For this week's Photoshop contest, I asked you guys to show us what the Mars Phoenixreally discovered that government didn't want us to know about. Well, apparently Mars is a popular destination for politicians, terrorists, Bigfoot and assorted other bizarre life forms. If most of this stuff did exist on Mars, the Men in Black would break down crying because their lives are meaningless and the government would shut down NASA immediately and return the money to taxpayers. Hit the jump for the top three, the Gallery of Champions and... the truth.
First Place — Ross Jeffcoat Second Place — Andy Sciamanna Third Place — John Fischetti
US sodiers are not the only ones getting advanced uniforms. In fact, Koreans may be taking the lead with a new stormtrooper suit that—if it goes beyond the vaporware stage—will include every sci-fi technology you can imagine. From a heads-up-display helmet to personal cooling and heating syss to a matching weapon that includes a laser-guided target assessment system to fire, you guessed it, mini-missiles. And that's just the beginning.
South Korea's Agency for Defense Development will start work in this uniform in 2009 under a two-phase program. The first one will include the battle uniform itself, with the bullet-proof helmet—that will include "sub-miniature cameras"—and their next-generation rifle, called the K-11. The K-11 will have a laser-guided target system which will communicate with the helmet, as well as mini-missiles and a high explosive projectile.
The battle suit itself will include a personal cooling and heating system, as well as a backpack designed to control and coordinate all the components. It will also include a friend-or-foe ID system and a GPS.
In the second phase of development, the soldiers will get upgrades in the suit itself. These will protect them against external threats, including atomic radiation, chemical agents, lasers, and mines.
Yes, you can welcome your new Korean overlords, as they only want to make sure you buy their flat TVs. [Korea Times via The Raw Feed]
See this ad right here? It's the Zune's latest TV spot, which debuted last night during Heroes. Needless to say, it has a generic look that could be for anyone. (Personally, I thought it was another Blackberry ad at first glance).
There is an alternative. And it was produced by Sibling Rivalry on spec (as in, it's NOT associated in any way with the Zune or Microsoft). The ad is shamelessly, sickeningly graphic without a real message that I can decipher. But I have a sinking feeling that I'll never, ever forget it...no matter how hard I try:
So what do you think. Ad one, or ad two? OK...that pun was unintentional, but it's way too great to delete.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:42:35 GMT
JUnique 1.0 (Default branch)
The JUnique library can be used to prevent a user
from running more instances of the same Java
application at the same time. It implements locks
and communication channels shared between all the
JVM instances launched by the same user.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:36:09 GMT
mxGraph 0.13.0.3 (Default branch)
mxGraph is a JavaScript library that uses built-in
browser capabilities to provide an interactive
drawing and diagramming solution. Target
applications are Web based applications that
require workflow/BPM, diagram, network, or general
graph editing to be available in-place on a Web
page.
License: Free for non-commercial use
Changes:
This release adds a model merging function and a label positioning style. Examples for both features are also included. A number of browser-specific bugs and visual differences have also been resolved.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:35:40 GMT
Xtables-addons 1.6 (Default branch)
Xtables-addons is a package that mostly supersedes
the old patch-o-matic repository for the Linux
kernel and iptables. Instead of patching the
kernel source, extensions are built as modules and
thus allow extending kernels without
recompilation.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
This release upgrades ipset to version 2.4.5 and made the package compilable for the upcoming Linux 2.6.28.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:35:18 GMT
Laconica 0.6.2 (Default branch)
Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a
microblogging platform. It helps people in a
community, company, or group to exchange short
(140 character) messages over the Web. Users can
choose which people to "follow" and receive only
their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It
provides a similar service to sites like Twitter,
Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk.
License: Affero General Public License
Changes:
Notice inboxes have been added. Posted URLs are automatically shortened. The SUP protocol is supported for quicker updates to FriendFeed. Tag streams now have an RSS feed. CSRF protection for posting notices and logging in. Replies made through the Web site will refer to the clicked-on message. Better handling of read-only requests in the API to allow using replicated mirror servers. 'Invite-only' mode for closed sites.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:33:31 GMT
SAcc 1.81-rc3 (Default branch)
SAcc is an access control system for Squid. It
provides Web based account managment and
restrictions.
