The TurckMMCache project which stopped a year ago because its main developer started to work at Zend got restarted by a new team under the name eAccelerator.

eAccelerator 0.9.1 is available for download under the GNU GPL license. It includes many bugfixes and is compatible to PHP5.

OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including road warrior access, home/office/campus telecommuting, WiFi security, secure branch office linking, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls.

The platforms supported are: Linux, Windows 2000/XP and higher, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

The project is open source and released under the GNU GPL.

Chad Dickerson has published a very nice list of the top 20 IT mistakes to avoid on InfoWorld.

There are many commonly overlooked mistakes in the list, from outsourcing to open source. As a bonus, the examples he uses offer a lot of insight on how even big IT companies are run.

ScriptViewer allows to execute PHP applications without the need of a server system.

It includes PHP, a webserver and a browser (IE based).

This could be very useful to easily create local demos of web-applications.

ScriptViewer is freeware.

Randy Charles Morin has published a very comprehensive article about alot of already existing technologies that could be used to make RSS scale better and reduce bandwidth consumption.

These include stuff already included in the specifications of RSS such as "skipHours" as well as features often already present in the software that would just need to be turned on, such as "LastModified" headers.

The Google Labs have released a new service called Google Suggest this month.

It's basically the usual Google search extended with a little gimmick which pops up to suggest queries as you type in the search box and displays each with the number of possible hits.

It's a kind of auto-complete feature which uses all queries ever sent to google to make suggestions and complete your query.

Chris Justus has done the great job of dissecting the Javascript behind. A very interesting insight.

This nicely large article on opensourcetutorials.com explains the basic concepts of Bayesian inference (as well as the things needed to understand it, such as conditional probability) and how to implement it in PHP.

A very interesting subject since it opens the road to spam filtering, text matching and many other applications. The example of medical diagnosis demonstrated in the article is very impressive.

The extensive list of sources used for the article might be a good starting point for further research in this field.

The second part in this series of articles is more focused on solving the parameter estimation problem for use in the analyse of (web) surveys.

Trac is a wiki based issue tracking system written in Python.

It's main features are wiki-capabilities and subversion integration. Besides the actual wiki that can be used for the documentation of a project, issue descriptions and commit messages also support the wiki syntax. This makes it seamless to link subversion commit messages with issues, bugs or feature requests.

Furthermore a timeline shows all project events in order, making getting an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy.

Trac uses SQLite in the backend and is released under the GNU GPL.

Freemind is an open source mindmapping application similar to commercial products like MindManager.

It allows to draw mind maps in an easy and fast way. The data trees can be expanded and folded at will. Dragging and copying parts of a tree to reorganize things is also one of the key features.

Freemind is written in Java and released under the GNU GPL license.

Google allows to search scholar materials such as articles from specialized media or books through scholar.google.com.

Special features include the name of the author displayed in the search results as well as how many times the work has been cited.

This might be a very useful help for people writing some thesis and is most likely to start the end of plagiarism in this field.

There is an extensive tutorial about how to write extensions for Mozilla Firefox on roachfiend.com.

All the steps required to create an extension from scratch are explained with many examples and much code.

Using this tutorial it would be pretty easy to create little tools that improve your online-productivity. Examples could be a CSS viewer or a list of keywords most used on a page.

A new version of GForge, a popular branch of Sourceforge has been released.

The new features include

• Role based access control (instead of individually assigning rights)
• Better CVS integration (Task and bug IDs are recognized in CVS commit messages)
• Subversion integration
• Forum to email gateway (reply to forum messages via email)
• Tracker to email gateway (reply to tracker entries via email)
• SOAP web service for the Tracker, Task Manager, User and Group API

A wiki is still missing, but since it's open source it's just a matter of time until a wiki is pitched in.

Sitepoint has an article about a "USB Private Virtual Machine" released by MetroPipe.

It's running a variant of Damnsmall Linux with the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client (including Enigmail for GPG based encryption) pre-installed. All of this within a CPU emulation using QEMU.

Another very neat feature is the persistent home directory, which allows to use a foreign computer without leaving any trace on it.

The private virtual machine is fully based on open source GPL software and thus is released under the GPL license too.

The linux version of the new car navigation software TomTom Go was released under the GNU GPL.

A page dedicated to open source software by TomTom is also available.

More information about TomTom Go is available here.

Flickr is a photo sharing service on the current wave of social applications.

Its very interesting approach is to allow users to spontaneously form peer groups which share photos.

The service is built essentially on LAMP components. Niall Kennedy points out a very interesting presentation about the architecture of the software, which discusses issues regarding the components used (PHP, PEAR, Smarty, MySQL) as well as the scalability.

xslt2Xforms is an XSL stylesheet which converts an XForms document into a usable XHTML form with a javascript implementation of the required functionality (validation, input types that don't exist in xhtml etc.).

The documentation is rather sparse but the demos are impressive (and include the XForms source)!

This software is available under both a GPL and a commercial license.

Monkeyplexer is an open source email sorting tool based on the CRM114 engine. Along with a good delivery agent, such as procmail, it can organize incoming email into appropriate folders (including a "spam" folder) without the user writing any sorting rules. It can learn from its mistakes, and has high reliability, due to the excellent CRM114 classification engine.

This looks very promising, although there's not much information about the project available yet.

Beate mentions a QT-KDE wrapper which allows to compile KDE applications natively under a Win32 environment.

Also, it opens some other perspectives:

• Building new, multiplatform apps using the rich KDE API
• Building applications that will work (look and feel) like other non-Qt and/or non-KDE applications in many graphical environments and configurations

The wrapper is released under the LGPL license.

Beate mentions two very cool packages of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, allowing to install those on an USB stick to carry them with you and plug them into any Windows system that crosses your way.

Extending this concept to other applications could be very interesting. For example a stick with a web application plus the software needed to run it (eg. Apache, PHP, MySQL...) would make a very nice demo.

OSDir.com reports that the OpenOffice XML format might become an ISO standard in the near future.