Welcome to the WebsiteGurus Linux Corner.

A few weeks back, I was whining that although Doctor Who was available on Amazon Prime streaming, I didn't have any way to watch it on my television. Thankfully, my friend Richard Servello pointed me to the bluecop repo for XBMC. Not only does bluecop support Amazon Prime streaming, but it also has add-ons for Hulu and countless other network-video-streaming collections. more>>

Bitcoin mining is so last year. Put your expensive GPU to use cracking passwords.

When the Bitcoin mining craze hit its peak, I felt the tug to join this new community and make some easy money. I wasn't drawn only by the money; the concepts behind Bitcoin mining intrigued me, in particular the new use of graphics processors (GPUs). With a moderately expensive video card, you could bring in enough money to pay off your initial investment and your electricity bill in a relatively short time. more>>

Catalyst is the latest in the evolution of open-source Web development frameworks. Written in modern Perl and inspired by many of the projects that came before it, including Ruby on Rails, Catalyst is elegant, powerful and refined. It's a great choice for creating any Web-based application from the simple to the very complex. more>>

Most people have heard of gold. Most people are familiar with dollars. For a handful of geeky folks, however, the currency they hope will become a global standard is digital. Whether it's a problem or not, the currency you use on a day-to-day basis is tied to the government. more>>

HTML5 lets you play music through compliant browsers—no "cloud" required. more>>

It may sound like a new Indiana Jones movie or possibly a cheesy platform-style video game from the 1990s, but the title of this column actually refers to our focus this month—programming! Not that there's anything wrong with daring adventures in remote locations, it's just that all the red tape can be overwhelming. more>>

Multiprocessing, multithreading and evented I/O: the trade-offs in Web servers.

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should service clients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starves because some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessing and multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways to achieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system libraries for asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). To highlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo servers written in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_server and a polling_server. more>>

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong. more>>

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). more>>

 New products for April.

In my past several articles, I've looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a tool to solve a particular problem. That's the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it's up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. more>>

Poorly implemented monitoring systems can drive an administrator crazy. At best, they are distracting. At worst, they'll keep whoever is on pager duty up for nights at a time. This article discusses the best practices for designing systems that will keep your systems up and stay quiet when nothing is wrong. more>>

The first ever Blue Drop Awards for excellence in Drupal development were announced yesterday. Organized and led by Ben Finklea of Volacci, the awards were both a community effort to celebrate the great work of Drupal Developers, and also a vehicle for Drupal and open source evangelism. more>>

Don't be afraid of using your chosen database's command-line client. more>>

TrueCrypt is a fully open-source tool for encrypting data. That data can be on a completely encrypted hard drive, or just an encrypted image file. Thankfully, the encryption works the same regardless of your platform, so Windows and OS X users can share encrypted files between computers. more>>

TUX Magazine ceased publication after issue #20. Download past issues here.

May we recommend subscribing to another fine Linux publication instead? Check out Linux Journal.

This article by Daniel Bartholemew originally appeared in TUX Magazine, Issue 14.

We know you "could" create web pages by just typing HTML into a text editor or word processor. For those of us that have done this, we also know how much we don't want to ever have to do it again. There are many expensive tools that allow you to create pages without even knowing how to spell HTML. But, expensive may also not be something you are looking for.

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This Mango Parfait column appeared in TUX Magazine issue 12.

I couldn't figure out how to classify it. It is a How-To but it is an Opinion but ... I picked Opinion to warn people that if they think Gnome is great and KDE sucks they will probably not be able to handle her humor. On the other hand, if a Gnome user wants to know how to set up working directories in applications links, set up a multi-boot system, or think front page is something from a proprietary software company rather than a adjective and noun, you will probably find this article useful.

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This article by Donald Emmack first appeared in TUX Magazine, Issue 13.

If you have ever used a word processor to create a newsletter you probably felt like someone tied at least one of your hands behind your back. While word processors are very important tools (and Linux systems tend to come with their share) they aren't designed to give you the kind of control you need for a newsletter.

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This article by Jes Hall originally appeared in TUX Magazine Issue 11.

While KDE has a reasonable default look and includes lots of ways to customize it, many people are always looking for one more thing you can change. In this article Jes talks about wallpapers, icon themes, mouse cursors, color schemes, splash screens and themes.

The web site KDE-Look.org supplies the pieces and Jes tells you want you can do. Download the PDF below.

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This article by Jes Hall originally appeared in TUX Magazine, Issue 10.

There are an assortment of programs for Linux that do various types of Instant Messaging. Gaim seemed to have the head start is the "do everything" category and has been my tool of choice for using a secure Jabber server. If, however, you want to stick to KDE applications, Kopete is the "approved" answer.

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In this article which originally appeared in TUX Magazine issue 9, I talk about my experience with a web site that seemed to not be Linux-friendly. It turned out that the vendor was Linux-friendly and wanted to address the problem rather than pretend that "if it works with IE, it is correct".

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This article by Ryan Paul originally appeared in Issue 8 of TUX Magazine

Let me go out on a limb and say that organizing information is a fairly serious problem for all of us. Sometimes it is just a list of notes which you can easily handle with a text editor or KJots but many times you want to put together different types of information that is related. For example, some text copied from a web page or file, some graphics files, along with some annotations.

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This article by Matija Suklje initially appeared in TUX Magazine, issue 7.

There are a whole lot of MP3 players out there. Few will also play Ogg Vorbis files. The iRiver devices are among the few. Virtually all, of course, "talk" to your Windoze system. But, we are about Linux. In this article, Matija explains how to get your iRiver device talking to your Linux system.

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This article by Dimitry Kirsanov originally appeared in TUX Magazine, Issue 6.

Most people seem to think of programs such as Tux Paint, the GIMP, or Adobe Photoshop when you start talking about drawing something. That's natural as they are more like the way someone would draw by hand. We learned to use crayons, colored pencils and water colors first. When we converted to the digital world, we used these programs to continue with that type of drawing.

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