Finnish Mapmaker Selects MapText's Label-EZ
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Commercial mapmaker Karttakone of Helsinki, Finland selected MapText's Label-EZTM automated label placement product for its mapping operations, MapText, Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft on Monday is unveiling its official Atlas technology branding for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming on ASP.Net, and will make the software available sooner than planned. The company hopes to ship its Atlas technologies around the end of 2006, as opposed to next year. Previously, Microsoft used the code name ASP.Net "Atlas" to refer to multiple components of technologies designed to assist Web developers with AJAX-style development, a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. Now, the server-side Atlas functionality, which integrates with ASP.Net, is called ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions. Client-side functionality, which integrates ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and other back-end platforms such as PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) or ColdFusion, is called Microsoft AJAX Library. This features the client-side JavaScript library. The Atlas Control Toolkit, meanwhile, is now called the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft had planned to ship Atlas with the next version of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas," which is due next year. By offering production-ready versions of ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and the AJAX Library this year, enterprise customers will be able to take Atlas applications into production with fully supported APIs, Microsoft said. Development of Atlas has met some roadblocks. An Update Panel feature for page refreshes was beset with reliability problems, according to a presentation at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference in Boston in June. The company also has had to address questions on which browsers to support. Microsoft nonetheless has had tremendous interest in Atlas, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, wrote in his blog on Monday. "Weâve had an unbelievable amount of interest and excitement around the product, with more than 250,000 downloads this year alone," Guthrie said. "I am excited to announce today that we are going to ship this fully supported Atlas 1.0 release on top of ASP.Net 2.0 and ensure that it works with Visual Studio 2005," Guthrie said. To expedite Atlas, the company will focus on a core set of supported functionality, including common components needed to enable developers to build client-side controls/components. Server-side functionality for integrating with ASP.Net also has been deemed core to the platform. Other features will be available in a separate download but not offered in the core "bucket," Guthrie said. "Over time, we will be moving more and more features into the fully supported bucket," Guthrie said. The 1.0 Atlas technology will be cross-browser and cross-platform, he added. "Things will get even better next year with Visual Studio Orcas, where we are adding rich JavaScript IntelliSense, debugging and WYSIWYG designer support for the ASP.Net AJAX Extensions within Visual Studio and many other great features to take advantage of," Guthrie said. Microsoft plans to have a beta of its Atlas technologies soon, followed by a release candidate. In other development tools-related events, Parasoft this week is introducing Jtest 8.0, for Java code analysis and unit-testing, while AutomatedQA is upgrading its memory debugger. Jtest 8.0 is for static code analysis. "It essentially helps development organizations build quality into their code and by doing so, obviously release on schedule more functionality and release with higher quality," said Nada daVeiga, Jtest product manager at Parasoft. Featured in version 8.0 is Bug Detective, which traces and simulates execution paths to expose runtime bugs that otherwise would be difficult to find through manual testing or inspections, Parasoft said. Automated generation and execution of in-container Cactus test cases also is included to simulate a realistic runtime environment. This enables early exposure of defects that might go unnoticed until quality assurance, deployment, or production time. Cactus is a testing framework that extends JUnit. Additonally, Jtest Tracer replaces Test Sniffer as a named capability; it has been updated to boost its effectiveness. JTest Tracer allows users to create realistic functional JUnit test cases to reflect an application's functional behavior. Test cases can be run to identify when new code changes break or modify applications. A new code review module in Jtest 8.0, meanwhile, helps automate the review process for code reviews. Geared toward teams of developers, the code review feature enables users to define and manage distribution lists and groupings for code review modifications and routings, Parasoft said. Test case parameterization in Jtest 8 allows Jtest-generated or user-defined JUnit test cases to be extended and customized with varied, controlled test input values. This enables creation of test scenarios that reflect a range of realistic usage, the company said. Also featured in version 8.0 are rules for Java 5 and the Hibernate Java framework. Parasoft Jtest 8.0 is available for Windows 2000 and XP, Linux and Solaris. Single-license prices start at $3,495. Also on Monday, AutomatedQA is announcing AQtime 5, which is a new release of the company's performance and memory debugger. New features automate the analysis and debug process, the company said. Also featured is support for 64-bit Windows applications. Other capabilities include the ability to exclude known memory leaks from results, and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland Developer Studio. AQtime 5 is licensed at $599.99.
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With XSKN's FK MB Midnight keyboard skin, I can put a big ol' sticker on my keyboard with all the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts printed on it. From Crave, CNET's gadgets blog.
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(InfoWorld) - In a sneak preview Thursday, Google revealed how it plans to integrate its AdSense advertising platform with Google Maps, meaning some push-pin graphics used at the maps site could be turned into mini-advertisements. Google has not set a time frame for when the feature will be ready to go public, said Andrew Eland, a Google software developer based in Zurich who gave a presentation at Google's Developer Day in London. Eland spoke of the feature during a talk aboutÂ Google's new "Mapplets" feature, which lets Web developers display content and build applications within Google Maps. A Mapplet uses two APIs -- Gadgets and Maps APIs. Mapplets can be used show content, such as a description of a building or landmark, and a specific photo and display those in a pop-up window when a push-pin graphic is passed over on Maps. Around those customized locations on the map, other paid-for points could be marked. Eland showed an example of a hotel advertisement that had its own icon rather than a push-pin. When the icon is passed over, information appears in the pop-up window. If the link is followed by a user on the Mapplet, "you receive a share of the revenue," giving Web site developers another way to make money for their sites, Eland said. Users would be able to set a limit on the number of sponsored ads on their customized map and also turn the feature off, Eland said. "This is something you will completely control," he said. Google's AdSense program, where Web site publishers display targeted text ads related to the content on their site, has underpinned much of the company's phenomenal increases in revenue.