License: GNU General Public License v2
Changes:
A segmentation fault when a URL has fewer / elements than expected has been fixed. FreeBSD portage installation support has been improved. This release has some code cleanup. An issue where log rotation hung sometimes has been fixed.
2008-11-18T20:22:00+00:00
The ISS Marks 10 Years In Space
Matt_dk writes to point out the upcoming tenth anniversary of the International Space Station in two days' time. "On 20 November 1998, a Russian Proton rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome for a historic mission: It was carrying the first module of the International Space Station ISS, named Zarya (Russian for 'dawn'). This cargo and control module, which weighs about 20 tonnes and is almost 13 meters long, provides electrical power, propulsion, flight path guidance and storage space. The launch of the module... heralded a new era in space exploration, as, for the first time ever, lasting cooperation in space was achieved between Russia, the US, Europe, Canada and Japan. Over the next ten years, many other modules were brought into orbit, and ISS developed into the largest human outpost in space. Since that time, the building blocks, transported by Russian launch vehicles or the US Space Shuttle, have expanded the ISS to the size of a soccer pitch and a current total mass of about 300 tons."
2008-11-18T19:30:00+00:00
New Generator Boosts Wind Turbine Efficiency 50%
MagnetDroid writes "A startup company based in Vancouver has developed a new kind of generator that could harvest much more energy from the wind. The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations. Normally, when wind speeds drop, a turbine's engine becomes less efficient. The new engine, from ExRo Technologies, runs efficiently over a wider range of conditions. The design replaces a mechanical transmission with what amounts to an electronic one. Magnets attached to a rotating shaft create a current, but individual coils can be turned on and off electronically at different wind speeds." The company will begin field-testing a small, 5KW wind turbine by early next year.
2008-11-18T18:38:00+00:00
HP's Fury At Vista Capable Downgrade
More documents are coming out in court proceedings over the Vista Capable debacle. Internetnews.com has good coverage of HP's fury over Microsoft lowering the requirements for a Vista Capable sticker, at Intel's request. "Intel officials may have been pleased that Microsoft lowered standards for obtaining the company's Windows Vista Capable logo program sticker, but the same can't be said about HP's execs. 'I can't be more clear than to say you not only let us down by reneging on your commitment to stand behind the [device driver model] requirement, you have demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to HP as a strategic partner and cost us a lot of money in the process,' said one e-mail from Richard Walker, the senior vice president of HP's consumer business unit, to [Microsoft executives]." PCPro.co.uk follows the trail of accusatory emails inside Microsoft from there: "HP's email prompted then Microsoft co-President, Jim Allchin, to send a furious email of his own to company CEO Steve Ballmer. Allchin's email suggests the decision to lower the requirements was made in his absence by Ballmer, following 'a call between you and Paul [Otellini, Intel CEO].' 'I am beyond being upset here,' Allchin wrote to Ballmer. 'What a mess. Now we have an upset partner, Microsoft destroyed credibility [sic], as well as my own credibility shot.' Ballmer, in turn, blamed another Microsoft executive, Will Poole, in a rather erratically typed reply to Allchin."
2008-11-18T17:50:00+00:00
Crowdsourcing Site Offers Rewards To Bust Patents
holy_calamity writes "Article One Partners is a new startup that offers $50,000 rewards to people that find prior art for certain valuable patents. The company's founder told New Scientist she thought the initiative would improve 'patent quality' by increasing scrutiny on poor patents. She aims to profit by selling the information contributors collect, or trade stocks based on it. Current patents they are looking for help to bust include those being used by Konami to sue Harmonix over Rock Band and Guitar Hero."
2008-11-18T16:56:00+00:00
AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot
flnca writes "Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them, and I was surprised to see that IBM is going to give its IntelliStation POWER Series workstations the boot in January '09. A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs? IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). Some years ago, I enjoyed hacking away on an RS/6000 workstation running AIX 4.2, and it was a pure joy. Not only the kernel, but also the admin tools, like smit and smitty. Their blade-centric solution uses Windows as a client for workstation application. This truly sounds like IBM wants AIX only for servers anymore. I'm not amused. Although, eXceed on Windows with an XDCMP server running on AIX might also be a viable solution ... whatever. But it can't beat a native POWER box sitting on your desk, that's for sure."
SecurityFocus is the most comprehensive and trusted source of security
information on the Internet. We are a vendor-neutral site that provides
objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of
the security community, from end users, security hobbyists and network
administrators to security consultants, IT Managers, CIOs and CSOs.
