Free neverwinter nights software for linux

Scorched 3D project is a game based loosely (or actually quite heavily now) on the classic DOS game Scorched Earth "The Mother Of All Games". Scorched 3D adds amongst other new features a 3D island environment and LAN and internet play. Scorched 3D is totally free and is available for both Microsoft Windows and Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris etc.) operating systems.
You can pick up the game and begin playing very quickly. Then, when/if you are interested, you can poke in the dimmer recesses of the game and get into the strategy (or just ignore it altogether!).
At its lowest level, Scorched 3D is just an artillery game with two+ tanks taking turns to destroy opponents in an arena. Choose the angle, direction and power of each shot, launch your weapon, and try to blow up other tanks. Thats basically it.
But Scorched 3D can be a lot more complex than that, if you want it to be. You can earn money from successful battles and use it to invest in additional weapons and accessories. You can play with up to twenty four other players at a time, mixing computer players with humans.
Theres a variety of changing environmental conditions and terrains to be dealt with. After the end of each round (which ends when everybody dies or theres only one person left), you get to buy stuff using the prize money you won from previous matches.
Enhancements:
- Added: UDP message handler for games COMs
- Added: ClearTracerLines console command
- Added: Moved ODE and zlib to external libraries and updated vesions
- Added: Changed objects and trees to be targets
- Added: Removed GIF files in preference to PNG files
- Added: wxWindows server GUI has been depricated (now console only)
- Added: Windows build of scorched has been updated to use visual studio express
- Added: Split server, client and laucher into seperate applications (server now has no reliance on GUI libs)
- Added: Refactored source to give a better client/server devide
- Added: More smoke kicked up when tank drives over and removes a target
- Added: Transparency available to missiles (and all other models)
- Added: Users connecting to web admin console from the local machine dont need an admin account
- Added: Console server now sends server logging to stdout
- Added: GLWTime widget to allow a clock to be drawn on screen
- Added: Dragging the mouse will drag the landscape (clicking still moves to look at point)
- Added: Split and inter-dependancy removal of configure.ac files
- Added: Camera recentered on tank at the start of each new round
- Added: For single player games camera position remembered for each player
- Added: Server only compilation for Windows and Unix systems
- Added: Text chat shown during level loading
- Added: All models are cached including animated models
- Added: All models are now animated (missiles, tanks, targets, boids etc...)
- Added: Bird animations are now not syncronized
- Added: Concept of an offical server, displayed on the net browsing dialog
- Added: Custom port and socket support for stats database connection
- Added: Asyncronous message support to UDP message handler
- Added: Server is only simulated periodically when playing offline
- Added: Mysql reconnection when connection lost
- Added: File logger splits files into ~256K chunks (and not by number of lines)
- Added: Removed use of ODE in preference to a simplier particle physics engine
- Added: Added target collision space that can be used for fast target bounds checking
- Added: Server now simulates the shots in real-time allowing for the addition of real-time gameplay
- Added: Server only sends initial shots and seeds to clients for each turn saving on bandwidth
- Added: ScorePerMoney value is now per 1000 rather than per 100
- Added: Web management authentication failure reponse is delayed before sending back to client
- Added: Web management sessions view to show logged in web admins
- Added: Web management exit when empty option (to exit server when no one is playing)
- Added: Web management log file search feature for finding strings in log files
- Added: Web management landscape, main, players, mods settings dialogs
- Added: Web management mod upload and import feature to allow remote uploading of mods
- Added: Web management looking up of unique ids for users
- Added: Web management combining user stats
- Added: DebugFeatures option for server.xml to disable InfoGrid
- Added: New wall types: WallActive and WallInactive
- Added: botonly option for accessories (ie: only for bots, not for AI objects)
- Added: Server file logging can be turned on from server settings
- Added: Concept of movement routines for targets so targets can now move
- Added: Boids and ships are now targets (can have a physical presence)
- Added: Boids and ships have the same positions on all clients and the server
- Added: Cleaned unused tags from landscape placement and ambientsound files
- Added: All aspects of the landscape (placement, sound, movement...) can be defined in the same file
- Added: Concept of a general include file to replace specific sound, movement, placement files.
- Added: nocollision, nodamageburn, nofalling, displaydamage and displayshadow attributes to targets.
- Added: New Plan map and buoys drawn on map
- Added: Server log page on web admin can auto-refresh
- Added: minsize and maxsize attributes to tree placement type to control scale
- Added: WeaponGroupSelect to allow weapons to select target from groups (e.g. boids weapons)
- Added: thrusttime and thrustamount attributes to WeaponProjectile to simulate missile thrust
- Added: maintainvelocity attribute to WeaponRoller to allow rollers to main the previous weapons momentum
- Added: Objects that become very small are now culled (not drawn)
