Open Source Pixels

Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji is readying a two-inch cubed computer that runs Red Hat Linux on 1GB of flash. The Space Cube is equipped with a MIPS-based NEC VR5701 processor, 64MB RAM, and numerous I/O connections, including a Firewire-like “SpaceWire” port designed for spaceflight.

Simple Movie Catalog will scan a given directory
for movies, query IMDb for info, and generate a
catalog in HTML that offers sorting and grouping
of found movies by different criteria.

GSTFS (GStreamer FS) is a filesystem for on-demand
transcoding of music files between different
formats. It utilizes the GStreamer library for
conversion, so any formats supported by GStreamer
should also be supported by GSTFS.

MTX is a set of programs for controlling tape
drives and the robotic mechanism of autoloaders
and tape libraries.

Topal is yet another program that links GnuPG and Pine/Alpine. It offers facilities to encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify messages. Multiple PGP blocks included in the text of a message are processed. Decryption and verification output can be cached to reduce the number of times the passphrase is entered. RFC2015/3156 multipart messages can be sent and received with help from some scripts, procmail, and a patch to Pine/Alpine. It includes basic support for verifying S/MIME multipart/signed messages. There is a remote sending and decryption mode for reading email on a distant computer via SSH with secret keys on the local computer. There is a high level of configurability.

ConstructrCMS is a content management system that features clean frontend URLs, a frontend cache system, backend user management and rights management, nested_sets logic for page structuring, TinyMCE integration, Prototype and Scriptaculous integration, a file based template system, the ability to use a frontend that fits your special needs, and an asset center for your uploads. Automatic synchronization is done after FTP uploads. Thumbnails are automatically created for image uploads.

Fayandria Foley helped reel in big bucks in July with one of the year’s most curious fundraisers. She helped pull together an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, which is typically a walkathon locally. More than 2,000 showed up — or didn’t, actually. Everyone at Foley’s relay stayed home to participate.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. “As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. [Ingo Weinhold] tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn’t particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet.” The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD.

Vbackup is a modular backup utility that can be
used to perform full or incremental system
backups. It consists of a set of scripts that can
be used to create backups using tar and xfsdump.
It can also make backups of PostgreSQL and MySQL
databases. It has a module for backing up the
Debian package list, and can store the backups to
a local or remote directory. It is modular, and
can be extended to perform other functions.

The KaufKauf Shoppingmanager is a Web-based
application that allows you to manage your goods
at home. It supports barcode scanners for faster
management, and it automatically creates shopping
lists that can be printed out or downloaded by
cellphone. It also watches “best before” dates and
informs you via email or SMS when foods reach that
date. The complete application is a system that
can be accessed from nearly everywhere and offers
you the possibility to find out what you really
need next from the supermarket.