2008-08-07
PHP 4.4.9 released!
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release.Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.9:Updated PCRE to version 7.7.Fixed overflow in memnstr().Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given.Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension.Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global. For a full list of changes in PHP 4.4.9, see the ChangeLog.
2008-08-05
PHP 5.3 alpha1 released!
The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. Windows binaries will be available starting with alpha2 (intermediate snapshots available at snaps.php.net). The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!The purpose of this alpha release is to encourage users to not only actively participate in identifying bugs, but also in ensuring that all new features or necessary backwards compatibility breaks are noted in the documentation. Please report any findings to the QA mailinglist or the bug tracker.There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes:Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)Late static binding and __callStaticLambda functions and closuresAddition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensionsOptional cyclic garbage collectionOptional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysqlWindows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore (details)New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:"Several under the hood changes also require in depth testing with existing applications to ensure that any backwards compatibility breaks are minimized. This is especially important for users that require the undocumented Zend engine multibyte support.The current release plan states that there will be alpha/beta/RC releases in 2-3 week intervals with an expected stable release of PHP 5.3 between mid September and mid October of 2008.
AP - Detroit's Big Three automakers pleaded with Congress on Tuesday for a $25 billion lifeline to save their once-proud companies from collapse, warning of broader peril for the national economy as well.
AP - President-elect Barack Obama's aides have privately asked senators whether Washington attorney Eric Holder would be confirmed as the next attorney general, according to a person involved in the talks.
AP - Calling climate change an urgent challenge, President-elect Barack Obama promised Tuesday that Washington would take a leading role in combating it in the United States and throughout the world. "My presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change," Obama said in a video message to governors and others attending a Los Angeles summit on the issue.
AP - The top U.S. military officer said Tuesday the Pentagon is developing plans to get troops quickly out of Iraq and into Afghanistan to battle a more confident and successful Taliban.
AP - Sen. Joe Lieberman will keep his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee despite hard feelings over his support for GOP nominee John McCain during the presidential campaign.
USN-672-1.txt
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-672-1 - Moritz Jodeit discovered that ClamAV did not correctly handle certain strings when examining a VBA project. If a remote attacker tricked ClamAV into processing a malicious VBA file, ClamAV would crash, leading to a denial of service.
USN-667-1.txt
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-667-1 - A large amount of vulnerabilities have been addressed in Firefox. Flaws such as information disclosure, bypassing of same-origin checks, arbitrary code execution, and more exist in prior versions.
rtm-essential5.pdf
Road Technological Minds - Essential #5 - This issue covers fuzzing, remote file inclusion, Samurai Framework testing, and more. Written in Spanish.
videoscript-password.txt
VideoScript versions 4.0.1.50 and below administrative password changing exploit.
MDVSA-2008-230.txt
Mandriva Linux Security Advisory 2008-230 - Security vulnerabilities have been discovered and corrected in the latest Mozilla Firefox 3.x, version 3.0.4. This update provides the latest Mozilla Firefox 3.x to correct these issues.
Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Last Week to Participate in PostgreSQL Certification JTA Survey
The PostgreSQL Certification JTA Survey currently underway is nearing its conclusion. The survey will close November 14th. We ask everyone that has not taken the survey to please take a few minutes and participate.
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Npgsql2 2.0.1 released!
Npgsql 2.0.1 is a minor bug fix for the stable 2.0 final release.
A RSS news feed containing the latest NASA news articles and press releases.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST
NASA's QuikSCAT Ocean-Observing Satellite Mission Honored
An Earth-observing satellite that has provided early detection of ocean storms and advanced the scientific exploration of global ocean wind patterns has been recognized for helping scientists better understand our home planet.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:37:26 +0000
Keluarga Besar Pemabuk
Schererville: Polisi Schererville, negara bagian Indiana, Amerika Serikat, kesulitan mencari anggota keluarga yang tidak mabuk dan bisa dipercaya membawa bayi berusia satu tahun pulang ke rumah.
Awalnya polisi menangkap seorang ibu ngebut pada akhir pekan lalu. Ternyata ia menyetir dalam keadaan mabuk padahal ia membawa bayi yang baru berusia setahun.
