I don't think I know anyone who relishes the task of data manipulation, and I'm certainly not different. Some of the more complicated manipulations pose a briefly satisfying technical challenge, but in the end, data manipulation is boring.

This "Linux Product Insider" features IronKey Secure Flash Drives, Jedox's Palo spreadsheet server, Tony Mullen's new Blender book, Hyperic's CloudStatus, Syuzi Pakhchyan's Fashioning Technology and Joel Spolsky's More Joel on Sofware.

The Linux Journal recently published an article I wrote on Jean-Pierre Lemoine's AVSynthesis, a program designed for artists working with the computer as a medium for the synthesis of image and sound. I'm fascinated by that program, so I decided to research the existence of similar software. This article presents the current findings from that research.

Google Tech Talks brings us this presentation describing the rate of development for the Linux kernel, and how the development model is set up to handle such a large and diverse developer population and huge rate of change.

This is the second in a two-part introduction to Gnome-Inform7 (and by extension, the Inform 7 language). I'm not going to spend much time re-capping what we covered last time, so if you haven't read part one, please do so now.

I've recently written about using bash arrays and bash regular expressions, so here's a more useful example of using them to test IP addresses for validity.

This "Linux Product Insider" features CrossOver Linux 7.0, Skype 4.0 beta, Scoofers Search Engine, BakBone Software's NetVault, MEN Micro's DC1 Rugged Display Computer and PostPath Server HA Edition v2.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way.

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they are often quite useful.

This week's "Linux Product Insider" features the ROGCon Republic of Gamers Convention, IBM's Project Big Green Gets Greener, Rickford Grant's Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition , Terra Soft's YDL PowerStation and Bergfrid Marie Skaara's eZ Publish Advanced Content Management.