Developer Jason Heiss began working on Etch in 2003, after trying out Cfengine, one of the oldest and best-known system configuration management tools. “I’d tried to learn and use it several times, but always found it complicated, confusing, and limited in what it could do,” he says. “Cfengine tries to cover a lot of areas of system administration, many of which are better covered by other, more focused tools. I started Etch as an alternative that was more narrowly focused on configuration file management, and thus simpler and more powerful. Other alternatives to Cfengine, most notably Puppet, started development around the same time. I try to look at the other tools on a regular basis, and so far I’m happy that Etch does what it does better than the alternatives.”

The first two major versions of Etch were written in Perl, but the current version 3 is written in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Heiss says, “I switched to Ruby because it’s a more pleasant language to write in. I’m still fond of Perl, but Ruby is cleaner and quicker to work with. Rails was a harder choice. I was already using Rails for another project, but it seemed a bit too heavy for Etch; all I thought I needed was a standard web service protocol. I was leaning toward XML-RPC, but none of the Ruby implementations seemed great. In the end I decided the consistency of using Rails for all of my projects made sense, and that turned out to be the right choice. Initially I wasn’t using a database, but I’ve added optional storage of reporting data into a database, and that was trivial with Rails.”

Heiss plans to add a feature to take advantage of that reporting data to help users predict the impact of changes. “You’ll be able to give Etch a modified copy of your configuration repository and it will give you a report of how many clients would be affected by your changes, which files would be changed, and so on. In a large environment it can be difficult or impossible for administrators to predict the possible impact of their changes, which leads to caution and fear about making changes. This feature should make it easier for folks to identify changes that would have a widespread impact and focus their attention and review on those changes.”

As for packaging the code for various *nix environments, Heiss says, “The Etch distribution comes with packaging config files and make targets for RPM, APT/dpkg/deb, and Solaris packages. We don’t distribute pre-built packages since folks generally want to include their config files and SSL certificates in the packages in their environments.”

To get the word out about the software, Heiss has led talks at conferences, “primarily the USENIX LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference. We’ve used Etch to manage systems at my last three employers, so word-of-mouth from folks has also spread the word a bit.”

To build the software, Heiss eschews fancy development environments. “Most editing is done in TextMate, with an occasional vim session when I’m not on my Mac. I use the Test::Unit unit testing framework included with Ruby for testing.”

As with most developers who work on projects on their own time, Heiss’s planned release schedule for Etch can vary. “Lately I’ve had time to work on Etch and have been making releases every few weeks. As I get my backlog of feature ideas trimmed down, I’ll probably settle back down to a release every month or two.”

Things may change more quickly if additional developers step forward to work on the project, which Heiss says he welcomes. “There are a number of interesting features I would like to see in Etch, and I’d also be very interested if folks have their own ideas and would like to implement them. The best way for potential developers to contact me is via the etch-devel mailing list, but direct email is also fine.”

Fortune4All runs on Windows PCs and Symbian devices, and claims to have more than 90,000 witty sayings. An editable data file lets you add your own pearls of wisdom. And as a special bonus, if you speak Greek, the application has available a file of fortunes in that language.

If you need your fortunes on other operating systems, a program called simply Fortune will do the trick under DOS, Windows, or Linux, and a Java version is also available for any operating system with a Java Virtual Machine. Or you can turn to Java Fortune.

If, on the other hand, you run a Mac, you might like iFortune, which provides a Cocoa wrapper for the fortune utility built into Mac OS.

Some people like to use pithy sayings in the their e-mail signatures. KookieJar is a flexible signature randomizer that can handle multiple signatures and multiple quote files, but it runs only on Windows.

Those few offerings are just an appetizer. Search for “fortune” on SourceForge.net and you’ll find several other options. But don’t worry if none of them is exactly what you’re looking for. Because all of the programs on SourceForge.net are open source, you can take something that’s close to what you want and customize it to meet your needs. If writing program code is as far from your skill set as reading Chinese, you can seek out a developer to help by posting in our Project Ideas forum.