Jadi si ibu berusia 24 tahun itu ditahan. Tapi bayinya tentu tidak bersalah sehingga polisi menelpon ayah si bayi. Polisi meminta bayinya dibawa pulang, diambil dari kantor polisi.
Si ayah datang.
Tapi, seperti istrinya, ternyata ia juga dalam kondisi mabuk. Jadi, polisi juga menangkap si suami dengan tuduhan menyetir sambil mabuk.
Persoalan si bayi belum selesai.
Polisi kemudian menelpon kakek dan nenek si bayi.
Persoalan juga belum selesai. Ternyata si kakek dan nenek juga datang dalam keadaan mabuk.
Si kakek mabuknya parah. Tidak dijelaskan ia ditahan atau tidak.
Sedang kadar alkohol si nenek masih dalam kadar yang diizinkan sehingga bayinya diserahkan kepadanya. Meski begitu, polisi tidak sepenuhnya percaya sehingga polisi mengawal si nenek pulang dengan bayi sampai rumah.
setelah tiba dirumah, dihadapan polisi pengawal tiba-tiba si bayi berseru dengan bau alkohol dimulutnya...."WHUUEENNAAKK GIILLAAKK!!!"
Polisi : "Gubrakkkk!!!"
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:13:04 +0000
Jurus Rayuan Maut
Cowok : "Mbak jangan pegangan sama besi kereta..."
Cewek : "Emang kenapa..?"
Cowok : "Kayaknya besinya kotor tuh..pegangan sama aku aja..."
Cowok : "Yank..bisa bantuin aku ga?"
Cewek : "Bantuin apa?"
Cowok : "Ngegambar yank...mau ga??"
Cewek : "Ngegambar apa?"
Cowok : "Bantuin aku gambar.....peta dari hati aku ke hati kamu"
Cowok : "Maaf mbak, jangan terlalu lama duduk dikursi itu, pindah dideket saya aja"
Cewek : "Loh?? kenapa??"
Cowok : "Takut dikerubung semut.. soalnya mbak manis.."
Cowok : "Beyb... kamu punya guru fisika gak."
Cewek : "Ada, emangnya kenapa..??"
Cowok : "Tanyain dong!!!"
Cewek : "Tanyain apaan..? PR kamu....??"
Cowok : "Bukannn.!!! tanyain dia kenapa si kok kutub-kutub hati aku selalu ngedeketin hati kmu"
Cewek : "Say, kalo mama kamu dan aku tenggelam samaan, siapa yang kamu tolong..?
Cowok : "Ya mama aku lah.. emang kamu yang lahirin aku..?"
Cewek : "Ih kamu.."
Cowok : "Iya, tapi abis selamatin mama aku, aku akan tenggelam bersama kamu.."
Cewek : "Sayang kamu udah jadi periksa mata kamu?"
Cowok : "Kemarin aku udah ke dokter mata sesuai permintaan kamu..."
Cewek : "Trus gimana?"
Cowok : "Dokter kaget ternyata di mata aku selalu ada kamu..."
Cowok : "Sayanggg... aku minta kunci gembok dong...!!!"
Cewek : "Buat apaan si emangnya.??"
Cowok : "Buat buka hati aku, terus aku masukin cinta kamu.... habis itu aku kunci rapet-rapet biar kamu selalu ada di hati aku..."
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:22:36 +0000
Unta Milik Salmo
Di padang pasir yang panas, hiduplah seekor unta dengan majikannya seorang islam. Panggil saja majikan tersebut Salmo.....
Unta milik Salmo akan berjalan jika Salmo berkata, "ALhamduLLiLLah"... dan untanya akan berhenti jika Salmo bekata, "BismiLLah"...
Suatu hari Salmo ingin berjalan-jalan dengan untanya. Setelah ia menaiki untanya ia berkata, "ALhamduLLiLLah" dan untanya berjalan namun lamban. Samo kesal lalu dia berkata "ALhamduLLiLLah" sebanyak 10 kali sampai-sampai untanya berlari.
Tiba-tiba didepannya berjarak sekitar 10 meter terdapat jurang yang sangat dalam. Dengan berteriak SaLkoD berkata, "BismiLLah!!!!". Unta itu berhenti tepat di pinggiran bibir jurang.
Dengan mengusap keringat dan menghela nafas ia berkata, "ALhamduLLiLLah!" unta itu berbalik dan kembali berjalan. Dan......... sampai sekarang tidak ada yang melihat Salmo.
