The de facto standard for port scanning always has been the venerable Nmap program. The command-line tool is indeed very powerful, but I've only ever seen it work with Linux, and every time I use it, I need to read the man page to figure out the command flags.

The truth is, I really don't have anything on my hard drive that I would be upset over someone seeing. I have some cat photos. I have a few text files with ideas for future books and/or short stories, and a couple half-written starts to NaNoWriMo novels. It would be easy to say that there's no point encrypting my hard drive, because I have nothing to hide.

For the past few months, I've been covering different software packages for scientific computations. For my next several articles, I'm going to be focusing on using Python to come up with your own algorithms for your scientific problems.

Most people with Internet access in their houses have visited a speed-test Web site to make sure they're getting somewhere close to the speed they're overpaying for. I'm paying more than $100 a month for my business-class connection from Charter, so on a regular basis, I make sure I'm getting the advertised speed.

This article is the second in a series on DNSSEC. In the first one, I gave a general overview of DNSSEC concepts to lay the foundation for this article, which discusses how to enable DNSSEC for a zone using BIND.

Several decent video editors are available on the Linux platform. Kdenlive, OpenShot, Cinelerra and Pitivi are those that come to mind as "big players" in an admittedly small market. I've used them all through the years, with varying levels of success.

Flatland, an 1880 novella by Edwin A. Abbott, is about a world with just two dimensions, inhabited by lines and polygons. Trouble starts when a sphere shows up.

Big Block Linux with a Four-Barrel Hemi We often brag about how few resources Linux needs to operate: a Raspberry Pi or Beagle Board, in a Web browser (

If you need remote access to a machine, you'll probably use SSH, and for a good reason. The secure shell protocol uses modern cryptography methods to provide privacy and confidentiality, even over an unsecured, unsafe network, such as the Internet.

It's nice to have many people visit your Web site. It's even better when people don't just come to your site, but also enjoy your content. But, best of all is when visitors to your site do what you would like them to do—sign up for your newsletter, register for your SaaS application or buy one of your products.