Back in the day when accelerated OpenGL was more of a novelty than it is today, the Really Slick Screensavers were in a class by themselves in terms both of appearance and being demanding on hardware. When developer Tugrul Galatali learned that their author had released their source code under the GPL, he decided to attempt to port them to Linux, and thus created RSS-GLX, whose newest version was released this week. Check out the amazing screenshots.

New RSS-GLX releases don’t come along very often, because all of the original screensavers have been ported. Occasionally, Galatali says, “I need to tidy up the code here and there to keep up with the times. Now and then somebody will email me about a neat program with source they’d like to see ported, and if it is interesting and looks feasible, I’ll spend a few days on the port and doing other odds and ends on the package as a whole.” The latest release adds the Pixel City screensaver.

The abundance of open source licenses has on occasion been an issue for Galatali. “Initially I had converted the Euphoria and Lattice screensavers from C++ to C so I could send a patch in to jwz [Jamie W. Zawinski, who maintains the XScreenSaver project], as XScreenSaver’s license hadn’t even crossed my mind. He appropriately turned the patches down unless I could convince the original author to relicense. After I decided to go on my own, licensing hasn’t been too much of a bother, as everything I’ve ported since then was already GPL, or the author was comfortable with GPL. And once the package made it into Debian, it got as much distribution as I could have hoped for.”

Galatali is always on the lookout for more excellent screensavers. “If you happen across an OpenGL program you’d like ported to Linux and the source is available, drop me a line. Otherwise, politely contact the original author, as many of us did with the Really Slick Screensavers.”

When we created our new SourceForge features page, we used some icons from the Tango Icon Library. We’re trying to pay more attention to performance, so we wanted to use a CSS sprite of the icons for the page. Our Google search for tango icon css sprite didn’t turn up any pre-packaged projects, so we decided to make one.

If you’ve been wanting to use Tango icons in your web apps, may we humbly recommend the Tango Icon CSS Sprite project. The tarball download includes .png and corresponding .css files for the full Tango core library in 16×16, 22×22, and 32×32 icon sizes. The README and examples are pretty bare-bones, so please give us some feedback on how to improve the package. Or help us out by spriting some of the non-core icon sets or whatever else you think might be helpful for open source web developers like us.

One of the great things about SourceForge.net is our high Page Rank – our project already shows up at the top of the search results for Tango icon CSS sprite.

A couple of months ago, Italian developer Francesco Mondello had had enough. He had a host of digital images, but they weren’t identical in size or even in format. Converting them to a consistent format one by one would have been a tedious task. Instead, to improve his programming skills, Mondello built Converseen, a batch image conversion tool that lets users convert and resize multiple images automatically. It’s easy to use, and allows you to convert images in a lot of different formats.

Mondello employed the Qt4 framework and ImageMagick libraries in Converseen. “I used Qt4 because it’s easy to use and powerful, and allows you to create software that fits in well with the look and feel of KDE and GNOME,” he says. He posted the project on SourceForge.net because “it’s the best way to share open source software. I appreciate being able to create a web site for my project, and I love the download counter.” To publicize its availability, Mondello announces new releases on Qt-Apps, freshmeat, and on the project’s web site. The most recent version was released last week.

In its current stage of development Converseen only lets users convert and resize images. “I’m planning to add advanced features like image rotation, cropping, and accurate resizing, maybe in a graphical way,” Mondello says. “I will feel ready for 1.0 release when I add these features and when I’m sure of its stability, though so far I haven’t had many bug reports.”

Mondello would welcome help with translations, and “I would like to compile Converseen on Windows, but I have some compiling problems. Since I’m a beginner programmer I can’t interpret these errors!” If you’d like to help, the best way to get in touch is via email.

SourceForge.net is only one of the sites maintained by our parent company, Geeknet. Keeping watch over them all is marketing manager Pegah Kamal. “I manage all of our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and our search engine marketing program,” she says. That makes Pegah our official social butterfly on the Web.

Pegah joined Geeknet more than two years ago, when we were still called SourceForge, Inc. Before she joined us she was “all over Silicon Valley” doing online marketing for organizations such as Infineon Technologies, Knight Ridder Digital, and Acxiom Digital.

Pegah Kamal

At Geeknet “I’m always learning something new, and it doesn’t get old. And the best part of the job is the people I get to work with – we have a lot of wicked smart and talented people here. And I love where this company is heading. We have so much going on here that its exciting but also overwhelming. We bring a lot of great energy and stuff to the geek community, plus it helps when we all have a little geek in us too. :)”

When we changed our corporate name last November, Pegah’s job changed significantly. “I initially started off doing campaign management for custom ad programs we sold. I later moved onto the ad product team, and then managed all kinds of fun marketing projects. Now I’m solely focused on online marketing for Geeknet. I get to immerse myself in geek culture and truly embrace my inner geek, plus I get to become part of the conversation and share my experiences.”

