Open Source Pixels

A few months ago, Google open sourced the VP8 video codec as part of the WebM video project, to create a truly Free/free unencumbered video format for the web as an answer to the non-Free/free patent-encumbered H264 format. Today, Google launched a new image format for the web, WebP, which aims to significantly reduce the file size of photos and images on the web.

RVM is an archive manager that uses rsync to
manage backups of multiple clients across multiple
logical partitions (vaults). It has some features
that some other rsync-based backup schemes lack,
such as being written in C++, needing no scripts
or other programs than rsync and any binaries on
which rsync depends (such as SSH), the ability to
manage multiple instances of rsync connections to
separate clients in parallel, the ability to use
multiple logical partitions (vaults) in a
configurable fashion for purporses of redundancy
and added reliability, and the use of hard links
for files that have not changed from one archive
to the next.

Changes: Several important bugs found and fixed. A configure option to skip STL memory exception testing has been added.

Tags: Archiving, backup, Mirroring

Licenses: GPL

Task Coach is a simple todo manager to manage
personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a
frustration that well-known task managers, such as
those provided with Outlook or Lotus Notes, do not
provide facilities for composite tasks. Often,
tasks and other things to do consist of several
activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with
composite tasks.

Changes: This is a bugfix release.

Release Tags: Bugfixes

Tags: Office/Business

Licenses: GPLv3

rpm2html automatically generates Web pages describing a set of RPM packages. The goal of rpm2html is also to identify the dependancies between various packages, and being able to find the packages providing the ressources needed to install another package.

Changes: Minor improvements and fixes: smoother RPM, reverted feature loss with RPM prior to 4.6, fixed typos in the man page, and removal of double open (which can bring speed-ups around 20%).

Release Tags: Development, Minor Enhancements

Tags: Software Distribution, Systems Administration

Licenses: LGPL, BSD Original, MIT/X

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer
application. The initial target platform is Linux,
using the infrastructure of the Jack Audio
Connection Kit (JACK) for audio and the Advanced
Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI. It is
meant to be a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio
workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the
personal home studio.

Changes: A new MIDI learn/controller mapping for plugin parameters. New Clip fade-in/out WYSIWYG curves. A MIDI resolution overflow fix. MIDI tempo standard on quarter-note fix. Extended MIDI controller mapping for mixer/tracks. New audio metronome gain control. A mute/solo tracks while looping fix. MIDI clock support. Audio import while looping has been fixed. MIDI track bank-select/program-change has been fixed. JACK transport sync has been fixed. A new clip tempo-adjust tool. Audio tracks auto-monitoring has been fixed. A MIDI track redundant mute/solo fix.

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio

Licenses: GPL

Aubit 4GL compiler is a programming language based on (and compatible with) Informix-4GL. It provides an easy way to generate screen/form based programs, since statements for handling Windows, Forms, Menus, SQL, and similar are built-in. With support for SQL statements forming an intrinsic part of the language, it’s especially suitable for developing database-oriented applications. Database connectivity is provided for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Informix, and others via ODBC. It supports both ncurses (console mode) and GTK+ (GUI mode) output.

Changes: Many bugfixes and enhancements, including PRINT IMAGE and BARCODE enhancements in PDF reports, allowing simultaneous access to different database types, and some object-oriented 4gl language extensions.

Tags: Database, Front-Ends, Office/Business, Software Development, Code Generators, Compilers

Licenses: FDL, GPL, LGPL

FormBuilder is an object-oriented PHP class for building HTML forms. It includes AJAX support, jQuery, Google Maps, reCAPTCHA, TinyMCE, and CKEditor.

Changes: This release adds the ability to send your form-submitted data directly to a Google Docs Spreadsheet. A new example was added demoing this new functionality. Support was improved for users with Javascript disabled.

Tags: PHP, Form Generation, Form Builder, jQuery, AJAX, Google Maps

Licenses: GPL

quvi is a commandline tool for parsing video download links. It supports
Youtube and other similar video Web sites. libquvi is a library for
parsing video download links with a C API. It is written in C and
intended to be a cross-platform library.

Changes: Support for Youtube WebM formats was added.

Licenses: GPLv3

Ubuntu has announced the availability of the release candidate for Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat”). It is “complete, stable, and suitable
for testing by any user“, according to the announcement, which also comes with a Hitchhiker’s Guide riff: “Releases are big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,
mind-bogglingly big they are. I mean, you may think it’s a long haul to
release a single Linux package or application, but that’s just peanuts
to a Linux distribution release. Because of this, we must work our way
up to it, incrementally…bit by bit…milestone by milestone…it takes a
lot of Deep Thought.“

On its Chromium Blog, Google has announced a new image format called WebP. It is based on techniques from Google’s recently open-sourced VP8 video codec and shows some significant size reductions for image data. There is also a gallery available to compare original and WebP-compressed images.
“While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.”
(Thanks to Martin Jeppesen.)