Remember secret handshakes and disappearing ink? Well, random number generators, MACs, and public key encryption do the same thing, but in a 21st century way. Learn how to keep your electronic secrets top secret.
Ruby is a concise, fully object-oriented, and powerful programming language. It's also ideal for building networked applications. Find out why Ruby really connects.
Given the amount of press Java garners, you'd think that every programmer is busily building Java applications. The reality is that many programmers have yet to give Java a try. If you're one of those programmers, Robocode might just be the project you need to jump into Java.
System security is always a trade-off between convenience and features on the one hand and protectiveness and removing unnecessary risks on the other. As the cliché goes, security is inversely proportional to convenience: the easier a system is to use, the less secure it's likely to be. In contrast to many discussions in this column, this month we turn our attention to the "secure if inconvenient" end of the spectrum.
Unless you're superbly organized or have a great memory, chances are you "misplace" files from time to time. Find answers the question, "Now, where did I put that?"
As Beowulf-style clusters have proliferated, many computational scientists have discovered that, although clusters provide adequate CPU performance for most applications, more finely-grained models are often limited by the performance of the network that interconnects nodes. While the network is typically Fast Ethernet (100 Mb/s) or Gigabit Ethernet (1.0 Gb/s), it's still not fast enough to run applications originally developed for shared memory parallel systems or commercial memory systems featuring high performance, custom-designed switched interconnects.
Version 4 of MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) has been in development since 2001. By the time you read this, MySQL 4.0 should be a stable release (or at least be in late-beta -- not finished yet, but still quite suitable for development work that you expect to deploy later this year).
Because Linux is now one of the primary platforms for Java development, developers have good reason to take advantage of each new Java release as soon as it's available. Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.4 (J2SE 1.4), the fifth major release of Java, was released back in March and is packed full of valuable new features. According to "Java in a Nutshell" author David Flanagan, there are 62 percent more classes and interfaces in J2SE 1.4 than its predecessor, Java 1.3.
CGI applications are often used to search through some database. For example, a catalog might let you look for an item by color, or an on-line dating service might let you pick people by gender, location, age, and interests.
Everyone professes to write portable code, but few programmers actually manage to do it. In most cases, so-called portable code comes out littered with #ifs or #ifdefs (or worse, nested #ifs and #ifdefs), rendering the code illegible and obfuscated. Sadly, the lion's share of many porting efforts is spent trying to figure out which lines of code are actually being compiled and executed. This wastes time and energy, and can be downright frustrating.
Over the past three and a half years, I've spent a good amount of time worrying about ways that Microsoft's long-term plans and strategies could hurt the market share of Linux and Open Source. Well, about a week ago, I was having a conversation with Jeremy Zawodny (one of our senior editors), and he raised some points that made me realize something: it might just be Microsoft's turn to be really worried. But not about Linux. (At least, not directly.) No, if I were Microsoft, I'd be much more worried about a little piece of software known as Apache.
As I write this, the hot topic on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org), the Linux gossip site of Linux gossip sites, is that the Vivek Mehra, vice president and general manager of Sun's Cobalt line (Sun's "baby" servers that run Linux), is saying that Sun is embracing Linux. A flood of opinions is pouring in: "This is great! Sun will move Linux into professional server markets!" "This is terrible! Sun will rip off Linux's best and leave the GPL in the dust." "At last, Sun has seen the light!"