- Added: maxobjects attribute to tree placement to set an upper limit on the number of trees created (default 2000)
- Added: Trees are now specified as a different model type (Tree) instead of a seperate placement type
- Added: Spline movement type for moving targets round a pre-defined set of control points
- Added: usefuel attribute on WeaponMoveTank can now be true, false or an integer for a constant use of fuel.
- Added: Changed the default web interface colors to match the forum scheme (finally)
- Added: Laserproof shield attribute can be set to true, false or total. Total blocks all laser damage.
- Added: Plan view darkens to increase the visibility of when lines are drawn by other players
- Added: flattendestroy attribute to targets to specify if they should be removed then a tank stops near them
- Added: Scorched splash screen shown each time a new version is installed
- Added: Capability for music (music can be configured for different actions both globaly and on a per level basis)
- Added: tabgroups to accessories, a tabgroup is the grouping used to group accessories in the buy dialog
- Added: Seperate volume control for music
- Added: Per-level options to allow levels to specify specific options e.g. Teams, No Walls etc..
- Added: Customer user avatars can be placed into the .scorched3d/avatars directory
- Added: nofallingdamage attribute to targets so they dont get hurt when falling
- Added: drag attribute to WeaponProjectile to allow a more realistic projectile motion
- Added: Error messages with lines that are more than 75 characters are wrapped onto the next line
- Added: Players can gift money to other players in their team
- Added: Some floats can now be a random range or a distribution of values
- Added: Web management chat is now in real-time
- Added: Reason for user discconecting from a net game is now visible to all clients
- Added: Shift-z hides and shows all gui components
- Added: Chat channels for server side filtering of chat
- Added: Chat spam auto muting
- Added: Chat supports links to players, channels and weapons. Displayed as tooltips.
- Added: New launcher and splash screen graphics
- Added: Scorched server automatically calculates ranks and orphaned avatars
- Added: WaterCollision attribute to WeaponProjectile
- Added: WeaponLabel and WeaponGotoLabel to allow looping with in weapons
- Added: Any image file type can be used for textures, levels, etc... (not avatars)
- Added: texture attribute to WeaponLightning to allow different textures to be used
- Added: jpg file support
- Added: Full screen anti-aliasing support
- Added: New TankAIs, ais are more accurate, can defeat shields and use fuel, napalm, rollers
- Added: boolean option to select whether graphics are paused when window focus lost
- Added: WeaponMessage primitive to be able to display messages (combat channel only - should add ability to select channel)
- Added: Level of detail for water (geo mipmaps) and changed water bounds so all of it moves
- Added: New water movement algorithm using discrete fourier transform (based on an algorithm by Thorsten Jordan)
- Added: GL shader support for more realistic renderering of the water
- Added: Landscape reflections in water
- Added: Shadows on water (hides sun too)
- Added: Option to disable pausing of graphics when window loses focus
- Added: FramesPerSecondLimit option to settings dialog
- Added: Admin audit log showing all admin operations on players
- Added: Admin username and optional reason are added to the list of banned players
- Added: Realtime-shadows
- Added: Depth-cueing on landscape
- Added: Assists are awarded when a tank resigns
- Added: Player tank remains when a player disconnects during shots being played
- Added: dampenvelocity tag to control amount of inertia given to rollers with maintainvelocity true
- Added: Different and more explosion textures
- Added: Explosion mode is always animate (noanimate tag added to WeaponExplosion)
- Added: Teleport animation
- Added: Server looped messages are sent on the announce channel so they can be turned off
- Added: Servers with stats support with always give the same players the same player id
- Added: Players that are muted and then leave and rejoin are still muted when stats support is enabled
- Added: WeaponPosition primitive to set explicit position of an accessory
- Fixed: High detail tanks being used for other players when detail level set low
- Fixed: Removed keep-alive header in http requests
- Fixed: Server will only show log files via the management interface that it created
- Fixed: SDL_Quit being called twice on the client
- Fixed: Sound failing to initialize will not prevent the client from being run
- Fixed: Optimized settings sent to the client to send only different settings
- Fixed: Optimized path finding code for tank movement
- Fixed: Wall hit indicators are now particles and so wont mask other effects
- Fixed: Server only serializes and compresses coms message once when sending to multiple clients
- Fixed: If client starts falling behind at 8x speed it will drop to 4x speed
- Fixed: Teleports with groundonly set to false should function correctly in caverns
- Fixed: Cleaned up tank state machine
- Fixed: MOTD and Rules dialogs reflect changes made while connected to server
- Fixed: Darkened night water (thanks Deathstryker)
- Fixed: Flag reseting on buying screen when buying items
- Fixed: Tanks on the plan view are surrounded by a black border (also smoothed)
- Fixed: Server web managament can view settings that do not fall into the usual brackets
- Fixed: Bug where a space in the installation file name could cause starting issues
- Fixed: Spectators cannot win (or draw) a game
- Fixed: Pressing enter can send many lines of text
- Fixed: Clients hanging when a mod download was in place