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:34:06 +0000
Percakapan di Art Museum
Ada 2 orang lagi ngobrol di art museum.... Orang pertama itu painter yang lukisannya ada di pajang di museum itu dan orang kedua itu pemilik museum itu...
Pemilik Museum: "Ada 2 berita neh,1 buruk dan 1 bagus...Mo tau yang mana dulu?"
Pelukis : "Ya udah deh yang bagus dulu aja...."
Pemilik Museum: "Tadi ada pengunjung dateng ke sini....Nanya ke saya, ntar kalau kamu mati, lukisan-mu bakal di hargai ama orang banyak gak?"
Pelukis : "Lalu?"
Pemilik Museum: "Ya udah saya bilang aja 'Iya'...."
Pelukis : "Terus?"
Pemilik Museum: "Dia akhirnya beli 10 lukisan mu dah...."
Pelukis : "Wah..Bagus deh kalau begitu....Jadi brita buruknya apa???"
Pemilik Museum: "Pengunjung itu ternyata dokter pribadi kamu...."
Pelukis : Gubrakkkk!!!!
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:46:04 +0000
Membeli Ceker Ayam
Seorang ibu di pasar hendak membeli ayam, dia lalu pergi ke tukang ayam, terjadilah dialog antara ibu dan tukang ayam:
Ibu : "Pak ceker ayamnya berapa harganya kalau 2 kilo?"
Tukang ayam : "2 kilo hanya 5000 bu .."
Ibu : "Boleh saya tawar gak ?"
Tukang ayam : "Oh boleh saja, ibu mau nawar berapa ?"
Ibu : "4000 boleh gak ?"
Tukang ayam : "3000 aja ya bu?"
Ibu : (Bingung) "Lho kok 3000 ?, tapi oke deh..."
Akhirnya si tukang ayam menyerahkan plastik berisi kaki ayam
Ibu : "Lho kok kakinya kiri-kanan"
Tukang ayam : "Iya dong! memangnya kenapa?"
Ibu : "Saya maunya kaki yang kanan doang ,,, soalnya kalo kaki yang kiri bekas nyebok!!"
Beyond Security will help you expose your security holes and will show you what the bad guys already know about your hosts and network. Use our Automated Scanning service to perform a full security audit of your site, and find the latest security news and tools on Beyond Security's SecuriTeam web site.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:37 GMT
Checkpoint VPN-1 PAT Information Disclosure
By sending crafted packets to ports on the Checkpoint Firewall which are mapped by port address translation (PAT) to ports on internal devices, information about the internal network may be disclos...By sending crafted packets to ports on the Checkpoint Firewall which are mapped by port address translation (PAT) to ports on internal devices, information about the internal network may be disclos...
-
Make your website safer. Use external penetration testing service. First report ready in one hour!
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:01 GMT
VMware Emulation Flaw x64 Guest Privilege Escalation (IRET)
By exploiting either of the VMware flaws described in this document, user-mode code executing in a virtual machine may gain kernel privileges within the virtual machine, dependent upon the guest op...By exploiting either of the VMware flaws described in this document, user-mode code executing in a virtual machine may gain kernel privileges within the virtual machine, dependent upon the guest op...
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Make your website safer. Use external penetration testing service. First report ready in one hour!
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:44 GMT
Openfire Jabber-Server Multiple Vulnerabilities
The jabber server Openfire contains several serious vulnerabilities. Depending on the particular runtime environment these issues can potentially even be used by an attacker to execute code on oper...The jabber server Openfire contains several serious vulnerabilities. Depending on the particular runtime environment these issues can potentially even be used by an attacker to execute code on oper...
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Make your website safer. Use external penetration testing service. First report ready in one hour!
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:28:43 GMT
Chris Howie: Development on hold
Well, this morning while I was packing up my laptop it kind of slipped, and… well…
Yeah, so don’t expect Banshee.OpenVP to be ready for a while.
I took a look at CloudFront today. They have really good intentions. The CDN space is quite a mess -- it could easily be a pay-as-you-go, self-service industry. However, players such as Akamai try to make a large profit. The CDN space is especially hard for small sites -- you can't get any reasonable pricing unless you are doing high levels of traffic.
Amazon wants to change all of that. However, I think they made a number of missteps in their initial offering.
