Planet SoC

The Monad.Reader Issue 12 is now out. It contains my article on physics engine implementation as well as articles from other SoCers, Max Bolingbroke and Neil Mitchell, and wonderful poetry by Wouter Swierstra, the editor.
Thanks to Thomas Schilling and Roman Leshchinskiy for help with the article.

I’m already write some articles about problems in running Trac on Jython.
Today i describe successfully installation of popular Django-based blog engine Byteflow on Jython.

Step 1: Install Java, Jython, Django

To setup Byteflow on Jython you must install JDK, and Jython compiler. I’m recommend to use Sun JDK version 1.6 and latest
Jython from 2.5 branch (Now latest version of Jython is 2.5b0 and final 2.5 version will released soon).

Note: if you install Jython on computer without graphical interface you must run console version of installer:
$java -jar jython_installer-2.5b0.jar --console

otherwise you get error:

I had to mess with Oracle database links recently. Here’s a good reference to the “CREATE DATABASE LINK” sentence syntax.

In my case it was:
CREATE PUBLIC DATABASE LINK MYLINK CONNECT TO USER IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD USING ‘mydb’;

‘mydb’ has to be an entry in ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora file on the server side Oracle client installation, so that the host database can see the foreign one (which is ‘mydb’).

Next, make sure that sqlnet is configured to use tnsnames.ora file. Its configuration is defined ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/sqlnet.ora, which contains client side network configuration parameters (again, on the server side!). For instance:

NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH=(TNSNAMES, LDAP)

MSN Soapbox videos or MSN Videos served via (soapbox.msn.com) can now be cached using the latest version of youtube cache. Soapbox Videos are served from servers hosted by edgesuite.net. Other videos served via MSN (video.msn.com) are static in nature and squid in caching mode can handle them anyway. So, now complete MSN Videos are cached using squid and youtube cache :) Also, video caching support has been added to youtube cache version 1.4.
With the above two domains, now youtube cache support caching of dynamic audio/video content from 10 audio/video portals. I am constantly working on adding more websites. A long list of websites is already on my todo list.
If you want audio/video caching for a particular video portal, post it here.

I found one recent blog post by Dale Beermann. Entitled “We’re Moving to Flash. Here’s Why.”, the post creates a discussion if Java is still the appropriate technology for UI design.
One of the subtitles says:
The Java Brand Is In Trouble
Personaly, I’ve been using Flex just for a couple of days so far, and I already love it! It is true, that the development tools still way back from the Java ones. But to be honest Flex doesn’t need that much of tool support as Java does. The clean separation between layout, events, and behavior makes Flex much cleaner technology than Java is.
The discussion on Dale’s post continues at InfoQ.com site.

Youtube Cache was lacking the very basic facility of updating the configuration files and caching directories when changes are made to the main configuration file located at /etc/youtube_cache.conf . The new version of youtube cache introduces a new script update-yc which will help you update the directories and other configuration files one you make any changes to main configuration file.
For example : After changing the base_dir option in youtube_cache.conf, if you run update-yc, the new base_dir and all subdirs will be created for you and update logs will be written to main logfile located at /var/log/squid/youtube_cache.log . Run update script as

Available in December with Linux cross-development tools, the Digi Connect ME 9210 offers a faster ARM9 processor and serial data rates, while adding a serial peripheral interface (SPI), I2C, and cryptography hardware.

Nice one! :) I’d be really happy to have this gadget for fun :)
Fund at Linuxdevices.com

Long time no post. Anyway, I have some good news.
The Gtk code for Aptitude has been merged some time ago into the main development trunk and we now have a release in Experimental.

For those that don’t know about it, here’s what it’s all about : “The new frontend is is an effort to bring some of the design principles of the curses frontend to a GUI environment, while also exploiting the unique features a GUI gives us and exploring ways to deal with changes in the environment in the nine years since aptitude was first designed.”

Spicebird is

"your one platform for many collaboration needs. It provides e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging with intuitive integration and unlimited extensibility."
Spicebird beta 0.7 pre release is out now and can be downloaded in 10 languages from the i10n nightly build archive. For the latest nightly build of English version, check this English nightly build archive.
Some of the new features in version 0.7 are