Python Traffic Analyzer is a Python base class and sample driver script written to retrieve and manipulate images from the TrafficLand cameras and calculate a numeric value representing the current traffic flow.

PyTrAn, an example driver script, an image collector and an image mask creator are available for download from the link shown at the bottom. To use the PyTrAn package begin by choosing a camera that you wish to analyze, for this example well use the camera captioned above.

We want to construct a mask over the area of the image that we are interested in, namely the road. In this particular example the road takes up the majority of the image but that is not always the case.

We will apply the mask over captured images to fine tune the area over which we are looking for movement. To create the mask we will first need to collect a sequential series of snapshots from the target camera. The image_collector.py script was written for this task:

$ mkdir mask_200003
$ cd mask_200003
$ ../image_collector.py 200003 30
Collecting 30 images...
30

Done.

The script is hard coded to capture images on a 2-second delay. The delay is necessary to ensure the image has changed. I believe 2-seconds to be the absolute minimum. Once complete, 30 images numbered 1 through 30 will be created in the current directory.

We construct a mask from these captured images by creating a diff-image for each sequential image pair and then adding each diff-image together. Naturally, a script was written to automate this task as well:

$ ../mask_maker.py 1 30
Creating a diff for each sequential image pair.
Diffing 29

Creating the initial mask from the first image pair.

Adding the rest of the diffs to the mask.
Masking 29

Done.

A number of .diff files are generated in this process. These files repesent the movement between individual sequence pairs.

The .diff files are simply intermediary files, the important bit is the mask file, which is generated as the sum of all differences.

The mask file may be dirty (as in this case) and require manual cleanup. The basic shape of the road however is clearly visible, evidence that we can with minimal effort automate the mask generation process. Also, this run was conducted at night, day-time images yield better results.

There are a few final steps we need to take before we can use the example PyTrAn driver script. First we need to convert the mask to ASCII (noraw) format:

$ pnmnoraw mask > mask_200003.ascii

Then we need to open an ImageMagick display window and get its X-window-ID using xwininfo. Finally, update camera_id and window_id in pytran_sampling.py and launch the driver:

