Portable apps aren't anything new. There are variations of "single executable apps" for most platforms, and some people swear by keeping their own applications with them for use when away from home. I don't usually do that, as most of what I do is on-line, but there is one exception: security.

Sure, you can open up a graphics program like GIMP and resize an image, but what if you want to resize 10, 50 or 200 images? ImageMagick's convert program is just what you need.

At the start of this quarter we looked at how 2013's graphics developments were more incremental than revolutionary, perhaps with the need for LTS stability in mind. Things are looking quite different this year, with several major changes quietly under way.

In this article, I've decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not in my column directly, but as a feature article called "PXE Magic" in the April 2008 issue.

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so on.

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him!

Create applications inside the Chrome browser with standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Poor telnet, it used to be the cool kid on the block. It was the program all sysadmins turned to when they needed to connect to a remote server. Telnet just wasn't that good at keeping a secret—all communication went over plain text—so administrators started switching to SSH for encrypted remote shell sessions.

Before you say anything, yes, I know Wireshark is available for Linux. This time, however, Windows and OS X users get to play too. Wireshark is an open-source network analyzation tool that is really an amazing tool for troubleshooting a network.

In these columns, I have covered several different scientific packages for doing calculations in many different areas of research. I also have looked at various packages that handle graphical representation of these calculations. But, one package that I've never looked at before is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info).