In Natvig’s own words, “Mumble also has an in-game overlay; this works in full screen games, and shows you a graphical representation of who is in the same channel (virtual room) as you, and who is talking right now. We also have positional audio for supported games; the voice of your friends will sound like it comes from the same direction their in-game avatar is.”

Neat, yes? That’s one of the reasons Mumble is November’s Project of the Month. To learn more about the team behind Mumble, and about the project itself, check out its special page.

Natvig says one of the reasons he chose SourceForge.net to host the project is because we’re “a recognized name, and we’re leeching on your fame.” That’s OK, Thorvald, leech all you want!

One of the easiest ways to play is by using Pasang Emas, developed by Bruneian Nor Jaidi Tuah, who released a new version this week. In Pasang Emas, you play against the computer, or you can watch the computer play against itself in demo mode. The computer will let you make only valid moves.

In pasang, each move is a capture move. When there is nothing left to capture the game ends. At any given point in the game the average number of valid moves is six or seven (compared to more than 30 in chess). Still, a human player is at a disadvantage against a computer, so a player who is serious about winning will take a lot more thinking time than his silicon-based opponent. (To equalize things, you can set the game’s AI to be “blurry,” and it might then miss the best move or even choose a bad one.)

Pasang is quick to play. A game can take less than a minute if you make a blunder in the opening and runs out of moves early, but usually a game will take several minutes.

Lest you think Bruneians sit around in coffeehouses all day playing pasang, Tuah says it is commonly played mostly during royal celebrations. Some students also play the game as an extracurricular activity.

Tuah says a former student suggested creating a program to play pasang almost 10 years ago. “I hadn’t heard about pasang before then, so it was a doubly sweet challenge for me: as a programmer I immediately jumped at the idea, while as a native I wanted to learn more about our traditional game.

“I wrote the first version using a commercial C++ IDE. It ran only on a particular OS and was never released, but was reported in an issue of Bruneiana, a local publication by Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and had a brief public exposure during an IT exhibition. Soon after I released a much improved version as freeware on a popular hosting service. This version was nominated as one of Brunei entries for the 2002 Asia Pacific ICT Award. It didn’t win, but I had a good time in Kuala Lumpur showing off our traditional game. Last year, this version was showcased in a business convention in Nanning, China.

“In 2005, I started porting Pasang Emas to work with GNU tools. For a GUI I chose GTK+ (through gtkmm binding) simply because I use GNOME as my desktop. I did look at generic layers such as wxWidgets, but finally decided that I didn’t need them, as GTK+ is already cross-platform. For an IDE I tried Anjuta, and it is great. I used emacs for a while – very productive. But somehow I fell in love with gedit and its no-frills simplicity. Currently my ‘IDE’ is gedit, a terminal (with tab support), and a file browser.”

Tuah has ambitious plans for upcoming versions. “I want to finish the Arabic translation. I want to make Pasang Emas a network game. The GGZ Gaming Zone is high on my list (in fact the only option) on my list of network gaming tools, but the documentation is a bit daunting. I also hope to add more themes. But, as you can judge from the available themes, I’m a not much of an artist. I’m also considering adding 3-D themes. I never find it pleasant to play board games in 3-D, but I can appreciate the ‘cool’ factor.”

So far Pasang Emas has been a solo effort, but Tuah welcomes help. “If anybody wants to lend their artistic talents and produce cool themes, that would be great. Submitting Pasang Emas as a proper package to Debian and Red Hat would also be great. I also want to get rid of libgnomeui dependency, but so far, I haven’t found a neat solution.” You can contact Tuah by email, or submit feature requests, bugs, and patches through the project site at SourceForge.net.

The most popular such program on SourceForge.net is Legal Case Management System. Created by Bulgarian developers, LCMS is designed for use by not-for-profit legal advice centres, to help them follow up on things like client consultations and court events.