$ ../pytran_sampling.py
DEBUG> grabbing frame from camera 200003
DEBUG> rotating image: pytran.this > pytran.last
DEBUG> refreshing image in 3 secs
taking a 5 minute sample at various thresholds.
DEBUG> grabbing frame from camera 200003
DEBUG> generating frame diff on pytran.last, pytran.this
DEBUG> displaying image: pytran.diff
DEBUG> converting pytran.diff to ascii
DEBUG> calculating traffic ratio...
ratio[5]: 55%
DEBUG> calculating traffic ratio...
ratio[10]: 52%
...
...
5 minute sample[5]: 67.88
5 minute sample[10]: 42.66
5 minute sample[15]: 30.57
5 minute sample[20]: 23.03
5 minute sample[25]: 18.39
5 minute sample[30]: 14.79
5 minute sample[35]: 12.42
5 minute sample[40]: 10.53
5 minute sample[45]: 9.06
5 minute sample[50]: 7.85

The sampling script will take 5 minute samples at varying color thresholds. The optimal threshold must be manually chosen. Furthermore, you will need to sample the traffic ratios during both heavy and light traffic times to get a good feel for your acceptable range. Also, keep in mind that the traffic ratio value is simply the percent change detected, or in other words the movement detected within the masked region. This means that a completely empty road will register similar values to a road so congested it looks like a parking lot. The time of day can be combined with the traffic ration to determine the logical truth.

With this task implemented and abstracted more complex systems can be built. When I find the time Id like to create a system that will take multiple potential travel routes and times, and during the travel time e-mail the traveler with the best route to take. Another idea I had would be to record the traffic flow values for each camera, for each day and for each half hour interval. Travelers and other interested parties can then analyze traffic patterns to determine the fastest route dependant on date/time.

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

There are a wide range of people interested and participating in this project. This is truly a global effort with contributors from just about every continent. Interests range from building a realistic home simulator out old airplane parts, to university research and instructional use, to simply having a viable alternative to commercial PC simulators.

Flight Dynamics Models

With FlightGear it is possible to choose between three primary Flight Dynamics Models. It is possible to add new dynamics models or even interface to external "proprietary" flight dynamics models:

1. JSBSim: JSBSim is a generic, 6DoF flight dynamics model for simulating the motion of flight vehicles. It is written in C++. JSBSim can be run in a standalone mode for batch runs, or it can be the driver for a larger simulation program that includes a visuals subsystem (such as FlightGear.) In both cases, aircraft are modeled in an XML configuration file, where the mass properties, aerodynamic and flight control properties are all defined.

2. YASim: This FDM is an integrated part of FlightGear and uses a different approach than JSBSim by simulating the effect of the airflow on the different parts of an aircraft. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to perform the simulation based on geometry and mass information combined with more commonly available performance numbers for an aircraft. This allows for quickly constructing a plausibly behaving aircraft that matches published performance numbers without requiring all the traditional aerodynamic test data.

3. UIUC: This FDM is based on LaRCsim originally written by the NASA. UIUC extends the code by allowing aircraft configuration files instead and by adding code for simulation of aircraft under icing conditions.

UIUC (like JSBSim) uses lookup tables to retrieve the component aerodynamic force and moment coefficients for an aircraft... and then uses these coefficients to calculate the sum of the forces and moments acting on the aircraft.

Extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base

Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
World scenery fits on 3 DVDs. (Im not sure thats a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.

Accurate and Detailed Sky Model

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. FlightGear can track the current computer clock time in order to correctly place the sun, moon, stars, etc. in their current and proper place relative to the earth. If its dawn in Sydney right now, its dawn in the sim right now when you locate yourself in virtual Sidney. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky. This modeling also correctly takes into account seasonal effects so you have 24 hour days north of the arctic circle in the summer, etc. We also illuminate the correctly placed moon with the correctly placed sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Flexible and Open Aircraft Modeling System

FlightGear has the ability to model a wide variety of aircraft. Currently you can fly the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets, and several light singles. FlightGear has the ability to model those aircraft and just about everything in between.

FlightGear has extremely smooth and fluid instrument animation that updates at the same rate as your out-the-window view updates (i.e. as fast as your computer can crank, and not artificially limited and chunky like in some sims.)

FlightGear has the infrastructure to allow aircraft designers to build fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits (which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views.)

