After several years of halted development, the classical mp3 player mpg123 is back. Original author Michael Hipp stopped working on it around year 2000, but now Thomas Orgis has continued its development and finally the first beta releases from the new version are out!

mpg123 was one of the first mp3 players for Unix systems, and it was famous for its low CPU requirements. Even nowadays it’s probably the most resource-efficient mp3 player available. The core of mpg123 was also used for mp3 decoding in many other programs, such as XMMS.

Last but not least, mpg123 is licensed under the LGPL. This is good news, since older versions of this software had a non-free open-source license (well, this is actually not news as the license changed some years ago during the development hiatus, but AFAIK this is the first version released as free software).

It’s good to see old friends back again 😉

Want to download videos from YouTube?.
You can get a shell script from my webpage.
Videos are stored in FLV format, that can
be played with many programs such as MPlayer.

A nice feature present in the latest JVM versions is the ability to hotswap a class: that is, to modify a class from a running application without having to restart it. This obviously helps to speed up the development process.

Eclipse takes advantage of this feature (it’s called Hot code replacement), and its users claim that it’s one of the best reasons to use this IDE. However, as it’s really a feature of the JVM, you can use it too without needing to use Eclipse at all. For example, Netbeans has it too, and it’s named Apply code changes.

But what happens if you don’t use an IDE with this feature? No problem. David Kavanagh has written a Hotswap task for Ant, so you can replace your running code from the command line and benefit from this feature from within Emacs or whatever editor you like.

Good hotswapping!