) release candidate of 5.2.0, RC5. If all goes well a week from now 5.2.0 final will be out ready for use. In the meantime I'd like to ask once again that everyone try this RC, which can downloaded from here.   I don't think you'd be able to find any major issues or regressions in this RC, but if you do certainly let me know, if necessary RC6 is not out of the question.    The more this new release is downloaded and tested, the faster we all get PHP 5.2 - so get out there and get testing!   The Windows builds have also already been created courtesy of Edin Kadribasic.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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With the release of HIT Lab NZ's OSGART (OpenSceneGraph + ARToolKit) framework imminent, I'm pleased to announce a release of the GPL-licensed ARToolKit v2.   Download ARToolKit 2.72 at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=116280  ARToolKit 2.72 contains a number of improvements over previous releases, with several of these focussed on the video capture libraries. Wayne Piekarski and Hartmut Seichter have substantially updated the Linux video input and added Pointgrey and Gstreamer video capture.  Those of you trying to integrate ARToolKit's coordinate system with existing OpenGL drawing will be pleased to see versions of the OpenGL projection and modelview matrix creation functions which now return right-hand coordinate systems.  Integration with OpenSceneGraph is the focus of our current and future work in the area of advanced graphics capabilities atop ARToolKit. However, this release also updates libARvrml so that it binds correctly to the recently updated OpenVRML 0.16.1.  There are a number of smaller improvements, bug fixes and reference documentation updates included. Please download the release and have a look at the readme and changelog.  We have also added more explicit direction on ARToolKit licensing to the Readme. Please be aware that the GPL-licensed ARToolKit cannot be used in a closed-source product. Closed-source licenses to ARToolKit Professional are available from ARToolworks in return for financial support of ARToolKit development efforts.  If you find bugs in this GPL release, please post in ARToolKit's bug tracker on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=116280&atid=674305. This is the preferred forum for bug reports. Patch submissions are also welcomed.  And yes, bugs fixes and other improvements are available between official ARToolKit releases by checking out the source from Sourceforge ARToolKit CVS repository using anonymous CVS. A simple tutorial on how to get the ARToolKit source using a CVS GUI tool is at http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=25731&group_id=116280.  Thanks to all the contributors to this release.  Philip Lamb HIT Lab NZ
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New models include enhanced styling, storage.
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If you're using FlickrFan, you should have a copy of podcatcher.root in your Tool folder. If not now, at the top of the next hour (launch the OPML app so it can do the update). I want to get started with a small group of people, develop features, and then figure out how to broaden it, if that turns out to be the right thing to do. For now, I just want a testbed to develop, and a group of interested users. I've put together a brief cheat sheet for FlickrFan users. http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html  If you have a question please post it there and we'll try to get you the answer. Hope it works, and hope you like it.