I just re­leased the new ver­sion 1.6 of my free spam fil­ter Spami­hil­ator! This ver­sion is a main­ten­ance re­lease. It fixes some minor bugs and im­proves se­cur­ity. In­stall­a­tion is re­com­men­ded to all users.

The new ver­sion of the Gradle plug­in gradle-down­load-task 1.2 has just been re­leased. The plug­in provides a Download task that dis­plays pro­gress in­form­a­tion while down­load­ing files, just like Gradle does when it fetches an ar­ti­fact from a re­pos­it­ory.

Ver­sion 2.4 of bson4­jack­son has just been re­leased. bson4­jack­son adds sup­port for BSON, a bin­ary rep­res­ent­a­tion of JSON, to the Jack­son JSON pro­cessor.

I really like how Gradle dis­plays pro­gress while it’s fetch­ing ar­ti­facts from Maven re­pos­it­or­ies, but I was al­ways won­der­ing why you can­not use the same func­tion­al­ity when you’re down­load­ing ar­bit­rary files in your build script. You can of course use An­t’s down­load task to fetch files, but it does not dis­play pro­gress in­form­a­tion. Since I could­n’t find a solu­tion on the In­ter­net I de­cided to write a plug­in.

I was work­ing very hard on the new ver­sion of cite­proc-java lately and I’m glad to an­nounce that it has just been re­leased. The high­lights in ver­sion 0.6 are:

I was re­cently writ­ing a sci­entific doc­u­ment with As­ciiDoc. As usual my tool­chain was As­ciiDoc → Doc­Book → FO → PDF. It really worked quite well un­til I came to the point where manu­ally adding cita­tions and edit­ing the bib­li­o­graphy by hand be­came really com­plex and I sud­denly found my­self yearn­ing for more auto­ma­tion.