Spanish developer Alex Aranda started to work on aTunes almost four years ago. “Initially I just wanted a simple application to transfer contents from my iPod to a computer. I didn’t like any of the programs I found, so started to work on aTunes as a tool to read tags from audio files and copy them to disk. When I finished the basic tool I started to add more features.”

Today the aTunes team includes, in addition to Aranda, developers Sylvain Gaudard and Thomas Beckers. “We also have occasional contributions from users who send patches, which we review and add to aTunes. A team of translators has translated the application to 23 languages. Every time a new version nears release, if we added some new literals, we send a message out a week in advance to all translators so they can update translations for the release.”

aTunes’ most recent version, 1.13.5, came out earlier this week. “We are currently working on version 2.0, which will have some new features and make it possible for users to develop their own plugins. We are also doing a lot of internal work in the application to improve its quality and performance.” Arada does his Java development using Swing and the Eclipse IDE.

“We have not yet decided on a date for 2.0 but we hope to release it early in 2010. In the meanwhile we we’ll continue releasing 1.13.x, including new fixes. Normally we release minor versions with new features every two months, but since we are working on a new major version now we need more time.”

Aranda says help with the project is always welcome from both translators and developers. “I personally would like to add some new ‘permanent’ developers to the team. In our Contributions page there is information about how to become a member of the team.”

To promote aTunes, the project announces new releases in sites like freshmeat. Some of its users have also created groups in social networks like Last.fm and Facebook.

SMI allows administrators to set up SHOUTcast servers using a graphical interface. It also allows users to manage servers with the same interface; they can start or stop and upload music, or have the server run as an “auto-DJ.” And as of the latest version, released last week, the software runs under Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, and Solaris.

The project began after project founder Scott Harvanek and two other developers set up a SHOUTcast daemon for a mutual friend who was not very computer-savvy but who enjoyed broadcasting. “We had to constantly make changes for him,” Harvanek remembers. “We finally decided we should write some software so he could just do it himself.” SMI is written in PHP and MySQL, with help from SHOUTcast, MRTG, Ices, and cURL.

The three friends registered the project on SourceForge.net as soon as they began to develop it in 2006. “We needed an easy unified platform where all of us developers could work on it without relying on a single person to make releases or perform other administration.” As a side benefit, “a lot of people have been able to find it via SF.net and Ohloh, so we haven’t done too much promotion – it hasn’t needed it.”

The developers aim to make releases every three to four months. In upcoming releases they plan upgraded AutoDJ and media management, and to do that, they’re happy to have help from other contributors. “We appreciate user involvement, as it’s the only way for us to know what people want, and everyone brings something unique to the project. The best way to get in touch with us is through the SourceForge.net site.”

Harvanek has one final note: “I’d like to thank Kristian Resset for being such a humongous help with SMI while I’ve been in the process of moving and caring for my newborn son. He’s been fantastic at leading the project, code updates, and general releases.”

To read more about the program, see this article. If you are interested in this effort, please contact our testing program manager, Daniel Hinojosa, via email at daniel at geek.net.

Ultimate Basketball Challenge is a pre-alpha simulation of the sport for your computer, with five on five play and tracking of player and team statistics. It’s nowhere near finished, but it is actively being developed.

If you have a Java Virtual Machine on your phone, you can get a basketball fix anytime, anywhere with Pocket Basketball. The graphics are rudimentary, but the game lets you try to shoot as many baskets as you can and prevent your opponent from scoring. It uses the dial pad to move your player around the screen.

We also have software for those who are a little more intimately involved with the sport. Basketball Coaches Management Tool gives coaches to tools to run everything from try-outs to tournaments. It tracks games and statistics, player information and player development.

PhpMySport is not b-ball-specific – it works for most team sports clubs and leagues. With it you can easily create and manage a web site, manage matches, seasons, players, and team compositions, post news, and host discussion forums.

