Lots of people use online photo-sharing sites, but they often have limitations, and may not scale well for people who post large numbers of images. If you want full control of your own work, try Camera Life. It allows you to organize your photos on a PHP/MySQL site that you operate, like better-known competitor Gallery, a former SourceForge.net Project of the Month.

Project leader Will Entriken says, “We copied a few of the competition’s best features: compatibility with Gallery Remote for photo uploads right from iPhoto, DigiKam, and Picasa; configurable themes; and a modular code base. But unlike the competition, a Camera Life site can be installed in two steps, not 11; it comes with a sensible set of default settings including support for Amazon S3 storage; and there is direct access to the lead developer.”

Camera Life can also act as a proxy, allowing you to store your photos on one server (such as Amazon S3 or an FTP site) and host the site from another. This can be useful if you have 1TB of photos on your file server and your web server has limited resources.

“The project started in 2001 as a experiment in bash scripting and was rewritten for PHP using feedback from my first users,” Entriken says. “The project uses PHP and MySQL and takes advantage of new metadata technologies as they become available: OpenSearch, RSS, sitemap, hCard, and so forth.” Coming up in future releases are better EXIF and metadata support, compatibility with Gallery themes, and internationalization. “The latter two we need help with – ideally from someone who could write a guiding document explaining a lot of the details and who has seen our codebase. I do not expect patches for this; guidance would be great. Otherwise, feedback from users to the lead developer is appreciated.”

A couple of weeks ago, to ensure compliance with US law as we roll out improvements to SourceForge.net, we began programmatically blocking access to the site for users in certain countries against which the US government imposes sanctions. Today, we’re happy to announce site changes that we believe maintain compliance with the law but offer project administrators, developers, and users more freedom.

If this topic is news to you, please read the statement we made explaining what we did last month and why. In brief, we blocked all users from certain countries from downloading software using the site.

Our action provoked a strong, angry reaction from those it affected and from the community at large. But even before we heard your cries of outrage, we were looking for reasonable alternatives – and we believe that we’ve found one.

We have no way of knowing exactly which projects should trigger a block. But each project’s leadership is positioned to make such determination – so we’ve placed that power in their hands.

Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we’ve ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.

We at SourceForge are fully committed to the ideals of free and open source software, including the principle of free exchange of information. We recognize that, for some people, the recent site changes called into question whether your support of us is justified. The changes that we deployed today are intended to empower our projects and reward your continued trust.

We recognize that this change isn’t the completely free access to everything for everyone that some would like. As a US-based web site, SourceForge remains committed to complying fully with all relevant US laws and regulations, including those affecting the distribution of software. But we are also working as diligently as possible to ensure that our compliance is coupled with the highest quality of service that we can offer to our diverse, global user base.

If you’re running the GNOME desktop environment and you want to make Google’s Gmail your default mail handler, you’re going to need to specify a script to do the handoff. Gnome Gmail integrates Gmail into mail links and commands on your GNOME desktop. Once it’s in place, when you select a mailto URL, or select Send Link… from Firefox, Gnome Gmail opens a Gmail browser screen with a composed message, ready to send. Gnome Gmail also supports file attachments and the Nautilus file “Send To…” command.

Setting up Gnome Gmail is simple. First install the software (the project provides packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Red Hat), then go to System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications and select Gmail as the Mail Reader.

Creator Dave Steele says Gnome Gmail started as a small script designed to parse mailto URLs correctly. “I’ve been fiddling with it for about four months, adding features as I ran across failure cases. It has grown quite a bit from its start – file attachment support tripled the size of the script.”

Steele wrote Gnome Gmail in Python, using vi. “Python is my first-choice go-to language for personal projects. Its ‘batteries included’ library support and robust syntax make it a satisfying environment for me.”

Since Steele has been registered with SourceForge since 2000, hosting the project here was a natural choice. “The site has done a good job lately providing support for third-party tools. I’ve got git – I’m happy.”

He announces new releases, like the most recent one last week, on Project News, and on freshmeat.net. “It’s surprising how effective Project News works; there must be an army of stringers trolling those feeds.”

Steele plans a cleanup release in a month or so, with internationalization support and a shiny icon. “Other than that, I plan to keep up with bug reports, and pay attention to feature requests.” He welcomes ideas and help – “especially patches. I’d love for someone to work out Gmail support for the indicator applet Ubuntu installs on the tool bar. The best way to contact me is through the bug and request trackers, or via my SourceForge.net email address.

Many of us enjoyed comic books in our teen years. Some of us have never outgrown them. While some people read an issue and toss it (or put it in a polypropylene bag to sell in 20 years), others like to keep their art archived and online. To help manage such collections, Bradley Swartout has created CBViewer, a program that lets you view compressed comic book archives.

A comic book archive is usually a CBR or CBZ file, which is really just a renamed RAR or ZIP compressed file. CBViewer lets you view the images in a comic book archive without first decompressing the file. It also lets you step forward and backward through archives in the same directory, as if you were reading from a stack of comic books.

But where do you find comic book archives? “I get my archives by the very boring and slow process of scanning in each page,” Swartout says, “or I buy them from pullboxonline.com. They’re also available from other sites, such as onipress.com and flashbackuniverse.blogspot.com.

“My original motivation to release CBViewer was an attempt to give back to the community for all the great software I have used over the years,” Swartout says. “I have been working on it for around six years. It is a hobby project for me, and I tend to add features as I feel the need for them, or if someone says, ‘Hey, I’d really like X in CBViewer.’”

Version 0.8 of the program came out last month, more than three years after the prior version. “Life got in the way,” Swartout says. “Since my first release of CBViewer I have had two more sons (bringing the total to four), gotten divorced, and found love again. But I have reached a point where I am able to work on the code again, and I plan to get another release out within the next three or four months.”

Swartout started writing CBViewer using Netbeans, but quickly grew frustrated with its automatic code generation and ended up using Emacs for most of the development. “But for most of the last few years I have been using jEdit, which is a wonderful, simple, clean editor.

“I decided to put CBViewer on SourceForge.net because that was where a lot of the software I used was hosted. It has proven to be very reliable and allows a wider audience than just hosting it on my own web page. I also announce releases on freshmeat.net when I do a release.”

In future releases, Swartout plans to integrate the JUnRar library into CBViewer to offer an alternative to having to have a separate install of unrar. “I am also planning on multiple-level scaling for the next release.”

Swartout says the goal of CBViewer has always been to do one thing – view comic archives – and do it well. He welcomes e-mail from anyone who’d like to help.

Organizations that may be targets of denial of service (DoS) attacks (and today, what organization is not?) need tools to check how well their countermeasures protect them. Acri Emanuele, a programmer and penetration tester for the Italian company Gerix.IT, first built Complemento as an exercise in the study of TCP/IP stack. Over time it evolved and become a set of pen testing tools whose later version was released this week. “Now I use it at work,” Emanuele says.

Complemento, and in particular its LetDown component, is a TCP stresser. TCP stress tests are difficult to perform without a tool like this. Emanuele says Letdown implements a “raw” TCP stack to run TCP connections in userland, which is useful when you want to know what resistance your systems offer to DoS attacks – not merely a syn flood, but against complete connections (three-way handshake plus data). Letdown also supports “payloads” written in Python, which lets you create and test complex connections using raw sockets, using Python for scripting them. The suite employs open source libraries such as libcurl and libpcap.

For the next release, Emanuele says he hopes to increase the stability of the tools and to improve integration with Linux distributions, especially BackTrack, the widely used Linux security and forensic distribution that he helps develop. But he’s currently very busy, he says, and “I do not think that development will continue very fast.”