One thing I truly miss about the "old-school" way of reading the newspaper is that I don't get to read the funny pages. No, that's not all I would read (although admittedly it may have been the first page I turned to), but a little levity always makes the day better. I'm not a big fan of graphic novels or even comic books, but the daily funny pages are just my speed.

I love video game emulation. My favorite games were produced in the 1980s and 1990s, so if I want to play them, I almost always have to emulate the old systems. There is usually a legal concern about ROM files for games, even if you own the original cartridges, so I'm not going to tell you where to find ROMs to download or anything like that.

The single largest group of users on high-performance computing clusters has to be the chemists. Their CPU-year count is definitely at the very top of the list. Because of this heavy use, several different packages have become standard tools that most computational chemistry researchers use.

If you're anything like me, the holiday season is spent fixing Wi-Fi and removing spyware. Occasionally, I get to install Linux for a relative who is ready to give up Windows or needs something that will run on a circa-Windows 2000 computer (Xubuntu is usually my choice).

Previously in this space, I have covered software packages like Maxima that can be used to solve symbolic mathematics problems. Several packages are available that can do those types of calculations. In this article, I discuss Xcas/Giac. Xcas is the GUI interface to the system.

Linux capabilities are one of the more fluid and less defined regions of kernel development. Linus Torvalds typically has no trouble violating POSIX standards if he sees a better way of doing something. In the case of filesystem capabilities, however, there's no standard to violate.

Like many LJ readers these days, I've been leading a bit of a techno-nomadic lifestyle as of the past few years—jumping from network to network, access point to access point, as I bounce around the real world while maintaining my connection to the Internet and other networks I use on a daily basis.

"If you want to escape and think/write code/...

Encryption and secure communications are critical to our life on the Internet. Without the ability to authenticate and preserve secrecy, we cannot engage in commerce, nor can we trust the words of our friends and colleagues.

I was in the buzz-making business long before I learned how it was done. That happened here, at Linux Journal. Some of it I learned by watching kernel developers make Linux so useful that it became irresponsible for anybody doing serious development not to consider it—and, eventually, not to use it. Some I learned just by doing my job here.