In part one of this two-part excerpt from JBoss: A Developer's Notebook, authors Norman Richards and Sam Griffith covered how to use the Web Console and its MBeans to manage your web apps. In today's excerpt, learn how to create a monitor for your app, how to configure alerts to be sent via email, and how to manage JBoss from the command line.

Barely larger than a first-gen iPod, this portable recorder lets you capture sound in 24-bit WAV format or compact MP3. But is the low price too good to be true? Accomplished recording engineer Mark Nelson MicroTracks a Hawaiian guitar festival to find out.

AJAX is all the rage and it's being used for non-trivial applications. But do you know what's fast and what's slow in AJAX? Get ready to tune your AJAX apps.

On-demand computing is a much-repeated term, but what does it mean, and what does it deliver? As Stephen Morris explains, autonomic computing, policy-driven workflows, and grid computing are all part of the answer.

In this follow-up to his first article on installing Fink, Koen Vervloesem tackles more advanced topics, such as building binary packages, running your own binary distribution server, and creating Fink packages for your own software.

An important part of hardening Windows servers against attack is disabling any unnecessary services on your machines. Mitch Tulloch, author of Windows Server Hacks, shows you how to identify which services are essential, and which can be turned off.

While we've been off shopping for audio hardware and software, Phil Torrone has captured a tour of Squid Labs on video. This is a one-minute promotion for his video, so that those subscribed to Distributing the Future don't miss it.

Generics provide the ability to create type-safe collections in .NET. Jesse Liberty explains why they're important, and how to best make use of them.

Any document-processing application needs to make a model of the documents it expects to process. This can be a time-consuming and error-prone task, especially if you've never done it before. David Wheeler of the Bricolage project shows how to analyze and model documents for his publishing system. Perhaps it can help you.

Bob DuCharme, a long-time XML.com contributor, shows us how to turn eBay email alerts into an Atom channel.

Databases have tables, Swing has tables. Why should it be a hassle to bring the two together? In this excerpt from Swing Hacks, authors Joshua Marinacci and Chris Adamson show you how to put some JDBC behind your table model, and bring your database to life in Swing.

In part one of this two-part excerpt from JBoss: A Developer's Notebook, you'll learn how use the Web Console (an advanced version of the JMX Console), how to work with its enhanced monitoring capabilities and MBeans, and how to create snapshots of your data over regular intervals.

Modern Unix-like operating systems have their own characteristics for allocating and using memory. Howard Feldman explains how modern programming languages use memory, why this matters, and how to avoid memory and resource leaks.

There's plenty of near-repetition in software development; writing very similar code over and over again. Stop copying, pasting, and modifying, and start automating the process! Zachary Kessin shows how to use Emacs Lisp to generate useful and reusable database-access code for PHP.

If your music relies on fresh, ear-grabbing sounds, you'll love Reaktor. Native Instruments' flagship softsynth isn't just packed with cool presets; it's a set of more than 20 instruments, all of them packed with cool presets. In this hands-on tutorial, MIDI guru Jim Aikin uncovers expressive features most Reaktor owners overlook.

In his latest XML Annoyances column, Micah Dubinko reports from last week's XML 2005 conference in Atlanta.

It's time to dig around in your OS X Developer Tools and put some of those utilities to work. Robert Daeley takes you on a tour of handy CLI tools that, if you're not using them now, you will be after reading this article.

As business use of the internet has grown up, so has business abuse. From this incubator emerged spyware -- the grownup cousin to viruses and worms, whose intent is not simply to have fun at someone else's expense but to make money at someone else's expense. Anton Chuvakin looks at what spyware is, how it works, and what you can do to keep your systems free of spyware infection.

In part one of this two-part series, Ryan Stephens described what an iterator is, both in terms of the iterator pattern and its implementation in C++. That explanation is sufficient only when you are using the standard containers, so in part two Ryan discusses the other kinds of iterators you should know about: reverse iterators, stream iterators, and custom iterators. Ryan is a coauthor of O'Reilly's C++ Cookbook.

Yes, you can spend extra dollars for Apple's sleek white video cable for TV connectivity, or you can hack your own together for cheap. Erica Sadun shows you how.

Noel Davis looks at problems in PHP, Emacs, ftpd-ssl, Lynx, Roaring Penguin pppoe, OpenVPN, RAR, Fedora Core X-Chat, HP-UX xterm, libungif4, and GpsDrive.

Bluetooth--its name is cool, but what can you really do with it? If you're curious, let Michael Yuan take you on a tour through the myriad use cases for Bluetooth-enabled devices, from car kits to social networking. He also provides overviews on the technology behind Bluetooth, and how to use it. If you're considering Bluetooth, either for app development or to create your own cable-free personal area network, this is a good place to start.

Analyzing and graphing statistical data doesn't have to be as dry and boring as it sounds. With the GNU R programming language, it can be as easy as writing a few lines of code--R is to statistics and analysis as Perl is to text files. Kevin Farnham shows how easy it is to use GNU R productively with just a little bit of training.

Building web sites can be tedious--so many parts and pieces are all the same. Have you written enough form processors and shopping carts to last the rest of your life? Now you can get on with the real programming. Christopher H. Laco shows how to use Handel and Catalyst to build a working e-commerce site without actually writing any code.

Jeremy Jones recently bought a new laptop and decided to run Linux. Don't shudder--it actually works! Here's how he installed, reinstalled, and configured Ubuntu GNU/Linux on a Dell Inspiron.