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OpenLDAP Everywhere Reloaded, Part I

By Stewart Walters | May 23, 2012

Directory services is one of the most interesting and crucial parts of computing today. They provide our account management, basic authentication, address books and a back-end repository for the configuration of many other important applications. more>>

Chemistry the Gromacs Way

By Joey Bernard | May 21, 2012

In this article, I'm diving into chemistry again. Many packages, both commercial and open source, are available to make chemistry calculations at the quantum level. The one I cover here is gromacs (http://www.gromacs.org). It should be available for your distribution via its package manager. more>>

TV

Make TV Awesome with Bluecop

By Shawn Powers | May 16, 2012

A few weeks back, I was whining that although Doctor Who was available on Amazon Prime streaming, I didn't have any way to watch it on my television. Thankfully, my friend Richard Servello pointed me to the bluecop repo for XBMC. Not only does bluecop support Amazon Prime streaming, but it also has add-ons for Hulu and countless other network-video-streaming collections. more>>

Hack and / - Password Cracking with GPUs, Part I: the Setup

By Kyle Rankin | May 15, 2012

Bitcoin mining is so last year. Put your expensive GPU to use cracking passwords.

When the Bitcoin mining craze hit its peak, I felt the tug to join this new community and make some easy money. I wasn't drawn only by the money; the concepts behind Bitcoin mining intrigued me, in particular the new use of graphics processors (GPUs). With a moderately expensive video card, you could bring in enough money to pay off your initial investment and your electricity bill in a relatively short time. more>>

catalyst logo

An Introduction to Application Development with Catalyst and Perl

By Henry Van Styn | May 14, 2012

Catalyst is the latest in the evolution of open-source Web development frameworks. Written in modern Perl and inspired by many of the projects that came before it, including Ruby on Rails, Catalyst is elegant, powerful and refined. It's a great choice for creating any Web-based application from the simple to the very complex. more>>

Cryptocurrency: Your Total Cost Is 01001010010

By Shawn Powers | May 09, 2012

Most people have heard of gold. Most people are familiar with dollars. For a handful of geeky folks, however, the currency they hope will become a global standard is digital. Whether it's a problem or not, the currency you use on a day-to-day basis is tied to the government. more>>

HTML5 for Audio Applications

By Paul Freitas | May 07, 2012

HTML5 lets you play music through compliant browsers—no "cloud" required. more>>

May 2012 Issue of Linux Journal: Programming

By Shawn Powers | May 02, 2012
Rubies, Pythons and Perls!

It may sound like a new Indiana Jones movie or possibly a cheesy platform-style video game from the 1990s, but the title of this column actually refers to our focus this month—programming! Not that there's anything wrong with daring adventures in remote locations, it's just that all the red tape can be overwhelming. more>>

Three Ways to Web Server Concurrency

By Martin Kalin | May 01, 2012

Multiprocessing, multithreading and evented I/O: the trade-offs in Web servers.

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should service clients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starves because some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessing and multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways to achieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system libraries for asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). To highlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo servers written in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_server and a polling_server. more>>

Tales From the Server Room: Zoning Out

By Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin | Apr 25, 2012

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong. more>>

Mercurial - Revision Control Approximated

By Joey Bernard | Apr 24, 2012

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). more>>

New Products

By James Gray | Apr 20, 2012

 New products for April.

Science the GNU Way, Part I

By Joey Bernard | Apr 17, 2012

In my past several articles, I've looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a tool to solve a particular problem. That's the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it's up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. more>>

Complexity, Uptime and the End of the World

By Michael Nugent | Apr 16, 2012

Poorly implemented monitoring systems can drive an administrator crazy. At best, they are distracting. At worst, they'll keep whoever is on pager duty up for nights at a time. This article discusses the best practices for designing systems that will keep your systems up and stay quiet when nothing is wrong. more>>

Blue Drop Awards Celebrate Achievements in Open Source Web Development

By Katherine Druckman | Apr 11, 2012

The first ever Blue Drop Awards for excellence in Drupal development were announced yesterday. Organized and led by Ben Finklea of Volacci, the awards were both a community effort to celebrate the great work of Drupal Developers, and also a vehicle for Drupal and open source evangelism. more>>

MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite3 - Comparing Command-Line Interfaces

By Daniel Bartholomew | Apr 11, 2012

Don't be afraid of using your chosen database's command-line client. more>>

Non-Linux FOSS: TrueCrypt

By Shawn Powers | Apr 09, 2012

TrueCrypt is a fully open-source tool for encrypting data. That data can be on a completely encrypted hard drive, or just an encrypted image file. Thankfully, the encryption works the same regardless of your platform, so Windows and OS X users can share encrypted files between computers. more>>

Hack and /: Automatically Lock Your Computer

By Kyle Rankin | Apr 05, 2012

If you've ever worked with pranksters, you've probably come across this classic office prank. First, the unsuspecting victim leaves his computer and goes to lunch or a long meeting and doesn't lock his screen. The prankster then takes a screenshot of his current desktop, hides all the desktop icons and any taskbars, and sets the background to be the screenshot the prankster just took. more>>

Building an Ultra-Low-Power File Server with the Trim-Slice

By Daniel Bartholomew | Apr 02, 2012

For the past several years, I've used a custom-built file server at my house. I've upgraded it many times, but it began life, as near as I can recall, in April 2000. When I say "upgraded", I mean the internals have been swapped completely on at least two occasions among other things. more>>

Tunnel

SSH Tunneling - Poor Techie's VPN

By Jayson Broughton | Mar 28, 2012

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train" ~ Robert Lowell. Oh yes, another good quote. This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users. more>>