The good news about VirtuaLaw is that it’s a free, open source legal case management system. The bad news is that its code hasn’t been updated in eight years.

Open Source Law is another long-ignored project that comprises a wiki with documentation revision control and a centralized repository. It’s supposed to allow members of the legal community or students to share each other’s documents.

Then there are those who have to manage the miscreants who wind up on the wrong side of the legal system. The Open Source Jail Management System stores and manages records for a small to medium-sized jail. It can help track demographic data, store intake and confinement procedures, maintain housing history, index court records, and facilitate incident reporting.

Various countries have specialized legal needs. For instance, the Delphi Probation System is alpha software designed to address complaints about the UK Probation Office’s computer system. Its developer says he began working on it “in the hope that one day I will be able to make the lives of overworked Probation officers less stressful.”

One specialized tool for police, Audacity Policial, is an extension of the Audacity sound editor helps police and justice officials pursue investigations based on telephone and environmental recordings. It supports audio analysis and transcription.

Finally, looking at law from a broader perspective, the Martus Human Rights Bulletin System is used by human rights and social justice groups to track violations. Martus is the Greek word for “witness.” According to the project’s page, human rights bulletins can be encrypted or searched, and can be backed up to a remote server.

BleachBit is not an uninstaller utility; it mainly cleans applications that are already installed, such as web browsers. However, two of its features complement uninstallers. First, BleachBit includes a cleaner of broken shortcuts and file associations, such as are usually left behind by Wine in the user’s home directory, though they can be left behind by many other programs, such as RealPlayer, Beagle, and OpenOffice.org. Second, Linux software often comes localized in several languages, but the Linux installers don’t give the user the choice of which languages to install in order to save disk space. While Debian and Ubuntu users can use localepurge, BleachBit’s portable locale cleaner frees 700% more disk space than that utility.

I asked developer Andrew Ziem how difficult it is to write a cross-platform app that works on two such different OSes as Linux and Windows. “It depends on which day you ask me,” he says wryly. “Generally, writing in Python and GTK+ makes writing portable code fairly easy, so most days I can focus on platform-independent features. Still, there are challenges. One of the first struggles was packaging. The differences between Linux distributions can require as much effort as the differences between Linux and Windows. At a basic level, Ubuntu and Debian require .deb packages, while Fedora, openSUSE, and others require .rpm. Then there are incompatibilities in RPM itself (such as the MD5 vs. SHA256 hash), and once that is taken care of, there are different versions of Python. Linux distributions also can’t decide where to keep the same kind of files (such as the Apache logs). And the list goes on.”

Ziem started writing BleachBit last year out of a desire to learn PyGTK. “I had programmed in various other languages, such as PHP and C++, but I hadn’t written GTK+. I was tired of the unnecessary labor required to develop in C++, and Python’s motto is ‘batteries included.’ I chose GTK+ because it is cross-platform, mature, good looking, and, like Python, standard on virtually all Linux distributions.”

While PyGTK is standard on Linux machines, it’s not on Windows, so the Python and GTK+ framework make up about 95% of the BleachBit installation size on Windows. Ziem says, “I’ve mitigated the size with executable compression and a unique translation optimizer.”

Ziem released the first version of the software just before the end of last year. To date it has received 37 reviews on SourceForge.net – all positive.

BleachBit is portable, fast, and doesn’t require compiling. One way you can use it to speed up your system right away is by vacuuming your Mozilla Firefox SQLite databases. The Firefox databases grow fragmented, large, and slow. If you are a heavy web surfer, you should quickly notice an improvement in the speed of the Awesomebar (which provides searching in the URL field), and some people claim an improvement in startup speed. You should also save a few megabytes of disk space too.

In addition to a graphical interface, BleachBit provides a command-line interface to automate cleaning jobs in a shell script, batch file, or cron job.

