Release Digest: GNOME, June 25, 2003

Eighth release of PythonCAD

I'd like to announce the eighth development release of PythonCAD, a CAD package for open-source software users. As the name implies, PythonCAD is written entirely in Python. The goal of this project is to create a fully scriptable drafting program that will match and eventually exceed features found in commercial CAD software. PythonCAD is released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

PythonCAD requires Python 2.2. The interface is GTK 2.0 based, and uses the PyGTK module for interfacing to GTK. The design of PythonCAD is built around the idea of separating the interface from the back end as much as possible. By doing this, it is hoped that both GNOME and KDE interfaces can be added to PythonCAD through usage of the appropriate Python module. Addition of other interfaces will depend on the availability of a Python module for that particular interface and developer interest and action.

The eighth release features improved preference controls. There is now a unified preference dialog box for setting drawing preferences, and more optional settings are now possible. Setting the background color of the drawing window is now available, and many dimension entity settings have been added, such as dimension bar color, dimension endpoint marker size, and dimension text color. The new preference dialog also allows for the setting of leader line arrow sizes and font color. Another new feature in this release is a tool for drawing polygons. The polygons can have any number of sides from three on up.

A number of internal code improvements are included in this release as well. The intersection code has been reworked again to return entity intersections as tuples containing float values. This release also has the beginnings of the rework of internal storage and handling of the user preferences and options. This work will continue for the next several releases at least. There are the usual assortment of bug fixes, documentation additions, and code improvements as well.

The new preference dialog does have a display bug when showing the font selection widget. I haven't figured out what is wrong, but opted to make the release with the bug present. A simple workaround is to select another option to modify so the font display widget gets removed, then reselect the option with the font display widget. This workaround will usually make the widget display itself properly. The next release should have this bug removed.

The mailing list for the development and use of PythonCAD is available. Visit the following page for information about subscribing and viewing the mailing list archive:

http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythoncad

I'd like to again publicly acknowledge and thank the developers and maintainers of PyChecker for the work they've done in developing this most useful tool. PyChecker is an effective tool for identifying errors in Python code, and I've been using it more and more. PyChecker gets a big recommendation from me and so I say thank you to the people who make it available.

http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/

Visit the PythonCAD web site for more information about what PythonCAD does and aims to be:

http://www.pythoncad.org/

Come and join me in developing PythonCAD into a world class drafting program!

Art Haas
--
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.

-Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822

BEAST/BSE v0.5.3

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.3 is available for download at:

ftp://beast.gtk.org/pub/beast/v0.5
or
http://beast.gtk.org/beast-ftp/v0.5

This is a quick update to fix crashes upon script initialization on some systems where short writes can occour.

BEAST (the Bedevilled Audio SysTem) is a graphical front-end to BSE (the Bedevilled Sound Engine), a library for music composition, audio synthesis and sample manipulation. The project is hosted at:

http://beast.gtk.org

This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from any GUI activities.

The most outstanding new features are the track editor which allowes for easy selection of synthesizers or samples as track sources, loop support and unlimited UnDo/ReDo capabilities.

Note, the .bse file format hasn't fully stabilized yet, so incompatibilities with future versions may occur, though we're making every possible attempt to maintain backwards compatibility.

Overview of Changes in BEAST/BSE 0.5.3:

• Seperated core plugin loading from LADSPA plugin loading
• Fixed memory leaks in various places
• Added child process (bsesh) error monitoring
• Fixed bsesh (script) communication for systems with short writes

---
ciaoTJ

Heartbeat 0.2

Application

Heartbeat 0.2

Description

A pygtk server monitoring application with ablility to monitor multiple services and multiple servers

Enhancements

• Support for using multiple configuration files using --config <config.xml>
• Defaults section has been added to the xml configuration file so you do not have to add certain properties to each service you wish to monitor. If the service does not have a particular property defined in it, heartbeat will then check the defaults section for that property.
• The mysql service now checks for the existance of the MySQLdb python module and uses it to connect to the mysql server.
• The postgresql service now checks for the existance of the pyPgSQL python module and uses it to connect to the postgresql server.
• The debug log can now be saved to a text file
• The debug log will now autoscroll by default when new text is added to it
• The debug log now displays more verbose error messages and uses red text on error messages as to make them stand out more
• Removed the ability to edit service properties for the time being
• Added Stock Icons to the menus and buttons.

Download

http://www.nolongervalid.com/heartbeat/heartbeat-0.2.tar.gz
http://www.nolongervalid.com/heartbeat/heartbeat-0.2.tar.bz2

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/hearbeat

Freshmeat Project

Conglomerate 0.5.4

Application

Conglomerate 0.5.4

Description

Conglomerate is an XML editor for GNOME, aiming to be as user-friendly as possible, to help non-technical people to use DocBook and similar formats.

Enhancements

• Fixed bug #115460: the executable is now named "conglomerate", rather than "conge"
• Major rewrite of the node "Properties" dialog. It's now modeless, a lot tidier, and supports the renaming of attributes.
• The display spec can now specify that Conglomerate should override the standard node property dialog for a tag, and use one from a plugin instead. I've begun the implementation of one of these plugins: a dialog that handles the standard attributes that are present on nearly every DocBook tag.
• We no longer depend on eel or libbonoboui, which should make it easier to build
• We now depend on libglade, which should make it much easier to support things like accessibility.
• Numerous minor fixes

Download

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/conge

gwget2 0.5

Application

gwget2 0.5

Description

Gnome2 wget front-end.

Enhancements

• Added Drag&Drop support. Now it's posible to drag urls from galeon/mozilla to gwget2.
• Added speed of the download.
• Added dutch translation (thanks to Reinout van Schouwen).

Fixes

• Fixed a bug with i18n support. Now i18n works but not in the column titles. I don't know why, so if you know how to fix this, let me known (with a patch ;) )
• Fixed path of gwget2.xpm install to.

Download

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1708&release_id=167736

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gwget2