Drupal fans will be happy to know that Whitehouse.gov has been relaunched as a Drupal site. Notably, the Drupal specialist firm Acquia is also working with the White House on the project as a subcontractor. Why that’s worth noting: Acquia founder Dries Buytaert also happens to be credited as the programmer who created Drupal in the first place, and he currently serves as the Drupal community’s project lead in the software’s development.

http://personaldemocracy.com/node/15131

This certainly seems like one giant leap for Open Source in general.

The third preview of IronRuby and IronPython running under the Dynamic Language Runtime and .NET 4.0 is now available. You can easily use IronPython and IronRuby objects and types as .NET 4.0 dynamic objects from within the pre-release versions of C# 4.0 and Visual Basic 10.0 found in Visual Studio 2010. The IronRuby and IronPython binaries are roughly equivalent to the functionality found in IronRuby 0.9 and IronPython 2.6.

Here’s an illustration showing just how powerful the new dynamic feature is for taking advantage of dynamic language functionality in statically typed languages

http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2009/10/ironruby-and-ironpython-ctps-for-net-40.html

If someone told you that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was keeping tabs on your Twitter updates, Facebook posts or YouTube videos, you’d probably laugh it off as another one of those conspiracy theories. But a recent report has revealed how the investment arm of the CIA has invested in a software firm called Visible Technologies that specializes in monitoring social media sites, including blogs, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. It’s part of a larger movement within the security services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/

Irony is a development kit for implementing languages on the .NET platform. It uses the flexibility and power of the C# language along with the .NET Framework 3.5 to implement a completely new and streamlined technology for compiler construction

http://irony.codeplex.com/

Irony is currently in its first phase, which includes building the two compiler front-end modules — scanner and parser. Like many parser-building tools in use today, Irony produces a working parser from grammar specifications. However, unlike the existing parser builders, Irony does not use a separate meta-language for encoding the target grammar.