You can find BleachBit in the package repositories for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, openSUSE, Foresight Linux, PCLinuxOS, NetBSD, and Arch Linux distros. Because inclusion in a repository can take some time, and because the policy of mainline distros is to freeze a certain version of the application, the BleachBit web site offers .rpm and .deb downloads of new versions for major distributions.

The software is available in 33 – count ‘em! – languages, thanks to what Ziem calls “an army of 99 volunteer translators.” Ziem says managing the translations takes a good amount of effort, especially given BleachBit’s schedule of releases every two to three weeks, sometimes with beta releases in between. “Launchpad provides a low barrier-of-entry for translators, and it’s easy for me to download translations from Launchpad,” Ziem says.

BleachBit is the tenth project Ziem has hosted on SourceForge.net since 2002. “It’s a large, mature site that provides a variety of nice tools (such as the statistics and project web space). For a while I had BleachBit’s web space hosted on Google App Engine. Half the reason I switched back to SourceForge.net was that it in case of trouble it generally provides real support; I can file a ticket that will be answered by a real human.”

In addition to his customized SourceForge.net web space, Ziem publicizes the software by listing it in GnomeFiles and Freshmeat, and via PAD (Portable Application Development), a software announcement standard for Windows download sites.

If you’d like to add your expertise to BleachBit, the project needs Greek, Japanese, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish translators. Ziem also needs testers and auditors who can test SVN and beta releases with little hand-holding, as well as people to write cleaners for popular proprietary Windows applications such as Adobe Photoshop and InDesign; see the Contribute page for information on how to help.

With Greenshot, what you see is what you get. You can save a screen or a part of one to any of several image formats within a second. You can also apply text and shapes to the screenshot. “Just have a look at the settings dialog to find out what’s possible beyond default behavior,” advises Jens Klingen, who develops the software with Thomas Braun. “Also, you can make use of the Prnt shortcut keys (including modifiers) if you want to be even faster.”

Greenshot is still in beta, and the developers hope to continue making releases at the rate of about two versions per year. “We have quite a few enhancements on our to-do list, including the ability to capture scrolling windows, zoom for the image editor, and a crop tool and blur filter.”

Pandora FMS monitors both systems and applications. It comes with agents for all active Windows platforms (2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7), Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS, and even Nokia/IPSO. It can collect information several ways (SNMP, TCP, ICMP, WMI, HTTP, SNMP traps) and display it in a powerful web- and AJAX-based centralized management console. (You can read more about Pandora’s features and see an online demo on the project’s web site.)

You might not have heard much about Pandora FMS because the project puts all its resources into development, not publicity. Nevertheless, Pandora FMS is in use in the datacenters of several organizations and corporations, including Brussels University and Cordoba University, as well as huge multinationals in the telecommunications sector and IT companies. Project leader Sancho Lerena says the project will publish the names of more enterprises that are using Pandora FMS on the project’s new web site when it launches version 3.0, for which release candidate code came out last week.

Lerena says he started working on Pandora FMS in 2004, when he needed a flexible, non-intrusive monitoring system that was able to integrate with other apps. “To build Pandora we used PHP and Perl because they offer a lot of libraries which allow us to focus directly on our goals, and avoid construction of additional tools or libraries. We also use AJAX and web technology to make the console user-friendly and powerful. Because PHP and Perl are easy to work with we can improve our code and add new features without a formal heavyweight process of design. Each developer uses his own development tools; there is no official tool we use. Some of us like Eclipse; I myself use gedit to work on code.”

The project posted Pandora’s code on SourceForge.net in 2006 because “SourceForge.net is the most important reference for the OSS community in the world, so we need to be there.”

Lerena says the core team of six developers is working on GIS, better reporting, and a new information architecture engine for advanced data post processing for future releases. “Our version cycle is about nine months. We always need help, mostly on testing, documentation, and translation. The best way to get in touch with us is the developer list.” You can also check out the project’s developer blog and web forums.

