News You Can Bruise for 2003 April 7

Hm, maybe I should split out the programming-related software into a "Software Software Roundup", since that's most of the interesting software I'm finding nowadays. On the other hand, why not jumble everything together?

• Xrmap lets you view and zoom in on a hugely detailed vector map of the world as you cackle maniacally like a B-movie villain. Changelog includes the phrase "Xrmap no longer complains if the CIA_WDB2.jpd vector data are not found." Sunclock, by the same author, gives an interface to various other maps of the world. Both very cool.
• Process Change Detection System watches for new processes on your machine.
• Draco is a web application framework. I think there was some talk of it at PyCon. [Hey, what about PyCon?-ed. I'm working on it.]
• Continuing the "useful thing ported to Python" trend, cracklib has been ported to Python.
• Albumshaper, one of the myriad of photo album software packages. I'm putting it here because I should at least *try* other photo album software packages before deciding that I don't understand them and writing my own.
• DPROG is a German industrial band, and also a language which generates C++ implementations of algorithms using dynamic programming (Dynamic Programming: The Coolest Thing Ever™).
• Autodia turns source code or other text into Dia diagrams. It can't be more aggravating than dragging boxes around in Dia! [0]
• SCons is a build system written in Python.
• CVSTrac is a bug tracker that lives on top of CVS.
• netrick is a colorful text-based Web browser that features partial ECMAScript support. They said it shouldn't be done!

[0] This is not really a problem with Dia. It's a problem with having to drag boxes aroud.

Woohoo, now every part of NewsBruiser setup except actually unzipping the tarball and making sure the webserver can write to the directory is web-based. Gotta test it and rewrite the docs, and then it's time for a release to beat all previous releases.