They aren't using it on amazon.com. They use Level(3)'s CDN! Why should anybody consider using a service Amazon isn't using themselves. This is a chance to prove your CDN in real life.
Tiered pricing. In a self-service model, it doesn't make sense to offer different prices for different bandwidth usages. One customer with 100 TB of traffic is the same as 10 customers with 10 TB of traffic.
Pay per request. For S3, this made sense. Every request was one disk seek on the servers, and people need to pay for that. However, in a CDN, you are expected to serve from memory. The 1 cent per 10,000 requests effectively adds 6 KB of data to every file. So if you serve a 1 KB file, this increases your cost by 6x. At the very least, the fixed cost per request should be less than that with s3 to account for the lack of disk seeks
Lack of peering. Doing a traceroute to cloudfront from a few locations (Carnegie Mellon, colos in New York and LA), it appeared that all of my traffic was going over transit links. In contrast, traffic to amazon.com went over fast and cheap peering links.
I do hope that Amazon fixes up CloudFront. It's a fantastic concept. They have the power to force reason into the market.
The new track editor is fully extensible. This means you can add your own pages to the dialog and get full first class editing support. All of the current pages are implemented in the exact same way you would need to write an extension page.
What I would like to see are a few pages contributed at least initially by the community:
Creative Commons metadata/license support A lot of work on this in the past had been done in the past, but never to a quality or completeness I was comfortable with for including in core. This support could either be an extension page to the editor, or an extension that interacts with existing pages/fields, like the copyright field.
Additionally, the extension could make a track column and query field available, so you could easily search for and view Creative Commons music. This was a pain to do in legacy Banshee, but it's a few lines of code in 1.x.
Music Brainz A page that allows for figuring out missing metadata, and also submitting track information back to MusicBrainz. Maybe it could also generate PUIDs. We have a complete C# implementation of the MusicBrainz web API (no native library needed) thanks to Scott Peterson, and it's used in other areas in Banshee. This really should not be that complicated to do.
I wrote a quick example today on how to extend the track editor. The example implements a History Page which allows you to change the play count, skip count, and last played date to arbitrary values. More could be done here, and in fact I'd like to make this a core page anyway.
You need Banshee 1.4 and Mono 1.9 or better (I opted to use C# 3.0 in the example)
Internet Radio
We made a decision early on in the 1.x series to provide very strong Last.FM support. We're fairly resource constrained, so this meant making traditional Internet Radio something of a second class citizen. In fact, I made a choice to not ship any default radio stations because really I should not be the one picking stations, and so many of them fall offline in the life cycle of a distribution iteration that supporting this is silly.
However, I made sure all the underlying pieces for good Internet Radio support were in place. We have a station editor, stream metadata is reflected in the UI so when playing a stream you can see "track changes" which in turn can trigger cover art, and the RadioTrackInfo object even handles fetching and parsing of remote station playlsits. We support M3U, PLS, ASX, and XSPF formats, and possibly some others I am forgetting.
The Radio source that ships by default is a bit bare in terms of UI, but this was intentional. You can add new stations and manage them, but we really need something like StreamTuner or Shoutcast, like Jono says, that builds on the Internet Radio core features. Implementing new sources is fairly straightforward. You can even extend the existing Radio source to build on it.
Implementing this would be a great standalone extension that I would love to ultimately roll back into core, maybe for 1.6 if an enthusiastic contributor steps up to the plate.
So what are you waiting for?
Join the community of enthusiastic Banshee contributors and write something great today. We have a large and functional API, lots of features to build on, and everything is designed around extensibility.
Such a large API can be daunting to learn, yes, but Banshee is also organized very well. We also have API documentation for Monodoc, and probably the best way to learn about Banshee's internals is to just read the source to the extensions we ship in core. All the great features in Banshee are just extensions!
2008-11-18T20:05:23+00:00
Dave Carver: CVS question
Alright here is one for you CVSNT guru's out there. I'm getting an error returned that happens consistently. Cannot Rename Entries.Backup: Bad Address.
This just started happening, the Temp directory has read/write access to the system checking the code out, the files aren't on a network drive. I've exhausted all my voodoo magic on CVS? Any thoughts or ideas?
Here are my take aways from the symposia day at ESE 2008.
The PDE Require Bundle section should move to the right side.
Orbit needs some love!
