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

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

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

Catalyst is the latest in the evolution of open-source Web developmentframeworks. Written in modern Perl and inspired by many of the projectsthat came before it, including Ruby on Rails, Catalyst is elegant, powerfuland refined. It's a great choice for creating any Web-based applicationfrom 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>>

Rubies, Pythons and Perls!

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

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

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should serviceclients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starvesbecause some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessingand multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways toachieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system librariesfor asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). Tohighlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo serverswritten in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_serverand a polling_server. more>>

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

A short while ago, an article appeared in LinuxJournal 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.