Saturday 4th of September 2010 the fourth edition of the Syllable Summer Conference will take place in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. We will present the new Syllable Server 0.4 (more info about edition 0.4), updates in our graphical development version of Syllable Server (which we showed during Syllable Winter Conference 2010, see the videos down below). Attention will also be paid to advancements in REBOL 3, continued improvements in our CMS and how we will also open up our communication channels.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see the more than twenty Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given by Kaj de Vos during the first Syllable Winter Conference in January 2009 (playlist) and the second Syllable Winter Conference in January 2010 (playlist).

If you want to help with making subtitles and translations of these videos please contact Bas de Lange on the here mentioned email address!

We are pleased to announce that we have released the new Syllable Server 0.4. This release focuses on maturing existing functionality, improving security, ongoing system restructuring, and making the system a suitable base for third-party package managers. Extensive work was done, so the full change log is quite long.

About half the packages in the system were upgraded, including key components such as the Linux kernel, UDev, the LFS init scripts, DirectFB, SDL, BASh, Packager, OpenSSH, REBOL/Core, the Cheyenne web server and CDRTools. Other important packages such as Ruby, Midnight Commander, Links and Transmission were also updated. XZ-Utils was added, providing the same LZMA compression as in 7-Zip, but in a different format that is becoming popular, and is better integrated with POSIX systems. TAr was upgraded and this version has support for XZ-Utils. Compression of the system distribution was changed from 7-Zip to XZ format. The latest development versions of Cheyenne and UniServe are included, which provide a new WebSockets framework for advanced persistent, full-duplex communication with the latest web browsers.

As an example of clearer system structure and improved security, the super user account has been renamed from "root" to "system". Logging in to this account has been disabled: you are now supposed to log in to the account named "administrator" to manage the system. From this account, you can use the sudo command to perform actions with system privileges.

Here is the updated manual, which explains the key abilities of the system step by step. Syllable Server can be downloaded here. Extra software is available here.

Saturday 30th of January 2010 already the second edition of the Syllable Winter Conference will take place in conference centre "Het Brandpunt" in Baarn. Like we did during the first Syllable summer conference with presenting Syllable Server and our WebKit based browser Webster, we will now also make some important announcements. During several presentations and demonstrations we will highlight these. We will also follow up on the content management system, with which you can manage websites on Syllable Server. In this context we will go more indepth into the TryREBOL site, with which you can try out the REBOL programming language in your browser. The recently implemented support for WebSockets on Cheyenne, part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards, with which persistent HTTP connections in an efficient manner become possible, and with that the management of rich interactive websites on Syllable Server, will of course extensively be highlighted. Keep an eye on the Syllable Winter Conference page for the latest updates to the programme.

To give you an impression of the conference, you can see here six Dutch spoken videos on YouTube of the presentations given by Kaj de Vos during the first Syllable Winter Conference in January 2009.

Part 1, deep links into the video: Syllable Desktop, memory management, swap, why do we use Linux as a server kernel?, the using of Syllable in a DVD factory.
Part 2, deep links: WebKit, mounting USB disks, terminal Bash shell, installing extra packages, Battle for Wesnoth, native applications, resource packages, VLC media player, Application Binary Interface.
Part 3, deep links: Unix System Resources, resources directory, symbolic links, no hard links, locality of packages.
Part 4, deep links: search paths, separation of system and independent packages, playing a movie with VLC.
Part 5, deep links: VLC, MediaPlayer, FFMPEG, media framework, hardware overlays, media codecs.
Part 6, deep links: the REBOL song, audio mixing.

If you want to help with making subtitles and translations of these videos please get in contact with Bas de Lange on the here mentioned email address!

Over the holidays, the Cheyenne web server that we use in Syllable Server got a WebSocket framework. Cheyenne's author Nenad Rakocevic implemented WebSocket support in just a day on top of the UniServe universal network I/O subsystem that underpins Cheyenne. In a few more days, he designed an original WebSocket framework supporting persistent connections in an efficient manner, extending the regular Cheyenne framework for the typical HTTP stateless request/response communication.