Write bug reports!
Modeling in e4 is controversial. (Now that’s a surprise!)
The modeling guys hate XML.
A lady bug screen saver looks nice.
SWT is on diet and will not get any cake.
2008-11-18T11:19:13+00:00
Ahti Kitsik: P2 fun: Failed to prepare partial IU
I got this while trying to install new version of subclipse on top of eclipse rcp edition of ganymede release. Running eclipse with -clean didn’t help.
!ENTRY org.eclipse.equinox.p2.engine 4 4 2008-11-18 13:17:31.218
!MESSAGE An error occurred during provisioning.
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.equinox.p2.touchpoint.eclipse 4 0 2008-11-18 13:17:31.218
!MESSAGE Failed to prepare partial IU: [R]org.tigris.subversion.clientadapter.javahl 1.5.4.
Then I thought - what the heck, [...]
"So yet another week, another -rc," began Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc8 Linux kernel. He continued, "this one should be the last one: we're certainly not running out of regressions, but at the same time, at some point I just have to pick some point, and on the whole the regressions don't look _too_ scary. And -rc8 obviously does fix more of them." Linus went on to note that most of the changes since -rc7 are small, "and there aren't even a whole lot of them."
Jiri Kosina cautioned that there is still an unknown bug affecting the e1000e driver currently in the 2.6.27 kernel, "rendering the cards unusable for most of the i-am-not-a-hacker users (and remember, even Dave Airlie bricked his laptop completely to death, when trying to restore eeprom contents)" When asked how to duplicate the bug, Jiri noted that the inability to reliably reproduce the bug added to the difficulty in debugging the problem, "apparently it is some kind of race, as it usually takes multiple cycles to trigger".
"The patches most people hopefully care about tend to be small details," noted Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc6 kernel. He continued, "and so more regressions should hopefully be closed now, some by just reverting the commits that caused breakage. I don't think anything special merits explicit comment, but you can get a flavor for things by scanning the appended shortlog." Earlier in the announcement email, Linus did note some specifics about which drivers caused the bulk of the patch:
"Same old deal - except it's been almost two weeks since -rc5. That said, the diff is actually about the same size, so I guess that means things are calming down. Most of the diff (bulk-wise) is updates to the new gspca (standard USB webcam) driver, although some of it is also removal of the dead miropcm20* driver."
Daniel Phillips noted that his new Tux3 versioning filesystem is now operating like a filesystem, "the last burst of checkins has brought Tux3 to the point where it undeniably acts like a filesystem: one can write files, go away, come back later and read those files by name. We can see some of the hoped for attractiveness starting to emerge: Tux3 clearly does scale from the very small to the very big at the same time. We have our Exabyte file with 4K blocksize and we can also create 64 Petabyte files using 256 byte blocks." He went on to discuss some of the remaining features yet to be implemented, including atomic commits, versioning, coalesce on delete, a version of the filesystem written in the kernel, extents, locking, and extended attributes.
Reviewing the above list, Daniel decided he would work next on the coalesce on delete functionality, noting, "without this we can still delete files but we cannot recover file index blocks, only empty them, not so good." He added that at this time he was only going to focus on file truncation, "as soon as file truncation is added to the test mix we will see much more interesting behavior from the bitmap allocator, and we will discover some great ways to generate horrible fragmentation issues. Yummy." Daniel continued to point out that Tux3 is an open source project, and as such is always looking for others to participate, "whoever wants to carve their initials on what is starting to look like a for-real Linux filesystem, now is a great time to take a flyer. The code base is still tiny, builds fast, has lots of interactive feedback and is easy to work on. And you get to put your email address near the beginning of the list, which will naturally write its way into the history of open source. Probably."
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For this week's Photoshop contest, I asked you guys to show us what 
US sodiers are not the only ones getting 
mxGraph is a JavaScript library that uses built-in
browser capabilities to provide an interactive
drawing and diagramming solution. Target
applications are Web based applications that
require workflow/BPM, diagram, network, or general
graph editing to be available in-place on a Web
page.
Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a
microblogging platform. It helps people in a
community, company, or group to exchange short
(140 character) messages over the Web. Users can
choose which people to "follow" and receive only
their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It
provides a similar service to sites like Twitter,
Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk.
SAcc is an access control system for Squid. It
provides Web based account managment and
restrictions.
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