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Latest Freshmeat Releases
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 libevent 1.4.4-stable (Default branch)
G4L 0.25.devel (Development Kit branch)
G4L is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool. The created images are optionally compressed, and they can be stored on a local hard drive or transferred to an anonymous FTP server. A drive can be cloned using the "Click'n'Clone" function. G4L supports file splitting if the local filesystem does not support writing files
Asterisk on IPCop Asterisk 1.4.19.2 for IPCop 1.4.18 (Default branch)
Sockso 0.9.2 (Default branch)
Sockso is a personal music server for everyone.It's designed to be as simple as possible so thatanyone with a mouse and some MP3s can get theirfriends listening to their music across theInternet in minutes.
WebGUI 7.4.37 (Default branch)
WebGUI is a content management framework built toallow average business users to build and maintaincomplex Web sites. It is modular, pluggable, andplatform independent. It was designed to allow thepeople who create the content to manage it online,rather than content management taking up the timeof busy IT staff. WebGUI comes with a full host offeatures including shopping cart, subscriptions,forums, photo galleries, FAQs, link lists, blogs,SQL reports, a Web services interface, and a veryconfigurable user privilege and profiling system.
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Slashdot News
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Department: for-once-its-not-the-scientologists Date: 2008-05-14T12:52:00+00:00 Comments: 22 An anonymous reader writes "The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents."
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: end-of-a-crack-the-whip-chain Date: 2008-05-14T12:09:00+00:00 Comments: 20 An anonymous reader sends a pointer to Erik Schwiebert's blog— he's the design lead of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit— where he announces that Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office. Not in Office 2008, which started shipping earlier this year. We discussed the announced death of VBA in Mac Office 17 months back. Schwiebert says that the interval to the next version of Mac Office will be shorter than 4 years but isn't able to offer any more detail. The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: boulder-dodging Date: 2008-05-14T09:40:00+00:00 Comments: 55 Several readers relayed the press release from JPL about the upcoming landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on May 25. It's going to set down in the north polar regions and look for indications of whether conditions have even been favorable for microbial life. "Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour... In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour... before its three legs reach the ground. Confirmation of the landing could come as early as 7:53 p.m. EDT. 'This is not a trip to grandma's house. Putting a spacecraft safely on Mars is hard and risky,' said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 'Internationally, fewer than half the attempts have succeeded.'"
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: thumb-cramps Date: 2008-05-14T07:11:00+00:00 Comments: 218 Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just "background music"...' I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: for-posterity Date: 2008-05-14T04:40:00+00:00 Comments: 34 Thomas Petazzoni writes "The fourth edition of Embedded Linux Conference was held from April 15 to 17 in Mountain View, California. With more than fifty talks and tutorials around the use of Linux in embedded devices, this conference covered a wide range of topics: power management, debugging techniques, system size reduction, flash filesystems, embedded distributions, real-time, graphics and video, security, etc. For those who could not attend the conference, Free Electrons has published under a free license videos of nineteen talks and an extensive report of them. You can for example watch Andrew Morton's keynote, Klaas van Gend's talk about the real-time version of the Linux kernel, or Mike Anderson's tutorial on the use of JTAG probes for kernel debugging."
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
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Latest from Techdirt.com
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Wed, 14 May 2008 04:27:00 PST
Back in January, we wrote about how best selling author Paulo Coehlo washappily pirating his own booksvia BitTorrent, noting just how much it was increasing sales. Since he couldn't initially convince publishers to go along with it, he set up a site that pretended it was from a fan giving away various translations of his book, even though it was really run by him. He admitted it in a speech in January that got his efforts a lot more attention. TorrentFreak has checked in with Coehlo to seehow things have gone since he admitted to pirating his own books. Not surprisingly, the increased attention has helped drive even more sales -- even though the attention was all about how people could get his books for free. Because of that, a couple of his books are back on the NY Times Bestseller list. It also resulted in his publisher, Harper Collins, being a bit more willing to embrace the experiment, putting a new Coehlo book online each month. Of course, as wepointed outat the time, this was still a really crippled and annoying-to-read way of offering free books online, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
What may be even more interesting is that Coehlo isn't sitting back and leaving things as is. He continues to experiment. For example, rather than selling the movie rights to one of his books, he's running an experiment tohave fans make a movieout of the book, dividing up the work. Since the book involves multiple perspectives, each person is expected to choose one perspective and film it. Coehlo and his team will then piece together the movie, awarding 3,000 euros to the best film segments, and also offering up 1,500 euros to whoever composes music to go with the film. This reminds me a bit of Jonahtan Lethem'sexperimentswith making a story of his freely available to movie makers. Hopefully we'll be seeing more such creative endeavors going forward.
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Wed, 14 May 2008 00:51:54 PST
The press is happily covering the news that some journalists arelaunching a new (paper) magazinecalled "Dispatches" by focusing on the supposed "contrarian" nature of the operation: it's focused on print, rather than the internet (though it will have an internet presence), and it's only going to publish once per quarter. The folks behind the magazine say they're trying to slow things down a little, and will focus on providing better analysis than the rapidfire approach of internet reporting. That makes sense -- but it's hardly new. Plenty of other press outlets have done the same thing -- and, realistically, the analyst business is based on this same premise (just with the idea that the content is paid for by companies receiving it rather than advertisers). Either way, even if the concept isn't particularly new, at the very least it's nice to see a magazine launch with a plan as to how to differentiate. That said, the differentiation is meaningless if it can't execute well and get people interested in the sort of in-depth content it hopes to provide.
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Tue, 13 May 2008 21:06:33 PST
The recording industry hasn't had much of a strategy for dealing with the changing marketplace over the past decade (and, no, I don't consider lashing out and suing music fans as a "strategy"), so far be it for them to start now. That's why it's amusing to see articles about how the recording industry honchos are nowbetting on a new generation of mobile phones to save them. Funny how that works. This is the same group of executives who will claim that the phones themselves have no value without the music -- and yet here they are hoping and praying that the devices will save their industry.
But the real problem is that this isn't a strategy. It's wishful thinking. It doesn't involve any actual insight into what's happening in the market. It doesn't involve any proactive movement towards accepting new business models and changing the way business is done. It's merely the old way of thinking, trying to figure out what the "next" platform will be on which to sell music. It went from vinyl to cassette tape (we'll skip 8-track) to CD to computer... and now they want it to go to mobile. But they're missing the fact that the more popular mobile devices get, the sooner it is that we'll see file sharing apps for mobile devices pop up. Rather than waiting and praying that some new platform will be the savior, isn't it time that the industry started taking lessons from the past 10 years, and worked towards adapting to the age of digital content?
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Tue, 13 May 2008 18:26:56 PST
Last month, we wrote about how MySpace hadwonits case against Sanford "Spamford" Wallace -- the infamous 1990s "Spam King" who (despite losing many court battles and owing millions in fines) simply can't seem to give up his obsession with scammy marketing techniques. The win was a default judgment, mainly because Wallace simply disappeared and stopped responding to court requests. Today, a judge ruled on the punishment, officiallyawarding MySpace $234 millionfrom Wallace and his associate Walter Rines. Given Wallace's disappearing act (which he's done in the past as well) it's unlikely that MySpace will ever see a dime of the money, but that hasn't stopped the company from touting this as the largest ever award under CAN SPAM. Amusingly, the extremely short court ruling also bars Wallace from setting up any new MySpace profiles. It doesn't say anything about Facebook, though, so perhaps that's where we'll see him next...
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