FlightGear realistically models real world instrument behavior. Instruments that lag in real life, lag correctly in FlightGear, gyro drift is modeled correctly, the magnetic compass is subject to aircraft body forces -- all those things that make real world flying a challenge.

FlightGear also accurately models many instrument and system failures. If the vacuum system fails, the HSI gyros spin down slowly with a corresponding degradation in response as well as a slowly increasing bias/error.

Moderate Hardware Requirements

The intention of FlightGear is to look nice, but not at the expense of other aspects of a realistic simulator. Our focus is not on competing in the "game" market and not on the ultra-flashy graphic tricks.

The result is a simulator with moderate hardware requirements to run at smooth frame rates. You can be reasonably happy on a $500-1000 (USD) machine (possibly even less if you are careful) and dont necessarily need $3000 (USD) worth of new hardware like you do with the many of the newest games.

That said, the more hardware you throw at FlightGear, the better it looks and runs, so dont feel like you have to chuck your expensive new hardware if you just purchased it. :-)

Internal Properties EXPOSED!

FlightGear allows users and aircraft designers access to a very large number of internal state variables via numerous internal and external access mechanisms. These state variables are organized into a convenient hierarchal "property" tree.

Using the properties tree it is possible to monitor just about any internal state variable in FlightGear. Its possible to remotely control FlightGear from an external script. You can create model animations, sound effects, instrument animations and network protocols for about any situation imaginable just by editing a small number of human readable configuration files. This is a powerful system that makes FlightGear immensely flexible, configurable, and adaptable.

Networking options

A number of networking options allow FlightGear to communicate with other instances of FlightGear, GPS receivers, external flight dynamics modules, external autopilot or control modules, as well as other software such as the Open Glass Cockpit project and the Atlas mapping utility.

A generic input/output option allows for a user defined output protocol to a file, serial port or network client.

A multi player protocol is available for using FlightGear on a local network in a multi aircraft environment, for example to practice formation flight or for tower simulation purposes.

The powerful network options make it possible to synchronize several instances of FlightGear allowing for a multi-display, or even a cave environment. If all instances are running at the same frame rate consistently, it is possible to get extremely good and tight synchronization between displays.

Flight Gear and its source code have intentionally been kept open, available, and free. In doing so, we are able to take advantage of the efforts of tremendously talented people from around the world. Contrast this with the traditional approach of commercial software vendors, who are limited by the collective ability of the people they can hire and pay. Our approach brings its own unique challenges and difficulties, but we are confident (and other similarly structured projects have demonstrated) that in the long run we can outclass the commercial "competition."

Contributing to Flight Gear can be educational and a lot of fun. A long time developer, Curtis Olson, had this to say about working on Flight Gear:

Personally, Flight Gear has been a great learning experience for me. I have been exposed to many new ideas and have learned a tremendous amount of "good stuff" in the process of discussing and implementing various Flight Gear subsystems. If for no other reason, this alone makes it all worth while.

Neveredit aims to provide end-user module editing facilities for Biowares Neverwinter Nights computer game.
It parses and writes most NWN files and provides a convenient interface to change a growing number of attributes of the module they constitute.
For developers, it provides a set of Python classes that can be used to manipulate NWN files at two layers of abstraction.
Main features:
- Loading and saving of modules
- Editing of Module and Area Properties
- Editing of most Placeable, Door and Creature properties
- 3D Graphical placement of Placeables, Doors and Creatures on the map
- Script editing and compiling (thanks to [WWW] Torlacks great compiler)
Enhancements:
- This release adds the beginnings of a conversation editor, preliminary support for multi-language editing, lazy caching of editors for better performance, and the ability to add new resource files to a module.
- Under the hood, this release has seen a vast reorganization of the codebase and many fixes and improvements.

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists: (1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard buddy lists; (2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others; (3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform; (4) it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available. But BuddySpace is about more than just messaging, as we explain below.

One of the key factors that led to the widespread popularity of Instant Messaging applications from 1997 onwards (including ICQ, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Odigo, and Jabber messengers) was the concept of pushed presence: the automatic notification of the appearance of friends and colleagues online.