If you want to use your computer and a projector for a basketball scoreboard, try Java ScoreBoard. It lets you keep a countdown clock, track the score, track fouls, play sounds, and even run a slide show.

Finally, if you’re more of a watcher than a player, especially of college basketball, the Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker may interest you. This Java Servlet offers bracket entering, multiple scoring systems, and multiple users, groups, and pools.

There are a few simplifications and a few differences between webDiplomacy and Risk:

Simplifications:
- All armies are the same strength: One army per territory.
- You have as many armies as supply-center territories, instead of getting new armies year by year.
- No luck is involved, no dice: You win fights when more neighboring armies support you than support the enemy. Both your armies and other players’ armies can support you.
- The aim is always to get half of the supply-center territories; there are no mission cards.

Differences:
- Everyone enters their moves in secret, and moves happen only when everyone has entered them; it’s not player by player like Risk.
- You can only build new armies where your first armies were built, in your country’s base territories.
- If an army loses a fight it can retreat.
- There are fleets, which are like armies, but they can go across sea/coast territories and not land, and can convoy armies across water.

The changes turn webDiplomacy into a game about cooperation and diplomacy, trust and bargaining, and trickery and deception, rather than luck and odds.

Australian student and developer Kestas Joe Kuliukas has been working on webDiplomacy since late 2004. The game is written in PHP. Kuliukas originally coded using Scite for simple code highlighting, but later turned to Eclipse PDT for auto-completion, with Xdebug on the server for debugging.

webDiplomacy development, like aspects of the game itself, is an exercise in collaboration. “Most of the work done on the software is done by people who have their own servers,” Kuliukas says. “Relatively little collaborative work is done directly on a single installation. This is convenient because it allows code to be properly tested before being integrated into the main release. The AGPL deserves credit for this; prior to the AGPL’s release the project used the BSD license, and webDiplomacy was plagiarized (breaking the BSD license) and no code was returned (which was unfortunate, but in line with the license). Since the AGPL was released, derivative sites share back code and everyone benefits.

“There are at least seven active servers: the official server at webdiplomacy.net, Facebook webDiplomacy; a Korean server; a custom server with alternate maps, rulesets and features; a Chinese server; and the server that plagiarized the code. Of these, Facebook webDiplomacy, the Korean server, and the custom server have had code re-integrated into official releases. A handful of people have also contributed patches directly into an official release.”

While the project’s version number makes it appear as if the game is in a late beta stage, that’s misleading. “The version number is tied to the year – 0.8x was 2008, 0.9x is 2009,” says Kuliukas. “I’d consider 0.80 to be the first non-beta release, but that’s with hindsight. Anyway, next year is 1.0, so never mind.”

webDiplomacy gives you lists of what each of your units can do. In this game snapshot, red is move/attempted move, yellow is support-move, green is support, blue is convoy, pink is retreat, a star means built, an explosion mean destroyed. Strategize with allies and enemies and enter your moves.

Among the planned enhancements for upcoming versions are a live chat feature and support for new variant maps, including many created by Oliver Auth. Players will also be able to enter orders via a point-and-click map instead of drop-down lists.

Kuliukas hosts the code for the game on SourceForge.net because “with SourceForge you can see how widely used and active something is, and can give feedback publicly; it gives a degree of confidence and transparency which I wanted for the project.” He publishes new release notices on freshmeat and Wikipedia, “though most users come from other installations or are linked via Facebook or forums.”

The game is pretty popular. “On the official server, the lowest number of players I’ve seen recently is 30 and highest is 130. Like any gaming server there are daily peaks and troughs. At the moment I’m writing this we have 1,366 players active in a game and 82 online, just on that one server.”

If you’d like to help out with such a popular project, the best place to talk about developing the code is forum.webdiplomacy.net. “The best way to get code in,” Kuliukas say, “is to set up a server with the changes and have people test it out, so it can be ported into the official code seamlessly.”