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Read and Write ICO,BMP formats in 100% pure Java   Been a long time in the making, but I've finally gotten round to the final release for 0.7  The library appears to be stable, hence my decision to finalize the current release.  Thanks to Olivier Le Tiec for reporting a bug with irregular icons (width != height), together with the necessary bug fix.  Thanks for using image4j!
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With Web sites like Yahoo and MapQuest giving away maps and driving directions it seems like a waste of money to buy a standalone program that basically does the same thing. To survive, software publishers need to offer a lot more than the online freebies. Microsoft Corp.'s Streets &amp; Trips 2005 does just that.
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OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean. To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck.
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What's the best way to provide digital driving directions to the likes of Google and Garmin? May the best map win. By Wilson Rothman from Wired magazine.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.   Problems with loading LaTeX packages and slide presentations were fixed. Non-static variables in every loop iteration are now allocated anew. Formatting under locales with nonperiod decimal separators was fixed, along with logarithmic tick labels near the machine epsilon.  Concatenation of nullpaths was fixed. New path markers were added and the perpendicular symbol in the geometry module was improved. The skeleton routines in the solids module were split to provide finer control.  Routines to facilitate drawing 3d contours were added. Reading portable XDR binary data into arrays works again; functions for reading and writing also in native binary formats were added. The TeX preamble is no longer output in inline mode. The TeX pipe is now aware of a previously generated aux file. Memory leaks were fixed. An inline limit is now imposed on old compilers to speed up compilation. Setlocale warnings are disabled unless debugging is on. A colorspace command for extracting the colorspace of a pen was added. An Asymptote introductory slide presentation was added and a user-written Asymptote tutorial is now cited in the manual.
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J. K. Rowling blocked the Finnish publication of her latest Harry Potter novel on paper from Finland because it lacked the ecologically friendly certification she favors, Agence France-Presse reported. Her Finnish publisher, Tammi, said that Ms. Rowling insisted that it import paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as being derived from wood grown and harvested in a way that promotes sustainable forest development. Sinikka Partanen, a spokeswoman for Tammi, said the first Potter books in Finnish were printed on recycled paper. âThis time itâs a more specific demand,â she said. The Finnish-language version of âHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallowsâ is due on March 7.
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Macros for key mappings, tags and entities that can be used with DocBook/XML and other similar markup languages.
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Google has unveiled MyMaps, a new feature that allows people to use their own personalized overlap maps to plot the locations of everything from cheap gas to local crime statistics.
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In previous issues, I  kept the user experience somewhat spartan which allowed the application to be modified with a mimimum of effort. This time we add points, ellipses, bezier curves and look at a new application class called Control, which allows users to tell the Doodle application what shape they want to draw next. By Guyon Roche. 0404
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A discussion of how to use frame styles in OOo Writer.
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Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.   In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.   He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.
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Don&#146;t like the names Apple created for the colors used in the Color Labels feature? Then just create your own. Find out how on the Apple Pro/ site &#151; it&#146;s the first of a weekly series of Mac OS X killer tips.   [Sep 09]
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KGuitar is powerful KDE-based music tabulature editor with support of guitar, drums, classic note scores, MIDI synthesizer output, chord, scales, modes, melody and rhythm construction and analysis tools, lots of tab effects, Guitar Pro files import.   After a long period of silence, I'm pleased to announce KGuitar 0.5.1 - a major bugfix release that covers most of issues for the last few years :)      * Compatiblity fixes: added support for autoconf 2.61, automake 1.10, gcc 4.2. Removed last bits of qt2->qt3 transition deprecations. Internal structures refactoring.     * Added zoom level (Ctrl Minus, Ctrl Plus), introducing multiple bars per row, automatically tuning to available window width;     * Finally introduced new exception-based framework for converters load/save. Makes converters much more bullet-proof and easier to write and debug.     * Guitar Pro import undergone major rewrite. Now it properly loads all gp4 files I have. Guitar Pro v3 and v5 formats are coming next. Anyway, Guitar Pro loader is now much more helpful about what errors it gets and less crash-prone. It detects and helps debug problems it encounters.     * Lots of displaying, mouse and keyboard control, printing fixes and prettifying. Track pane now has a header and it's synchronized with track list. Melody editor now has trapezoid and shark fin inlays.     * New QMap-based API for song metainformation - stores not a fixed number of fields, but key=value pairs.     * Misc things: project transitioned to Subversion.  As always, comments and especially bug reports are welcome. Also keep in mind that KGuitar is now registered at http://www.ohloh.net/projects/8959?p=KGuitar - so, take a look there too :)