However, Instant Messaging (IM) is just one of many possible presence-related and presence-dependent applications. For example, presence-enabled applications can facilitate safety-tracking of children by mobile phone, support for emergency services, blind-date radar, group teleconference management, multiplayer games, and anything involving the collaboration of individuals separated in space and time.

Why phone a contact only to receive an engaged tone or pre-recorded message, when the telephone network already knows what state your contact is in, and could indicate this directly on your contact list? All of these concepts embody varying degrees of what we refer to as enhanced presence management.

The concept of presence has matured in recent years to move away from the simple notion of online/offline/away, towards a rich blend of attributes that can be used to characterise an individuals physical and/or spatial location, work trajectory, time frame of reference, mental mood, goals, and even intentions! Our challenge is how best to characterise presence, how to make it easy to manage and easy to visualise, and how to remain consistent with the users own expectations, work habits, and existing patterns of Instant Messaging and other communication tool usage.

BuddySpace generalizes the concept of Buddy List (popularised by Instant Messaging tools such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger) to provide multiple views of collaborative workgroups according to users needs and tastes. Our aim has been to provide a personal dashboard or radar screen so that one can observe the availability and interaction state of colleagues worldwide in a manner that exhibits the following desirable properties:

* immediate: real-time updates need to be pushed instantly to users rather than pulled in by request -- the push approach helps keep updates more palpable and informative
* peripheral and therefore non-intrusive: users lead busy lives, and dislike being bombarded with yet more information, so we aim to keep awareness of colleagues available in a compact manner that can be noticed peripherally
* customisable: some people prefer simple or hierarchical lists, some prefer visual maps, some prefer status lights, and so on; some prefer a Windows look-and-feel, some a Mac-- we need to cater for diverse user preferences and capabilities
* scaleable: we have to provide ways to indicate the presence of potentially enormous numbers of people, even given that these numbers will be filtered down for personal use -- researchers inhabit workspaces with many hundreds of colleagues around the globe; the Open University has well over 150,000 students online; large peer-spaces like music swapping communities have many millions of users connected simultaneously
* interoperable: with several hundred million users of the Big Four (AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!), it is crucial that any approach allow interopebility with systems to which our users already subscribe; this is one of the many reasons we built BuddySpace entirely on top of Jabber (www.jabber.org), which provides gateways to the Big Four products.
* cross-platform: we need to service a community not only on Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac desktop and notebook configurations, but also on PDAs and mobile phones -- we therefore develop entirely in Java
* XML-literate: for future intelligent applications, communication transport needs to be about more than just string-transmission; another we adopted Jabber is that it is based entirely on a generic XML transport architecture, ideally suited for this purpose.
* open source: for the research community to join us and to gain leverage via our research output, we have ensured that BuddySpace is open source, available on SourceForge.
* clean: BuddySpace adheres rigorously to the Jabber specification, which means that it interoperates with other Jabber clients and servers without danger of the rogue behaviour that non-standard implementations inadvertently allow (e.g. the semantics of users inhabiting multiple groups is undefined in some clients, and can cause crashes).
* extendable: BuddySpace deploys a plug-in architecture which means that additions, such as new visualizations, and new concepts such as gaming interfaces, are readily achievable

BuddySpace fulfills all the above criteria, and provides a compelling user interface that can be highly compact, yet provide users with an important feel-good factor, akin to seeing nearby office lights turned on when entering ones office building at night. By studying the semantics of presence, we can also augment the existing impoverished presence states in a principles manner, providing capabilities that are more representative of the way real users work. Forthcoming capabilities will include automatic location updates via mobile devices, and the use of semantic matchmaking via intelligent profile handling, in order to help users quickly find and filter colleagues of particular interest.

