It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.
Last week Juliet Kemp showed us somet special Perl variables for reading things in; this week we see the other side -- variables that are useful when we want to write things out.
Sometimes it's the little things that trip us up, like a filename that begins with the wrong character. Juliet Kemp knows what to do when Linux becomes confused and won't operate on a file the way we want it to.
In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?
Bringing Windows 7 clients into your Linux network is exactly what the fine Samba server is made for. But every Windows release comes with new interop roadblocks, and Windows 7 is no exception. Charlie Schluting shows how to get past the latest ones.
Setting up proper wireless encryption is easier than ever on Linux. WEP is broken and has been for a long time, but WPA and WPA2 are still going strong. Eric Geier shows how to configure your Linux client to connect to a proper wireless encryption and authentication server to set up a secure wireless connection.
Laptops are often disconnected from networks, which makes running automated network backups a bit challenging. But in Linux there is always a way, and Juliet Kemp shows how to set up hands-off worry-free automatic laptop backups.
In this third and final installment of how to survey the airwaves with Linux tools, Eric Geier shows us more tools for network surveying and discovery, deep snooping, and intrusion detection and alerting.
It can be tempting to throw hardware at MySQL performance problems, but there are ways to tune your SQL database so that it doesn't always need more power. Sean Hull gives some excellent tips on simplifying, strengthening, and speeding up your MySQL database.
What the heck does “ mean? Why do we see these, and what can be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.
Remote Linux PC access over the Internet requires extra security precautions. Today we lock down the OpenSSH server more tightly, get through a firewall without opening the LAN to the world, and decide if we want password authentication or certificate authentication.
It isn't very difficult to crimp your own CAT5 cabling. You can repair and re-use old cable, cut cable to exact lengths, and save money. Aaron Weiss shows how, with lots of good pictures.
If you're fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has all the data that's required, store it in a temporary table, and then select from this temporary table as needed.
Despite claims by advanced users, confusion abounds when trying to run two OSes. Matt Hartley offers some possible solutions.
Surprisingly, running hard disks warmer rather than colder makes them last longer, and putting new disks in a nursery makes all of them happier. Paul Rubens shares these other simple tips for getting the most out of your hard disks.
Discover how to start developing for the Android platform with this extensive guide, which provides a reference to the Android platform as well as a look at developing your first Android application. You'll explore the top 10 features for developers as well as learn design and development tips that go beyond the phone and target tablet development as well.