Donald E. Knuth's monumental book series The Art of Computer Programming has deep roots. When the distinguished Stanford Professor Emeritus Knuth began putting his ideas to paper, John F. Kennedy was president, Don Draper was Madison Avenue's hottest ad man, and most of us were merely potential zygotes. Publisher Addison-Wesley says that the first three volumes of Art of Computer Programming are “widely recognized as the definitive description of classical computer science”. Practicing programmers have long applied his “cookbook” solutions to their day-to-day problems. Now comes the long-awaited fourth volume to compose a new four-volume set. The new volume 4 brings together definitive new coverage of broadword computation, combinatorial generation, fundamental combinatorial objects and other topics. Bill Gates has said that people who read the entire set should send him their résumé. If you get that far, we imagine Linus would love to see it too!
The OpenERP open-source suite of comprehensive business applications recently bounded up to version 6.0. OpenERP's eponymous developer noted that a number of factors warranted the release's designation, including advancement in simplicity and ease of deployment, the ability to build an ERP system at one's own pace, greatly improved affordability and accessibility for companies of all sizes, and more than 800 contributions from its global community of open-source developers. Further, OpenERP v6 now is available not only as an on-site version, but also as an SaaS platform, which the firm says “radically reduces the cost and complexity of an ERP deployment”. Some of the hundreds of additional new features include extended multicompany functionality marketing campaign management, simplified accounting interface, tracking of tickets for support and after-sales services, push and pulled logistics flows, talent acquisition and manufacturing scrap management.
The developers at GrammaTech have released a fresh new version 3.6 of CodeSonar, a source code analysis tool that performs a whole-program, interprocedural analysis on code and identifies complex programming bugs. Version 3.6 adds two significant improvements, namely a significantly improved GUI, which streamlines developer interaction and boosts productivity, as well as a more efficient analysis engine, which can reduce analysis time on large code bases, says GrammaTech, by up to a third. GrammaTech also says that CodeSonar's unique strength is “its ability to identify far more program-crashing defects and security vulnerabilities than competing static-analysis tools”. Another advantage is CodeSonar's new GUI that “enables developers to quickly digest key information, understand and identify the most important issues and prioritize fixes”. CodeSonar runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and supports most compilers.
The developers over at The Document Foundation are giddy about their new LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of this free, power-packed and open-source personal productivity suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh. Based on and containing all features of OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice contains the Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base applications. Some of the many new features include compatibility with SVG files, improved ergonomics in Calc, and Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters. The Document Foundation says it now has more than 100 developers working on LibreOffice.
Bibble Labs' bills its new Bibble Pro and Bibble Lite, both nudging up to version 5.2, as “an ambitious project to revolutionize digital photographic workflow”, streamlining it to run “at the speed of light”. The applications, according to Bibble Labs, offer tools for photographic editing and organizing capabilities all at “blazing speed in a sleek, modern interface”. Version 5.2 adds, among other things, support for 14 new RAW formats, including Nikon D3100, D7000, P7000 and Panasonic LX5, GF2 and GH2, and includes significant improvements to the application's selective editing capability. Both Bibble 5.2 Pro and Bibble 5.2 Lite are available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
TYAN is targeting its newly released S8225 Workstation Motherboard at graphics workstation and personal supercomputing applications. The power-efficient S8225 supports two six-core AMD Opteron 4100 series processors and up to four double-wide PCI-E 2.0 GPGPU compute accelerators. Additional features include four 1-Gbit Ethernet ports, integrated support for IPMI 2.0, an optional LSI 2008 SAS controller, integrated audio, IEEE 1394a headers and TPM 1.2 support in an EATX 12" x 13" form factor.
Illumination Software Creator from Radical Breeze makes application development not only accessible to everyone but also “just plain fun”. Now in version 3.0, this cross-platform, 100% visual application creation suite allows even those with absolutely no programming experience to visually design and create their own software applications that run on a wide variety of platforms. This latest version adds support for native iPhone and iPad applications using the exact same projects that already build for Android, Flash and so on. Apps produced for iOS platforms by Illumination Software Creator are able to be submitted to the iTunes App Store. Support for Windows Phone 7 applications is coming soon. Illumination Software Creator is available on on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