Scan Tailor can split two-page scans or cut off parts of a neighboring page from a single-page scan. It corrects page skew and aligns pages with each other. It removes the shadow around a book’s spine and increases the contrast of content in that area. It can convert text to black and white while leaving gray-scale or color images intact. It will even automatically detect those images for you.

About the only thing Scan Tailor doesn’t do, outside of optical character recognition, is correct the geometric distortions you get when capturing a document with a camera rather than a scanner – but its developer says that functionality is coming.

Scan Tailor beats the features offered with applications bundled with most scanners. “In fact,” says developer Joseph Artsimovich, “I always advise people to turn off any post-processing features of their scanning software if they are going to use Scan Tailor for post-processing. From Scan Tailor’s point of view, any ‘improvements’ made by scanning software are considered as damage. For example, contrast enhancement may completely remove the spine of a book, forcing Scan Tailor to guess which parts it needs to cut off.”

Artsimovich, who grew up in the Soviet Union, used to read lots of books – “until I started this project in late 2007″ he says with a wink. In today’s Russia, many books are available online for free, in part because foreign works published in USSR before 1974 are not protected by copyright in Russia, and in part because many volunteers spend their time digitizing books. “Having benefited greatly from the wide availability of books online, I wanted to give something back. My initial idea was to digitize one of my own books. That didn’t happen, because I quickly found out that existing post-processing software is so complex and unintuitive that it’s next to impossible to use, even for a technical person like myself. At that time I was looking for some new stuff to work on. That’s how Scan Tailor was born.”

Considering that he is a C++ fan, Artsimovich’s choice to create Scan Tailor using Qt and the Boost libraries was a natural. “People might be surprised by the fact that I don’t use any image processing or computer vision libraries. I did evaluate several of them, but I found flaws in every single one. A common flaw would be non-thread-safe code, which is unacceptable for Scan Tailor, which does use threads. So I ended up porting algorithms from other libraries if they were available, and implementing the missing ones by myself.”

Artsimovich says Scan Tailor’s next major release will bring correction of geometric distortions and improved despeckling functionality. “The former may require a couple more releases to make it handle complex cases. When that’s done, the project will have reached the state when there are no high priority tasks left, and at that point we might declare it a 1.0 release. After that we may start implementing various nice-to-have features and improving performance by rewriting some of the algorithms for OpenCL.”

Artsimovich appreciates help from other contributors. “Coming up with new image processing algorithms is important, as I am not a particularly bright guy. General purpose developers are even more necessary, as there is a huge amount of work needs to be done that doesn’t require any special knowledge.

“Documentation is an area which I don’t touch myself and completely rely on volunteers to work on. It’s too painful for me to write large amounts of anything but code. So far we have decent documentation in Russian, but next to none in English. I’d like that to change.”

The best way to get in touch is to join Scan Tailor’s forums.

Labels or cards created by gLabels can contain text, images, lines, shapes, and barcodes. gLabels also includes a document merge feature that lets you print a unique label for each record in an external data source, such as a CSV file. It can even handle CD/DVD labels. And it comes with a command-line front end called glabels-batch which can be used to print glabels files without launching the GUI application.

When he started working on the software back in 2001, Evins was hosting the project on his own, but without any content management or bug tracking tools. He moved the code to SourceForge.net “because a large number of successful projects were already hosted there, and it seemed like a stable place to set up shop.” The latest version, 2.2.6, was released on the site last week, and announced on freshmeat and GnomeFiles.

gLabels is built upon the GNOME platform, in part because it was (and still is) Evins’s primary desktop. Evins says the next major revision will be targeted at GNOME/GTK 3.0 and will feature some UI cleanup and some major housecleaning of the code. Some of the features planned for future versions include rich text objects, a printer calibration tool, and better management of custom templates, Evins says. He makes releases to the stable branch as bugs are discovered, which often happens as new distributions roll out later versions of GTK. New development releases are more sporadic.

