Based on new research, source code analysis has been used to find thousands of bugs in the Linux 2.6.x kernel. Here's how the technology works, what it can find, and why coding may never be the same again.

As enterprise systems evolve from concept to code, an otherwise clean design can become downright, well, messy, as the practical plumbing of logging, caching, transactions, and more infiltrates modules. Wouldn't it be better if, say, logging were just another module? Enter aspect-oriented programming.

As your networks grow, you'll want ways to segregate and manage them. Cisco routers are staples for this purpose, but Linux, together with GNU Zebra, can make a good substitute. Here's how to get up and running with Zebra.

I am happy to report that I've finally completed Madame Pearl's "Clairvoyance for Fun and Profit" correspondence course. For the modest tuition of $1,000, I've received hours of expert instruction via webcast, a sheepskin for my office (soon to be parlor), a deck of tarot cards autographed by Madame Pearl herself, and a shiny new iBall, a wireless crystal ball that peers into the future.

"Money makes the world go around" is a well-known adage, and a similar aphorism could be made about the Internet. Indeed, in the last ten years, a mammoth industry has grown out of and because of the Internet. These days it's quite common to conduct a considerable part of one's personal business online, using the Web to manage utilities, bank and securities accounts, and to purchase everything from cruises to cars to compact discs and even candy.

If you've worked with a group of programmers, you've probably used version control software like CVS. However, version control is also useful for non-programmers -- for instance, for a group of technical writers producing product documentation.

Document and image scanners have become an integral part of many offices. With a scanner, you can quickly digitize photos, diagrams, and even textual documents for electronic alteration and distribution.

The last few "Extreme Linux" columns have focused on multiprocessing using OpenMP. While often used in scientific models for shared memory parallelism on symmetric multi-processor (SMP) machines, OpenMP can also be used in conjunction with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to provide a second level of parallelism for improved performance on Linux clusters having SMP compute nodes. Programs that mix OpenMP and MPI are often referred to as hybrid codes.

If you've worked with Linux for some time, you've probably used a set-user ID (or setuid) program to temporarily gain permissions different from your normal access rights. Unlike typical programs that run with your permissions, a setuid program runs with the permissions of that program's owner. For example, if you launch a program that's setuid and owned by root, that program runs as though root had executed it, temporarily granting you the same (full) access privileges as the superuser.

Many applications, including most of those shipped with Windows, Linux, KDE, Gnome, and Apache are written in C. C is perhaps the most universal of all programming languages -- its expressive power, portability, minimalism, and speed make it a popular choice.

Although many of my columns deal with entire programs, I find that people still send me email about the basics. So, this month, I thought I'd address an issue that people seem to keep asking about: basic list manipulation.

Last month's "Tech Support" showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, a handy system utility that alerts you to all filesystem changes. Like SNORT and others, Tripwire's just one of many practical security measures that minds your system 24/7.

I've always been, well, skeptical about the Linux desktop. Now, I use one myself, KDE on top of SuSE Linux 8, thank you very much, but then I know Linux.