In my last article, I started discussing Compojure, a Web framework written in the Clojure language. Clojure already has generated a great deal of excitement among software developers, in that it combines the beauty and expressive elegance of Lisp with the efficiency and ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Although many people are excited about the hardware-hacking possibilities with the Raspberry Pi, one of the things that interests me most is the fact that it is essentially a small low-power Linux server I can use to replace other Linux servers I already have around the house.

It's funny, when your home office is your couch, you tend to forget how nice it can be when you dock a laptop and have all the extra screen real estate a monitor brings. For many years, I left my work laptop docked at work, and when I worked from home, I just VPNed in with a personal laptop.

It was inevitable. Back when the Raspberry Pi was announced, I knew I eventually would use one to power a beer fridge.

How'd Ya Do That? I tend to read science fiction or fantasy for entertainment and/or escape from reality.

Because the August issue's theme is programming, I thought I should cover some of the more-advanced features available in OpenMP.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows I love mobile devices. Phones, tablets and other shiny glowing gadgets are almost an addiction for me. I've talked about my addiction in other articles and columns, and Kyle Rankin even made fun of me once in a Point/Counterpoint column because my household has a bunch of iOS devices in it.

Creed of Python Developers Pythonistas are eager to extol the lovely virtues of our language. Most beginning Python programmers are invited to run import this from the interpreter right after the canonical hello world. One of the favorite quips from running that command is:

We've been working on writing code for the game Cribbage, and last time, I created the code needed to pick a random subset of six cards out of a "deck" and display them in an attractive format—like this: $ sh cribbage.sh Card 0: 7C Card 1: 5H Card 2: 9H Card 3: 10S Card 4: 5D Car

Mom always said, "It's not nice to point." I'd argue Mom didn't manually enter long, cumbersome URLs, however. We're all familiar with services like TinyURL, but because we're Linux folks, we tend to prefer doing such things on our own. As with almost everything in Linux, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and in this article, I explore a bunch.

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.

I've spent the past few months reviewing shell scripting basics, so I think it's time to get back into an interesting project.

In many scientific disciplines, the research you may be doing is completely new. It may be so new that there isn't even any instrumentation available to make your experimental measurements. In those cases, you have no choice but to design and build your own measuring devices.

The other day in the Linux Journal IRC room (#linuxjournal on Freenode), I was whining to the channel about no-ip.com deleting my account without warning. My home IP address hadn't changed in a couple months, and because there was no update, it appeared abandoned.

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that.

Many free software fans, if they were like me, breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Android operating system hit the market.

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

New Linux users often ask me "what is the best way to learn about Linux?" My advice always comes down to this: install and use Linux (any distribution will do but something stable works better), and

Like many folks, I received a shiny new Nexus 7 tablet for Christmas. This brought me great joy and excitement as I began to plot my future paperless life. For most of the evening and an hour or so the next day, I was sure the new Android tablet would change my life forever. Sadly, it wasn't that easy.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as "SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis.