Rudolf Cornelissen has once again updated his NVidia driver page with a status update on his ongoing progress with the driver.

Click below to read his full update.

beunited reports on their Java porting project. They have fixed a "serious flaw" and finally have a working version of J2SE. Here's the full monty:
After a wild weekend of coding and BeShare chat sessions the beunited.org Java Team has some progress to report. The team has been able to create a working version of the J2SE 1.4.0 JVM that runs under BeOS R5 and actually interprets Java byte code. This is still early in the development, but for the first time the JVM has interpreted the java.lang.String class and others. This is after the team spent 2 months trying to debug a serious flaw in the native code generation of the hotspot engine. Progress should be rapid after this point as most of the hard work is now complete. The next step is to have the JVM complete its initialization and run 'hello world'.

Good news indeed! Way to go guys, keep it up!
yellowTab just put online an update, concerning the vote that will take place tomorrow at the EU, on the subject of software patents. yellowTab isn't the only (not by far) company to show concern about this matter, if this is approved, many software companies could be in trouble. Read it all at yellowTab.
Dane Scott over at LeBuzz had a small talk with Marcus Overhagen about the Media Kit progress. He gave him some interesting tidbits, like for example "...we are testing alpha 1h. The mixer is now fully functional, and a single remaining glitch (that happens after a few minutes) in it has been found and located, but the bugfix for that isn't done yet.".

He also told him that work on the codec API has started, about 2 weeks ago. Great progress and great job, to everyone on the Media Kit Team. Heck, to everyone over at OpenBeOS! Read it all right here.
Frans van Nispen updated Xentronix's page with a status update on their ongoing work with Refraction, and this time he tells us about speed gains: "I just recently improved the speed of our C++ code for the Beta 6.4 (soon to come) and was quite happy with the results. An overal increase in speed of the layer rendering of 2.31 times the old code and the normal mode even 3.85 times as fast."

Awesome! But that's not all, oh no. Head over to this page and be amazed at the results of the optimization. Truly WOW! And as always, don't forget the Early Bird License for Refraction.
The undoubtly most successfull mission in NASA's history ends today, when the Galileo craft plunges straight to Jupiter, for a fiery, solemn death, thus ending its 14 year long voyage.

First approved by the US congress in 1977 (the year I was born by the way), Galileo brought a wealth of information and data over the years. Perhaps the most well remembered is when it gave us the only images of when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter's surface.

For more about Galileo's last day, and the mission itself, click here. Is it just me, or does this remind you also of... V'ger? Live long and prosper.
yellowTAB today announced that Skycycle won't be used in Zeta after all, at least not now, and that Portable, another band from Los Angeles, California, took their place. They did this, according to Skycycle Online, because Skycycle's 24-track masters are property of their former record company, who initially promised to return the masters to Skycycle but did not stick to their promise.

Portable consists of Chance Hutchison (vocals, guitar), Gus Ciceri (guitar), his brother Sebastian (bass) and Brian Levy (drums). Their motto - "You don't know us if you haven't seen us live." Chance is originally from Orlando, Florida. He moved to Los Angeles and sang in several local bands, including one called "Getting Red", consisting of Chance, Sebastian, Brian and another guitarist, a high school friend of Chance. Portable was founded later, in 1996, by Chance and Brian. Sebastian, not in Portable at that time, introduced his younger brother Gus as guitarist. Jeff Menke played bass guitar.

And we at ICO are proud to present you with an interview we did with Chance, Portable's vocalist. [Ed. note: A huge thanks to Eddy Groen for doing most of the work to get the interview done.]

This just came to my attention (thanks Eddy) , and since i know someone of you out there are LiveJournal users, I decided to write about it.

Sean Graham has stopped maintaining his LiveJournal client for BeOS, ALiveJournal. He gives the chance of anyone wanting to take over the project to do so, so anyone interested, drop him a line and go over the details.
The World Tour of Marketing (my invention, neat) continues, as yellowTab's Bernd Korz continues his travels around the world. His next destinations include South America and Asia (once again, it is a huge market).

In Argentina he will present Zeta to the Minister of Education and other representatives. In China and Malaysia he will also present Zeta to a large number of businessmen and other guests.

To read it all, click here. Impressive, and I'm sure we all hope that his journeys are successful, don't we?
DarkWyrm has posted another update at his site. Here's what he said:

"Adi and I have gotten some things going the last couple weeks. I haven't personally tested it yet, but we have support to add and remove BViews on both server and client side. Adi had been working on client-server interoperability with the app_server, BWindow, and BView. He's also started tweaks to the messaging subsystem to allow for faster messaging than the means previously used. I've managed to squeeze in some time here and there, adding quite a few minor bugfixes here and there in both some interface kit classes and the server.

Some cruft has been removed, and the next step is to be able to change cursors using the BCursor class from a regular BApplication linked to OpenBeOS' libbe. In plain English, test applications are starting to be able to do stuff and have meaningful conversations with the server. In other news, things are *slowly* starting to die down at school, so I'm starting to get a little time to do things which I haven't been able to do in a while, including a little work on my other projects. You can expect some nice changes to this site in the coming weeks, too. That's all for now. :)"


We'll keep you updated on his progress, stay tuned!