Free interesting software for linux

Today many people are used to keeping in touch with news sites and blogs with an RSS feed reader. RSS offers access to any kind of frequently posted information. This also makes it an interesting technology for handling usenet newsgroups, which are like updated several times a day.
nntp2rss provides a bridge to access newsgroups using an RSS reader. A special feature of this application is that it assembles all the articles from various feeds in a single feed.

libsexier is a sexy cairo widget library for gtk/gnome.

Currently only one widget is in this new library, fittsmenu, find out more at http://www.qdh.org.uk

You can build it like so:

./configure
make

Once built you can cd examples and run ./fittsmenu to try it out.There have been many interesting comments regarding this new menu, and some misconceptions about the way it works. As a result there are some interesting new features I want to add to the fittsmenu widget, however some of these features are very difficult (slice scaling for instance) to put together so please be patient.

If you’d like to know more or get involved please email me about it. As this is in the very very early stages of development I’m very curious to hear peoples opinions and rants about what I’m doing.

Matware NTN is a library written in Javascript that will allow you to create really dinamic sites without recharging the page.
Comming soon is going to have MySQL support that is going it to make an application really interesting.
This software this under development.
If you want to distribute, copy or modify Matware NTN, you are welcome to do so under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Enhancements:
- This release adds the XML Object from gazingus.org and many bugfixes.

Bio::AnnotationCollectionI is a Perl interface for annotation collections.
SYNOPSIS
# get an AnnotationCollectionI somehow, eg
$ac = $seq->annotation();
foreach $key ( $ac->get_all_annotation_keys() ) {
@values = $ac->get_Annotations($key);
foreach $value ( @values ) {
# value is an Bio::AnnotationI, and defines a "as_text" method
print "Annotation ",$key," stringified value ",$value->as_text,"n";
# also defined hash_tree method, which allows data orientated
# access into this object
$hash = $value->hash_tree();
}
}
Annotation Collections are a way of storing a series of "interesting facts" about something. We call an "interesting fact" in Bioperl an Annotation (this differs from a Sequence Feature, which is called a Sequence Feature and may or may not have an Annotation Collection).
The trouble about this is we are not that sure what "interesting facts" someone might want to store: the possibility is endless.
Bioperls approach is that the "interesting facts" are represented by Bio::AnnotationI objects. The interface Bio::AnnotationI guarentees two methods
$obj->as_text(); # string formated to display to users
and
$obj->hash_tree(); # hash with defined rules for data-orientated discovery
The hash_tree method is designed to play well with XML output and other "nested-tag-of-data-values" think BoulderIO and/or Ace stuff. For more info read Bio::AnnotationI docs
Annotations are stored in AnnotationCollections, each Annotation under a different "tag". The tags allow simple discovery of the available annotations, and in some cases (like the tag "gene_name") indicate how to interpret the data underneath the tag. The tag is only one tag deep and each tag can have an array of values.
In addition, AnnotationCollectionIs are guarentee to maintain a consistent set object values under each tag - at least that each object complies to one interface. The "standard" AnnotationCollection insists the following rules are set up
Tag Object
--- ------
comment Bio::Annotation::Comment
dblink Bio::Annotation::DBLink
description Bio::Annotation::SimpleValue
gene_name Bio::Annotation::SimpleValue
ontology_term Bio::Annotation::OntologyTerm
reference Bio::Annotation::Reference
These tags are the implict tags that the SeqIO system needs to round-trip GenBank/EMBL/Swissprot.
However, you as a user and us collectively as a community can grow the "standard" tag mapping over time and specifically for a particular area.
Enhancements:
- Perl

M3U-Playlist Manager is an administration of loose m3u-playlists in tree structure. Simple mouse-click to add or remove a song from playlist with currently running Song in the Player.

And other interesting functions. Supporting only XMMS at the moment.

libsift is an algorithm to identify and locate interesting points within an image. For all such points, a descriptive signature is extracted.
The signatures can be stored and matched among multiple images, allowing for a large number of interesting applications, such as aligning overlapping images and identifying objects or motion within image sequences.
libsift is used by the autopano-sift program to create panorama images.
This library is a 100% C# implementation of the SIFT algorithm ("Scale-Invariant Feature Transform") and additional matching algorithms. The SIFT algorithm is an image feature location and extraction algorithm which provides the following key advantages over similar algorithms:
- Combined feature location and extraction algorithm.
- The keypoint locations are more precise and repeatable, because SIFT uses subpixel localization and multiple scale keypoint identification
- The descriptors are highly distinctive. For example, I tested with up to 300,000 keypoints while matching a large 60 picture panorama and it did not have a single invalid match.
- The feature vectors can be efficiently correlated using probabilistic algorithms like Best-Bin-First kd-tree search.
Enhancements:
- A serious bug in the Gaussian sigma computation and a bug in the DoG scale handling were fixed.

Netcat is a simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts.

At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

Perhaps some equivalent to netcat, or "nc" should have been written and distributed ten years earlier as another one of those cryptic but fundamental Unix tools that we all use daily without even thinking about it.