Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Democracy Player 0.9.0 has been released yesterday, which has been announced in quite a number of places already, e.g. Boing Boing.

It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux; if you're on Debian unstable the installation is as simple as apt-get install democracyplayer (I uploaded the new packages yesterday, they should have reached all mirrors by now).

If you want to know what this is all about, but you're reluctant to install yet another program, check out this screencast (MOV, 37MB) which shows the basic functionality and user interface and discusses some of the new features... I think you'll like it.

You can use it for all kinds of video blogs and podcasts, it'll download and play almost anything with an RSS feed.

I've started looking at Trac recently, a nice web-based project management tool written in Python.

It integrates with existing Subversion repositories; for example, you can browse the code in your repositories with Trac (it'll be displayed syntax-highlighted), view diffs between revisions etc. etc. Additionally, you get a wiki (e.g. for project documentation), as well as a built-in bug-tracker a la Bugzilla, all integrated nicely into a single piece of software...

It's Free Software, of course (the license changed from GPL to revised BSD somewhat recently)...

A few words on the installation:

• First, install Trac, e.g. via apt-get install trac.
• Then create a so-called Trac environment with trac-admin /path/to/environment/myproject initenv. You'll be asked where your svn repository resides, what's the name of the project etc.
• You can then edit /path/to/environment/myproject/conf/trac.ini, and change the header logo/URL, the default component/priority/issue-owner and more.
• For more administration, I recommend using the interactive Trac shell via trac-admin /path/to/environment/myproject. Type "help" for um... help.
• Read the docs for how to setup the web server in order to run Trac (you can use CGI, FastCGI, or mod_python).

So far I've set up ca. 7-8 Trac instances for various projects and I'm quite happy with it. While I was at it, I also created a tiny Trac article in the German Wikipedia.

You can get tons of useful plugins and macros over at trac-hacks.org for additional functionality, e.g. DoxygenPlugin, GanttPlugin, DebianBtsMacro, and many more.

This is pretty interesting stuff: the M4 Message Breaking Project tries to break Enigma M4 messages intercepted in the North Atlantic during World War II.

From the project website:

The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia. The signals were presumably enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4 - hence the name of the project.

They provide Free Software clients (GPL'd, written in Python and C) for Unix-like operating systems and various Windows variants. Project updates are available from the project blog.

The first message has already been successfully broken. The plain-text reads:

1930 Funkspruch 1851/19/252:
" F T 1132/19 Inhalt:
Bei Angriff unter Wasser gedrückt.
Wabos. Letzter Gegnerstand 0830 Uhr
AJ 9863, 220 Grad, 8 sm. Stosse nach.
14 mb. fällt, NNO 4, Sicht 10.
Looks "

Translation:

1930 Radio signal 1851/19/252:
" F T 1132/19 contents:
Forced to submerge during attack.
Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h
AJ 9863, [course] 220 degrees, [speed] 8 knots. [I am] following [the enemy].
[barometer] falls 14 mb, [wind] nor-nor-east, [force] 4, visibility 10 [nautical miles].
Looks "

Hm, digging in the past with modern technology...

(via Network Security Blog)

I noticed that there have been quite a few Python related posts on Planet Debian lately. Here's mine.

I'm having a really hard time trying to find a good solution for rendering an OpenGL scene (e.g. from a VRML file) using PyOpenGL and/or OpenGLContext in the command line. All solutions I tried so far pop up an X11-window, which is not what I'm looking for. Instead I want to render the scene and dump it to PNG/JPG without requiring an X11 server.

Can this be done with PyOpenGL/OpenGLContext? I could probably try to use xvfb, but that's really an ugly hack. Besides the images I get using xvfb are somewhat broken, not sure why (does xvfb support OpenGL?).

Any hints are appreciated.

From tabasoft.it:

Biferno is a new generation, Cross Platform Web Scripting Language that allows developers the rapid implementation of dynamic Web applications and of Web sites that offer a high degree of user interactivity.

Biferno is an Open Source Project distributed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, its current version is 1.2.0.

So what's wrong with PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (on Rails)? Why develop yet another (web) scripting language, especially one which looks like an exact PHP clone? Can anyone enlighten me why they're doing it and what they see as advantages over other languages?

(via Schockwellenreiter)