Version 0.5.7 was released today. There are only two fixes in this release. One is a compilation fix for Solaris and the other one is a security fix. Turns out a buffer used for local communication didn't have sufficient checks. User data isn't written without checks though so the worst that can happen is that huge amounts of memory is allocated. The socket was also bound to the loopback device so it should only be locally abuseable.

Well...I spoke to hastly...the problems haven't been fixed yet, Adaptec are still trying to track them down but there doesn't seem to be much effort going into it. I get at most one mail every two weeks with some information. In the meantime I can do stuff like update this page and send email via SSH to my server, but not much else. Development *will* continue once the problems are solved, I just won't try to predict when it will be :-)

Some of the emails that I've recieved seems to indicate that some are worried that I'm dead. Well, I'm not but I'm having the weirdest computer hardware problems I've ever experienced (and I've worked with tech support). My newly bought Adaptec 2400A IDE-RAID card refuses to work due to a combination of reasons (most of them not due to Adaptec). On the bright side though, I seem to have ironed out most of them and I'm just waiting for some final feedback from Adaptec before I can reinstall Debian and continue hacking away at Ample.

What better way to celebrate that 0.6.0 is coming closer, than to change the design of the web pages? I hope you like the new look, if it looks goofy you probably have an ancient browser. Target browsers are Mozilla (Netscape 6.x) and Internet Explorer (recent version) since they both understand what CSS is etc. Writing for older browsers isn't funny.

0.5.3 will be released soon. New features is HTML templates (for custom HTML output, see included man page for details) and SysV IPC support (allows server processes to share the file information stored in memory which saves physical memory). Of course a slew of buf fixes and a couple of new bugs should be expected :-)

AMPLE is short for "A MP3 LEnder"
(interesting name just to make a good abbreviation?)

I wrote AMPLE one summer when I was coding for a company and got fed up with having to FTP over all my MP3 files from my home server to the computer at work just to listen to them. And the other "MP3 servers" I could find didn't fit my needs for one of the following reasons:

• Depended on libfoo, libbar, python, perl, php3, Apache, libssl, etc, etc, etc...I just wanted to listen to the files

• Had a lot of features for "DJ:ing" etc that I really didn't need

• Well....it was fun to write too :)

So what's good with AMPLE?

• Small, standalone (written in C using no external libraries)

• Portable (I think), I often try to compile it on the SourceForge compile farms

• Allows you to listen to your own MP3's away from home, nothing more, nothing less

This is beginning to sound like marketing cr*p so I'll just stop right there, check out the links on the left for more info.

Regards,
David Härdeman <david@2gen.com>