© 1999 Michael J. Hammel

R 0.63.2
IRTC CDROM (Year Two)
Mesa to be integrated with XFree86
dc20 1.0
ImageMagick 4.1.8

Disclaimer: Before I get too far into this I should note that any of the news items I post in this section are just that - news. Either I happened to run across them via some mailing list I was on, via some Usenet newsgroup, or via email from someone. I'm not necessarily endorsing these products (some of which may be commercial), I'm just letting you know I'd heard about them in the past month.

R 0.63.2
R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. R implements a language which is not entirely unlike the S language developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Rick Becker, John Chambers and Allan Wilks. Indeed in the absence of an R manual, you can (mostly) get along by using the S manual.

Changes: There have been lots of bug fixes since the last release, please check the ChangeLog for details. The most important change is probably that the windows version now is in sync with the unix version.
http://fangorn.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R/

IRTC CDROM - Year Two
The IRTC CDROM (Year Two) is a compilation of all entries made to the Internet Raytracing Competition during its second year of operation. As the IRTC is bi-monthly, this covers round #7 (May/June 1997) to round #12 (March/April 1998). There are over 1000 images and source archives available.

In addition to the entire year's worth of stills submissions, the CD also contains the first three rounds of the quarterly animation competition (October 1997-January 1998 through April 1998-July 1998). This CDROM is designed to be used with a web browser - the entire CD is indexed via HTML and bears some resemblance to the IRTC website (with enhancements).

For more details see:
http://www.aussie.org/products/irtc-cd2.html

Mesa to be integrated with XFree86
Precision Insight has announced that Brian Paul has given them authorization to integrate the majority of Mesa directly into X as a product they will call X-Mesa and distribute under a license similar to the existing XFree86 license. (The announcement isn't clear if this is going to be a GPL/BSD licensed commercial product only, a GPL/BSD licensed product that will be freely available, or a subset of the actual XFree86 project.)
http://precisioninsight.com/piinsights.html

dc20 1.0
DC20 is a user friendly package for the Kodak DC20 camera. It consists of two programs, a low-level driver for manipulating the camera from the command line and a Tcl/Tk front-end which uses the driver. You can use the internal viewer, or choose any standard external viewer.

Changes: This is the first announcement.
http://members.xoom.com/kavalsky/dc20.htm

ImageMagick 4.1.8
Frederic L.W.Meunier

homepage: http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/ImageMagick.html
download: ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/

ImageMagick (TM) is a package for display and interactive manipulation of images for the X Window System. It is written in C and interfaces to the X library, and therefore does not require any proprietary toolkit in order to compile. Although the software is copyrighted, it is available for free and can be redistributed without fee. ImageMagick is known to compile and run on virtually any Unix system and Linux. It also runs under Windows NT, Windows 95, Macintosh, and VMS.

© 1999 by Michael J. Hammel