But how much geek cred does Pegah bring to the table? “I grew up watching Star Trek:TOS and Star Trek:TNG with the family, and of course Star Wars. I actually have a VHS tape of ‘Return of the Jedi’ still at my mom’s house. Being able to develop my inner geekness is pretty interesting and fun.”

If you spend any time speaking with Pegah, you find she lives up to the blurb in her Twitter bio: Dame of all Things Daring. “That’s an attitude thing. I’m pretty upfront and high-energy. Super extrovert, who loves to have fun with good people. Not scared to take chances at work, even if it means I might fail. It’s the only way to keep learning and growing here.”

Not that she spends all her time in the office. “I love to hang out with my friends and travel,” she says. “The farthest I’ve been is Kuwait and Iran. I’ve made all kinds of trips to my favorite US cities this year – Las Vegas, New York, Miami, and LA.”

When she’s not making people aware of Geeknet in the online world, Pegah falls back on an inner passion for cooking. “Both my parents love to cook. My dad is more creative and my mom does more of the traditional Persian dishes. I would love to be a master chef somewhere in the world. I could totally see myself traveling the world and learning all kinds of new techniques and dishes – possibly even hosting my own cooking show.”

In the meantime, she’s just sticking to the occasional dinner party at her place. Want an invitation? Geeks are welcome.

IT departments are pretty familiar with tradeoffs. You can buy a comprehensive package to meet almost any need, but the cost might be prohibitive. Sometimes you can get something that does most of what you want, but forces you to change your work routines. But the beauty of open source software is that you can modify any given applications to suit your exact needs.

When Graham Pitt found that existing open source code review tools didn’t match his organization’s work flow well, or didn’t enforce it, he began working on his own web-based code review tool. Groogle makes reviewing code fast and effective because it only does the things his team wants and needs, and it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars per seat.

Groogle is particularly effective for reviewing code held in a Subversion revision control system. It has tight Subversion server integration, is language-agnostic, and focuses on usability and supporting workflows rather than changing workflows to support the code review tool. It can also help enforce an agreed-upon workflow. The workflow that Groogle imposes can be customized by modifying a database, and administrators can define new workflows by defining new review types. “This customization will be made accessible from the front end in future releases,” Pitt says.

Groogle has a more limited scope than comparable commercial tools in terms of the variety of source control systems it supports. Although it is extensible, it only supports either Subversion servers or file uploads of archives in tar, gzip, bzip2, or zip format. It is designed to review code changes where changes are held on separate branches. It doesn’t review non-text documents like many commercial review tools.

Groogle includes support for integration with many authentication mechanisms, including Active Directory. It also provides syntax highlighting for more than 100 different languages.

Groogle is written in PHP, JavaScript, and XSL, and leverages open source GPL projects such as Doctrine for database object relational mapping (ORM), PHP File Tree for tree support, jQuery, Geshi for code highlighting, libGD, Pear::Auth, Pear::Log, Pear::Text_Diff, Pear::File_Archive, and Pecl::Svn. “We use a LAMP stack because the tools provide a quick and easy way of storing, indexing, and presenting data to users across different platforms. There’s no need for the end user to download anything for their PC; all they need is a modern web browser.”

Similarly, the project chose to host on SourceForge.net because “it provided the quickest and easiest portal to make a GPL project available to the masses. It provides an instant web site, easy download management, statistics, makes the project searchable instantly, and setting up a publicly accessible Subversion repository via SourceForge.net was trivial.”

In addition to being searchable from SourceForge.net, Groogle announces new releases on freshmeat.net. “Together they provide a considerable amount of relevant traffic for Groogle. The numbers of downloads of Groogle is far in excess of what I expected,” Pitt says.

The road map for Groogle includes new features such as CVS and Git support, Subversion authentication support, private reviews, providing review metrics in CSV and graph formats, RSS support, major performance improvements, a greater focus on collaboration for group reviews, and ongoing improvements to the layout and presentation of Groogle and features in the Groogle database. “Groogle is a long way from finished,” Pitt says.

Major releases tend to be six to 12 months apart and bring significant new features. Minor bug fix releases typically come out every couple of months, as and when bugs are filed and fixed.

Pitt says progress on Groogle is slow because he’s generally the only developer and he works on the software part-time. “Some patches have been gratefully received and merged, but big releases and new features are often a long way apart because of this. Developers are always welcome to help on Groogle, and users who give feedback on functionality, layout, feature requests and provide bug reports are always appreciated.” You can contact Pitt via email or through the Groogle support forums on SourceForge.net.