March 2004 Archives

I came across this press release today for a new O2 compressed video capture tool:

NO:magic just made compressed capturing on the SGI O2 even better!

Capture for use with Silicon Graphics O2 systems is capturing system optimised for capturing audio and compressed imagery from external sources

Frustrated with losing frames while capturing video footage with your Silicon Graphics O2? Well NO:magic have the answer!

With NO:magic's Capture for use with SGI O2 systems you'll be capturing frames or fields of footage in no time, while taking full advantage of the O2's real-time Image Compression Engine.

NO:magic's Capture is an easy to use GUI based capturing system that fully integrates with your O2's existing Digital Media Tools.

About NO:magic
NO:magic is a bespoke software development company specialising in 'neat ideas'. Formed in the third quarter of 2003 with the simple goals of generating, building, productising and licensing 'neat ideas'.

NO:magic - 2004-03-29 18:16:35

There's a tardist of the package available at:
http://www.nomagic.co.uk

No idea of pricing on this one - though I fear the lack of pricing information in the press release as well as on the website translates to "not priced for hobbyists". It would be wonderful to be wrong though.

SkyBound has just announced the immediate availability of FlightGear v0.9.4 for IRIX:

I am pleased to announce the release of FlightGear v0.9.4. It is available for free download from:

http://www.flightgear.org

The IRIX binary is available at:

http://www.a1.nl/~ehofman/fgfs/

FlightGear is a free, open-source, multi-platform flight simulator. The source code is licensed under the GPL.

Precompiled packaged versions are available for most platforms including Windows, Linux, Sgi, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

The IRIX version now lives in the standard conformal /opt/FlightGear-0.9.4 directory and has optimized versions of the main program for mips3/R4k and for mips4/R10k.

Here are a few of the highlights from this release:

- Ability to fetch weather conditions in real-time from the NOAA web site.
- Working VASI/PAPI lights.
- Ability to fly under bridges, taxi into hangers, etc.
- Added a tool to facilitate installing additional scenery chunks.
- Many updated textures and models.
- The San Francisco area has been vastly improved.
- Several new aircraft were added (Comper Swift, Hawker Hunter, and T37 Tweet)
and most of the existing aircraft have been improved in various ways.
- A built in scripting language.
- Updated aircraft AI and ATC modules.
- Complete overhaul of the autopilot system.

For more information on the FlightGear project, please visit our web page at:

http://www.flightgear.org

You can view a summary of the new features, changes, and bug fixes for this release here:

http://www.flightgear.org/version.html

Erik

I came across several announcements for this event on Usenet, and while obviously not something designed for hobbyists it still may be of interest:

The SGI User Group's annual international Technical Conference will be held 23-27 May, 2004 in Orlando, Florida, USA. The user conference is open to all SGI customers.

The SGIUG 2004 conference will include technical information and tutorials, as well as an opportunity to meet with SGI's top executives and engineers. There will also be a tour and dinner at the Kennedy Space Centre.

The Organizing Committee will present the results of their work and nominate candidates for office. There will be an election at that time to accept a more formal organization and officers to continue to refine the group. Please make your desires known in regards to your participation and ideas on making it a world class user group.

More details at the official website, as well as a PDF of the official flyer:

http://www.sgiug.org/SGIUG2004.php

Another month, another Mozilla milestone release - Mozilla 1.7b is now out and foetz has provided us all with a IRIX build.

Mozilla 1.7b fixes some 400 additional issues and undoubtedly introduces a few more; be sure to check out the Mozilla 1.7b README for more information on some of these changes.

Note: This release depends on tardists outside the current g2office distribution due to missing symbols in GTK+/pango:

gdk_threads_lock
pango_find_base_dir

Installing foetz's gtk_240 and pango_140 tardists will resolve this, but may cause problems with other g2office programs - I've not had the opportunity to check on this yet. You will also need gettext_0141 as noted in the February 23rd Mozilla 1.7a annoucement.

dexter1 has put together a tardist for Qt 3.3.1, the first step toward a KDE 3.2.1 build. More information and related discussion on both Qt and KDE under IRIX can be found in this forum thread.

You can grab a copy here or on the mirror mentioned in the forum thread above.

Update: The archive linked above was updated on the 27th to repair some symbolic link related issues.