With Avogadro you can see in 3-D the shape and structure of chemistry. Want a protein? Want to see a gold surface? Want to build the next great cancer treatment? Avogadro’s the tool for you.

Geoff Hutchison, an assistant professor in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, and Donald Curtis began planning Avogadro in 2006. The project got a big help the following year with a Google Summer of Code project from Marcus Hanwell, who has now become a lead developer. Today, the project is releasing Avogadro 1.0, in honor of its namesake. Avogadro’s number is 6.02×10²³, so chemists often celebrate October 23 as Mole Day.

When he set out to build the application, Hutchison says, “I needed something like Avogadro. I didn’t really see any truly great tools to create molecular models. For my research, it’s the critical first step of doing computational chemistry simulations – you need the molecular data!

“We’ve tried to make the most intuitive program for building chemical systems – molecules, proteins, crystals, nanotubes, whatever. And we’ve made everything modular – almost everything is a plugin – so you can easily add or change functionality. We want Avogadro to be flexible and scale from educational use to advanced research.”

Avogadro is written in C++ and uses the Qt user interface toolkit. “This allows us to have releases on Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously. Qt has also really helped out with multithreading our interface – most of the chemistry simulation occurs in the background on multicore machines, which makes the interface much smoother.”

The chemistry side is largely handled by the Open Babel toolkit, since it handles scores of chemistry file formats and data types. Hutchison is also the lead developer for Open Babel.

In Avogadro, if you’re drawing a molecule, you can switch elements, say from from carbon to nitrogen, by just typing the atom symbol. You can also move things around with either the mouse or the arrow keys.

One of the coolest features, Hutchison says, is the auto-optimization tool. “This lets you optimize the geometry of a molecule as you edit or manipulate it. Think of it as running an interactive chemistry simulation. Pull an atom, and the molecule will respond. Drag a molecule around, and you can see others move in response. It’s like a little video game.”

The project makes regular bug-fix releases, and anticipates a major feature release every year. Hutchison also hopes that the Python scripting interface and plugin framework will make it easy for people to add features and extend Avogadro between releases.

Right now, about 15-20 people work on the code, and Hutchison says “we’d love to have more contributors. We could use help with documentation and tutorials (particularly for education), translations, OpenGL rendering optimization, GLSL shaders … We’ve got a list on our wiki actually. Of course people can always contact us on the avogadro-devel@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list.”

Today Avogadro has been adopted by a lot of universities for teaching, but it has also gained traction in the business and research communities. “We will shortly have our first journal cover,” Hutchison says, “and there’s a blog posting about using Avogadro to visualize molecular databases for drug leads.”

One of the earliest attempts to address the craving for porn was the Porn Toolkit. A Spanish developer began putting together a group of scripts to help users expedite their searches and downloads. The software was last updated in 2002 and never made it out of beta. A couple of years later Fetchgals attempted something similar, targeting galleries of thumbnail photos, but it too now appears to be abandoned.

Slightly more sophisticated is Pr0nSpider, for multithreaded porn downloads. Like the others, it has languished untouched for several years.

Let’s say you want to search for porn, but only featuring green-skinned girls with whips. You can try the Orphne browser. Available as both a standalone browswer and a Firefox plugin, Orphne offers “a built-in tagging system and search engine lets you find exactly what you want, instantly. A rating system makes sure the best links rise to the top. Customizeable slide shows show you only what you want to see.” The project hasn’t been updated in a couple of years.

Gnaughty is a similar project, and one that was updated earlier this year. The GPL-licensed software promises “to automatically download adult sex content, i.e. porn movies and pictures, from a known Internet porn directory.”

We haven’t tested any of these apps, and we urge you not to do so on your employer’s time. In fact, if your job is to keep porn off your own network, SourceForge.net has you covered there too, with software such as DansGuardian and Ircproxy for content filtering and the whitetrash plugin for the Squid web proxy application.