“It all depends on my available time and inspiration,” Evins says. “This is a hobby for me, and I can always use help with things like creating new templates. It would be nice to have someone methodically review available products and produce templates to fill some of the gaps. There are many features in the TODO list and the SourceForge.net feature request tracker that are ripe for someone to tackle.” The best way to get involved is with an email message to glabels-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.

The USDA provides several different ways to search its nutrient database to find foods that contain a given nutrient. Among its other capabilities, NUT can suggest a food with a missing nutrient from among the set of foods that would meet all the Daily Values if added to the meals being analyzed.

The program’s creator, Jim Jozwiak, says, “NUT is a main part of my own attempt to figure out my nutritional requirements. I had a vision of recording my meals and seeing the nutrients arrayed in front of my eyes, and I was pretty sure that when these nutrients were presented correctly, I would be able to figure out the secrets of nutrition by comparing how well I felt or what symptoms I had to the nutrient levels I saw. I intuitively felt that even if I spent money to buy an existing program, which I was too cheap to do anyway, the existing programs would probably be too simple-minded in their presentation of the nutrients for my purposes.”

Jozwiak started working on the program in 1994. “At first I used the USDA’s abbreviated version of the database, which has all the foods but only around 30 nutrients. I kept adding nutrients from the whole database to the abbreviated database until 2003 when I redesigned the architecture so that I could handle the entire database with its 140+ nutrients and still get good performance.”

NUT runs fast because it is a C program. “I had a vision of no dependencies, and I didn’t want or need a complex development environment,” Jozwiak says. “In other words, I saw it as a ‘write once, use forever’ project. I was committed to support NUT, and I did not want any additional difficulty from a lot of dependencies on other projects and tools. My main tools were bash, make, and the gcc compiler.

“For the most part, the big advantage to using NUT is that I personally have used it to figure out my nutrition, and have included all the features that I found necessary over the years, while pruning features that did not pay off. The paradigm is not of a computer programmer deciding what would appeal to users, but that of a program user realizing he needs a new feature or style of presentation in order to figure out his diet.”

That’s a good thing, because Jozwiak doesn’t get a lot of feedback from the program’s users. “I think most people feel that their personal nutrition is none of my business. When I have gotten thank-you emails and asked the people what they discovered by using NUT, I almost never got a sensible answer.

“Today I consider the project to be done. Every year the USDA releases a new version of its database, and I have to fit it to my program. At that time I usually also introduce some little bug fixes or minor features.”

linux.conf.au 2010 will feature 14 separate mini-confs, including Business of Open Source, Education, Wave Developers, and Open and the Public Sector. Gabriella Coleman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Glyn Moody, and Nathan Torkington will keynote at the event.

More info:
Schedule
Registration

Molitor says, “The main difference from the original Minesweeper obviously is that fkmines is not controlled with a mouse (although mouse support could be implemented, but I’m not really interested in that). Instead, you move around using the vi key bindings – h j k l – plus some extras like G for the last line and $ for the last column. Also, instead of opening fields and marking mines by clicking, you use the spacebar and m.

“The other big difference is that the field of mines can be bigger than the terminal; that is, you can have a mine field with more rows and columns than your terminal has. One reason this is important is that xterm and the like can be resized, and I didn’t want fkmines to crash in that case. And some freak might want to solve a 500×500 mine field. Of course you cannot see all of the mine field at the same time then, but fkmines will scroll the field to keep your cursor visible.”

Because Minesweeper is relatively simple, fkmines is already essentially feature-complete, though Molitor has a few more tasks to take care of. “It will crash for big fields like 1000×1000; I’ll try and fix that when I find the time. Also, there’s no manpage yet; I’ll write one when I’ve got the syntax figured out :)). Of course, if fkmines gets any user requests for new features that seem reasonable to me and are not to hard to implement, I’ll try to implement them on some boring rainy day (November has plenty of them here).”

Molitor created fkmines in only a couple of days. “I wrote all the code in vim and use make and gcc for compilation. A friend of mine wondered if anyone would want to use the game, so I decided to find out” – and that’s how fkmines wound up on SourceForge.net.