The NCBI C++ Toolkit provides portable libraries
and applications for assisting genetic science.
These include libraries for networking, SQL and
BerkeleyDB access, CGI and HTML handling, ASN.1
and XML handling, sequence alignment engines,
sequence retrieval engines, BLAST database
engines, FLTK and OpenGL graphics toolkits, and
basic system utilities.
License: Public Domain
Changes:
This release adds a method to compute column-specific pseudocounts in PSI-BLAST. It refactors the grid services library. It adds unit test framework and error logging for all File API classes. It fixes pthread support on IRIX. It enhances support of XML serialization. It fixes support for Sybase. It adds support for smaller lookup tables for small queries. It adds an API to retrieve GenBank loader statistics. It has assorted other enhancements, speedups, and bugfixes.
jGnash is a personal finance application written
in Java. A JVM of 1.4 or greater is required.
jGnash supports several account types, including
investment accounts. jGnash has support for split
transactions, nested accounts, scheduled
transactions, commodities, and currencies. jGnash
can import QIF files, excluding investment
accounts and transactions. Data is stored in an
XML format so it is easy to manipulate and read
the data external to the program. jGnash also has
scripting support to add custom reports and
functionality.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
In addition to several obscure bugfixes, this release adds OFX support for credit cards and the OFX version 2 file format. Handing of automatic backups has been improved.
Actually, it was on the 25th of December. Linus Torvalds played Santa Claus and released a gift for all Linux users. It’s the New Kernel. Let’s take a closer look to this new piece of art.
GtkHash is a utility for computing message digests
or checksums using the mhash library. Currently
supported hash functions include MD5, SHA1,
SHA256, SHA512, RIPEMD, HAVAL, TIGER, and
WHIRLPOOL.
License: GNU General Public License v2
Changes:
This release fixes progress bar display for large files. It removes the dependency on libglade.
PoDoFo is a C++ library to work with the PDF file
format. It also includes also a few tools. It
includes classes to parse a PDF file, modify its
contents in memory, write the changes back to
disk, and create new PDF files. The PoDoFo tools
are simple tools built around the PoDoFo library.
These tools are primarily examples of how to use
the PoDoFo library in your own projects, although
they offer useful features for working with PDF
files.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
Many improvements to podofoimpose, the PDF imposition tool, most notably support for Lua plan files. Full Unicode support on Windows and
Linux. Initial work on font subsetting. Fixes for a few memory leaks, several parsing issues, and countless smaller bugs.
Childsplay is a suite of educational games for
young children, like gcompris but without the
GNOME environment. It uses the SDL libraries to
provide smooth animation and stores the results of
each child in a database.
License: GNU General Public License v3
Changes:
This release has many bugfixes and translation updates.
“Judgment day has arrived for owners of 30GB (and only 30GB) Zunes. The music player inexplicably entered a worldwide coma last night, and players are completely non responsive.” [Kroc: I wonder if this is anything like the bug that caused Windows 98 to crash after 49 days when the tick-count exceeded 32-bits 
]
Researchers presenting at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) have
used MD5
collisions to generate bogus, but trusted, SSL certificates as reported by heise online.
This would allow nefarious web sites to generate a certificate purporting
to be from any other site—greatly increasing the reach of phishing
and other scams. “Using a weakness in the MD5 cryptographic hash
function, which allows different messages to generate the same MD5 hash –
known as an MD5 ‘collision’, the international team of Alexander Sotirov,
Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molinar, Dag Arne Osvik
and Benne De Weger, have used one attack scenario to create a certificate
which will be trusted by all browsers because it appears to be signed by
one of the root CAs that browsers trust by default. The certificate can
also be used to sign other certificates, which could allow attackers to
carry out ‘practically undetectable phishing attacks’.”
The past year has seen strides in open source’s place in the industry, cementing its role as a major force in the enterprise — with several key players and stakeholders rising to the top. Just what do they have planned for the next twelve months? Also this year, the breakneck pace of development in networking technology continued apace. But with concerns about security and energy consumption at all time highs, there’s still a great deal of work that needs to get done. And quickly.
A new centre aimed at speeding the development of mobile computing devices around the Linux-based Moblin OS opened in Taipei. The idea is for Taiwanese companies to use the centre as a testing ground for new netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), as well as develop more applications around Moblin.
