New Products
Safentrix bills its new and free cloud-based hosted e-mail security service as the world's first to offer outbound e-mail security. The service provides spam and virus filtering for incoming e-mail as well. The firm says its product provides peace of mind to organizations worried about misused e-mail servers, given that the majority of spam results from this misuse. Other key features include compatibility with all common e-mail servers, a control panel secured with high-grade encryption, a geographically dispersed network with multiple redundant servers, near-zero false positives, near-zero maintenance, up to 20,000 users per domain and premium and free service levels.
Got the drive to be a software legend but lacking the road map to get there? You might want to pick up Sam Lightstone's new book Making it Big in Software: Get the Job. Work the Org. Become Great. from Prentice Hall. Lightstone covers the road to the top in a step-by-step manner, from landing a job with great potential, to moving your way up and then blazing your way to the pinnacle. He says that everything has changed radically in “the biz”, and professors and career counselors never tell you the complete story. Other topics include mastering nontechnical skills crucial for success; understanding the “sweet science” of software R&D; “working the org” to move up rapidly; managing time, projects and life; and even breaking out into entrepreneurship. Also included are 17 interviews with legends such as Steve Wozniak, Marc Benioff and our own personal fave, Linus Torvalds.
Among the most veteran CAD apps on the Linux platform, VariCAD, now in version 2010 2.0, is a 3-D/2-D CAD system for mechanical engineering design. Core features include tools for 3-D modeling and 2-D drafting and dimensioning; libraries of standard mechanical parts (ANSI, DIN); calculations of standard mechanical components; and tools for working with bills of materials (BOM) and blocks. Version 2010 2.0 adds new features, such as geometric constraints among entire solids, advanced tools for working with Boolean trees, a significantly improved user interface and improved DWG import. A free 30-day trial version is available for download.
AdMarvel has beefed up its Android Advertising Toolkit, an open platform and toolset that enables Android application developers to integrate rich-media advertising into their applications. The new version 1.5 also supports rich-media advertising on the mobile Web on Android phones. Advertising metrics and analytics are provided via an on-line Web console giving a near real-time view of the application's advertising performance. AdMarvel also provides a fully functional rich-media ad server, supporting the provisioning and management of direct-sourced or in-house advertising.
If you want to get the most out of Wolfram Research's famous Mathematica application, pair it with Salvatore Mangano's Mathematica Cookbook for useful and informative “recipes” of all kinds. The book covers all levels of applying Mathematica for data visualization, covering everything from high-school algebra to sophisticated analyses in science, engineering, financial analysis, software development and more. Some specific topics include 3-D imaging, audio processing, calculations from mathematics and physics, image processing, distributed computing and many others.
Speaking of Mathematica, that application's maker, Wolfram Research, has released version 2 of Workbench, an Eclipse-based IDE that is specialized for Mathematica and other Wolfram technologies. The platform, says Wolfram, “combines Mathematica's ever-growing programming language and world-renowned computation, visualization and modeling features with one of the world's leading IDEs”. Developers, thus, enjoy the luxury of working with any Eclipse-supported language. New in version 2 is the ability to create documentation for Mathematica applications, as well as a host of improvements to code editing and navigation. Workbench requires Mathematica 6 or higher and is compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Workbench is also a key tool internally for Wolfram for the development of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and other technologies.
Likening this service to changing out a car's engine while speeding down the highway, Ksplice Uptrack from Ksplice, Inc., eliminates the need to reboot Linux servers to reboot their kernels. Thus, crucial updates and security patches can be applied live without rebooting or disrupting running applications. Ksplice Uptrack subscriptions are currently available for six leading versions of Linux including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and OpenVZ.
FancyPants is a multimedia applications framework from Fluffy Spider Technologies, whose new version 3.0 now supports Google Android. The company says that FancyPants gives OEMs of Android-based devices and their channel partners new capabilities to differentiate their wares in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Besides mainstream Android mobile development, FancyPants supports digital video (STB, DVR, home-media center), office automation (printers and MFPs) and other consumer electronics and industrial automation areas. FancyPants further enables total separation of user interfaces from applications that use them, offering developers “a unique autonomous user-interface model, enabling comprehensive deep customization of Android device GUIs on a per-application, or suite of applications, basis”.
Please send information about releases of Linux-related products to newproducts@linuxjournal.com or New Products c/o Linux Journal, PO Box 980985, Houston, TX 77098. Submissions are edited for length and content.