WebSocket is a part of the upcoming HTML5 web standards. It allows a web browser and a web server to have a persistent, two-way full-duplex connection using just one TCP connection. It does this by starting a regular HTTP connection and then effectively renegotiating it into its more flexible underlying TCP connection. This gives it good chances to traverse firewalls, effectively giving us back the full power of the Internet. In this way, it is an evolution and replacement of Comet, which is a collection of hacks to use Ajax to simulate persistent HTTP connections. WebSocket improves over Comet by being standardised, much cleaner and more scalable. It does, however, require explicit support by both the server and the client. Currently, only Chrome 4 has WebSocket support. It is planned for Firefox and Safari. The latter means WebKit and that means we will be able to port it to Webster.

We intend to use this framework in our Syllable web infrastructure. The Cheyenne WebSocket framework is available in its SVN version. A WebSocket echo demo program is available here.

There is now a demo chat application online. Remember that you need a WebSocket browser for it, such as Chrome 4 or a nightly build of WebKit. You can follow Cheyenne discussions here.

We wish you all a good new year! The new sun is shining strong here, surely the sign of a fertile year to come. Indeed, we will create some breakthroughs this year.

At a request from Carl Sassenrath, inventor of REBOL and the Amiga OS, Kaj has created a website that allows you to try the REBOL programming language without installing it. The site showcases the new REBOL version 3 that is close to going into beta release. It also offers to test the classic REBOL 2 and ORCA, the open source implementation of REBOL, and to make comparisons between them.

The website is running on Syllable Server 0.3, in development towards version 0.4. For this application, the security of the server operating system was enhanced to be able to offer the public to run generic REBOL scripts.

The website was made on top of the REBOL stack included in Syllable Server. It runs on the Cheyenne web server. It is made in a Model/View/Controller architecture with the network application platform we have been working on: a combination of the QuarterMaster web framework and the content management system that is also used to build our Syllable websites. This REBOL demo site marks the transition of this application platform to being capable of building advanced interactive websites.

At the request of our Spanish web master, Lucas Murad from Argentina, and Leo Ruilova, from Chile, Kristian has opened a section for Spanish speaking Syllable fans on our forum. Do come in and say hello to them!

Our yearly summer conference will be held from Saturday July 18 to Saturday July 25 in the Netherlands. We will be sailing again on the Frisian vessel the Stêd Sleat while discussing and demoing the Syllable systems. This year we are offering several arrangements, so you can choose how many days you want to attend. There are discounts for longer stays and for kids, so you can make this into a nice vacation for your family. Contact Bas for arrangements.

The news sections of the websites have been extended with RSS feeds. If you prefer to follow Syllable news through an RSS reader application, you can now do so. Each selection of the news on the different sites has a corresponding feed. Look for the RSS icons. Please don't let your reader fetch the feeds too often. We don't publish news several times per day, so it's no use to check more often than a few times each day. Each news article now also has its own page, so the feeds can point to them. Good reading!

If you think the news articles here are out of line, that's because the web sites got a brand-new news module. Custom made for Syllable, just as the rest of the site. However, the older news items are still in the old style, which is less flexible, so we can't easily update their styling. The new articles are in our custom database and have their content fully decoupled from the styling. They're also easier to write and maintain. It's an important focus of ours to lighten our workload.

Kaj has ported XML-Starlet, a suite of XML tools that builds on LibXML2 and LibXSLT. The immediate motivation for the port was the need to process the XML files inside Open Document Format files (as used by OpenOffice and a number of other office applications). In our downloads is an installation package for Syllable Desktop.

The current issue of Micro Mart, a weekly computer magazine in the UK, has an article about Syllable and three other alternative operating systems. It was written by Michael Reed.