Once you have a database set up, sooner or later you will want to edit its tables or add a new record. You have four ways to do so.

When databases became available for the personal computer in the mid-1980s, they quickly gained a mystique as the ultimate productivity applications. Despite their widespread use, in some ways they have never lost that mystique -- so much so that many desktop users will stretch the use of spreadsheets to cumbersome lengths rather than consider setting up a database.

When we were in college, my wife (then, girlfriend) had the best answering machine greeting message, ever. When people called her, the answering machine would answer, “Hello?” and wait. Invariably, the caller would start talking as though they had actually reached a live person. They'd be talking about last weeks assignments, or a party next week. Then the other shoe would drop.

The robustness and versatility of the Android open source operating system combined with extremely energy efficient E Ink could prove to be a marriage made in heaven, as this demonstration from labs.moto.com would suggest.

Presentation software isn't complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be. Maybe that's why OpenOffice.org's Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code.

The upcoming release of Cygwin version 1.7 will be dropping support for Windows 9x (Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me). If you're lucky enough never to have to use Windows, Cygwin probably seems like a waste of effort. But, if you're not so lucky, Cygwin is what keeps you sane.

Listen to Your Music, and Your Friends' Music, Wherever You Are

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

The Master view in Impress is the equivalent of page styles in Writer. It's the view where you can set elements of design that appear throughout your presentation, such as the slide background and foreground colors, any reoccurring elements, and the fonts. By creating the master slides you need before you add content, you can automate your work and free yourself to focus on content.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a wrapper around a set of technologies that enables developers to build rich Internet applications that deploy on the desktop. Applications are created using a mixture of JavaScript, HTML, and Flash. The resulting

Why do you need an article on building slide shows in Impress? You don't, in one sense, because the application is simple enough for anyone who has ever seen a slide show to figure out. If you want, you can just plunge in and learn by doing. However, if you take the time to learn, you'll find that OpenOffice.org has two tools to help you organize and automate the process -- and, ultimately, to help you save time.

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.

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting language in the LJ Readers' Choice survey. That inspired me to write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start yelling at me).

Stubbornly, OpenOffice.org continues to ship with only a handful of templates. Despite the efforts of several sub-projects and individuals to change the situation, the standard OpenOffice.org download includes only a couple of slide show presentations and a few templates to accompany the wizards available in the file menu. This lack of templates is a serious handicap for many users, and often leaves a poor impression on new users who are accustomed to the selection of templates found in other office suites.

What is interactive fiction? It all started in 1975 with a man named Will Crowther who wanted to create something for his daughters that tied together two of his loves: role playing games and cave exploration. The result was a game called "Adventure" (also sometimes called "Colossal Cave"). He wrote the game on the mainframe he used at work and while his daughters loved it, others who discovered the game did to, and they shared it far and wide. Stanford student Don Woods discovered the program on one of the university computers in 1976 and with Crowther's permission extended the Fortran original, adding more rooms and treasure. This expanded version was later ported to C and from there to countless platforms and languages. You can still download various versions of it today.