tunequeue is a web based internet radio station control software; both a dynamic listener interface and an administrative interface.
tunequeue includes features like: multiple channels, user requests and ratings of songs, several types of queuing and show scheduling.
How it works:
Essentially, tunequeue just tells Ices what to play (Ices is nice enough to ask after each song when used in playlist mode). tunequeue decides what to play based on a number of criteria, including user input via a web interface. There are a number of scheduling methods which can be used to determine which song to play next, including random, sequential, least played, newest, highest rated, etc. tunequeue also allows you to schedule different playlists and method combinations to be used at different time periods, effectively creating "shows" at different times.
What can I do with it?
For example, my channel on Spogbiper plays current indie music from my collection. From 8AM to 5PM, it usually plays a random mix of songs that I like to hear while working, picking the next song from a set of the songs that havent been heard for the longest amount of time. However, from 11:30AM to 12:30PM, it plays early 90s alternative songs that I enjoyed ten years ago. From 5PM to 7PM it plays a select subset of the normal mix, all songs that are faster and more upbeat (got to start the party, work is done :). At 8PM it plays the highest rated songs according to users voting on the website until 9PM, and then it plays randomly from the newest additions to the library for an hour. Finally, at 1AM it switches to the sleepy time playlist, a mix of slow songs from the main playlist and an additional set of songs only played during the night.
In addition to the automatic scheduling, I allow users to request any song from the library at any time. Users can see the next few upcoming songs and cancel them or move them forward in the queue. Occasionally I will define a set playlist I like in Winamp and have the channel play through it sequentially. (tool to import winamp playlists is still very alpha but coming in next release).
In contast to my largely random style, a religious station currently testing tunequeue plays a set sequential playlist from start to finish each day, the order being defined in advance by church members. Thanks to the work of Jacint Balint, tunequeue has a nice web interface where they are able to easily create schedules for each day. Also added by Jacint is the ability to log the date and time that each song plays for use in reporting to licensing agencies.
Technical details:
Tunequeue is written in perl. It is designed to use the excellent Icecast streaming server and Ices to stream the audio to listeners, but it should be trivial to use tunequeue to control other streaming systems. The song library and channel configuration is stored in a SQL database, currently we have only tested with MySQL.
Enhancements:
- Major rewrite of the user interface cgi.
- The new design is extremely flexible to allow you to quickly create any kind of web based interface to your radio feed.
- No HTML generation is done in the cgis, all html can be created any way you like and tunequeue will insert live data anywhere you specify youd like it.
- Several templates are included as examples of different layouts.
- Also added many minor improvements to logging, settings, and some bug fixes to go along with all the new bugs.

mod_video was created in order for me to be able to check on my apartment while on holiday using a camcorder hooked up to my Linux machine. It it an Apache module.

A few months earlier I had picked up a BTTV-based (Bt848) frame grabber card from the leftovers bin, and although I was able to make it work I cant say that it was very impressive.

The software that came with it just locked up my machine under Windows, and the software available under Linux wasnt too hot either. The image quality can at best be described as questionable.

The module was written the night before I was leaving for my holiday, and being the first time I had used the video4linux API, I had to pick apart a few programs written by other people in order to figure out how to make things work. The documentation I was able to find on the net didnt really answer all my questions and at times it was just confusing.

I hadnt written anything that encodes JPG or PNG images before either, so I had to figure out how libpng and libjpeg work as well. Hopefully I didnt screw up too badly.

bwstats will report on how much data has been received and transmitted over each live interface since the system was booted up. bwstats project will also attempt to predict bandwidth usage over the next 30 days based on current usage. I wrote this out of curiosity to see how much data I was shifting about each month; the results were interesting.

At present bwstats will only run on Linux and other systems with the /proc filesystem as the interface statistics are obtained from /proc/net/dev and /proc/uptime files. Sorry.

Improvements to come include the ability to carry over data from the previous reboot so that the results are meaningful for those who power down their computers each night, and the ability to change the period for which predictions are made (currently this is trivial but means editing the source).

Note: since I wrote this tool I have noticed that the figures in this /proc/net/dev file wrap around after they reach a certain figure, therefore skewing the figures when data reaches beyond around 4.2GB (damn Linux kernel!). This will be obvious when looking at the figures. This script will still work perfectly up until the point where the wrapping occurs. This will be fixed in a future release, but for now be warned!