Matthew Gast develops a simple model to determine the maximum theoretical capacity of an access point to carry voice calls.

In Part 1 of this series, Mitch Tulloch, author of Windows Server Hacks, showed you how to identify which basic server services are essential, and which can be turned off. In this second part, he shows you additional services for servers configured with specific roles.

There are myriad ways to control and manipulate information on a MySQL server -- some are stand-alone GUI apps, some are web-based, and of course the venerable (and powerful) command-line option is always available. Robert Daeley shows some of the most useful tools.

O'Reilly editor Andy Oram reports on the state of VoIP from this year's VON conference. As well as looking at some of the latest products and trends, Andy considers the security and policy issues facing the industry.

Are you paying full attention to anything you do these days? Probably not. Whether at work or at home, you probably are distracted by email, IM, the telephone, the television, and countless other distractions. We begin this podcast with Linda Stone talking about Continuous Partial Attention from her SuperNova address "Your Attention Please." Paul Graham compares amateurs and professionals in his OSCON keynote "What Business Can Learn from Open Source." We respond to a listener comment on a story we ran last week and conclude with Ernie Prabhakar on open source from infancy to adulthood. (DTF 008 beta: 24 minutes, 30 seconds, 13.9MB)

The most complained-about development tool is often the bug tracking system. Matthew B. Doar, author of Practical Development Environments, offers advice on what to do about some of the most common frustrations with bug trackers, such as tracking bugs in multiple releases; tracking files affected by a bug; and more.

Palm devices were once the model of simplicity for Mac users. Giles Turnbull, late-'90s PDA geek, picked up a new Palm TX after a lengthy mobile device hiatus. But he soon discovered that syncing feeling that accompanies Palm/OS X connectivity these days. Here's his report.

As you may know, we've been retooling our editorial focus during 2005 to focus on what the world looks like in the post-core-XML specification era; that is, what happens when we stop working so much on XML as with it? Toward that end, we've prepared a survey for XML.com readers, which I hope you'll take a few minutes to complete. One thing I can promise is that your responses on this survey will be carefully studied as I think about the editorial focus of XML.com during 2006.

XMLTV is a set of open source utilities for working with television schedules. It's not just for people building their own PVRs, though--with a little cleverness, you can build your own schedule applications. Brian Murray shows how he manages his family's entertainment time.

Perl hackers work with files all day long, creating, renaming, updating, editing, and munging them. Do you know your file-manipulation code works, though? That's why Phil Crow wrote Test::Files--to gain confidence and practice good coding. Here's how it works and how he tested a test module.

Type; reload web site; eyeball output; fix bugs; repeat--there's a better way to write PHP code! Testing gives you confidence not only that your code works, but also that you can make changes to improve your design and flexibility without breaking behavior. Sebastian Bergmann, the author of PHPUnit, shows how his library can help to ease your development woes.

3D has taken over video gaming. When will it take over mundane computing areas such as file managers, word processors, and desktop environments? Maybe soon, if Hideya Kawahara and the Project Looking Glass team have their way. John Littler explores the ideas, implementations, and possibilities of 3D interfaces in this interview.

Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column brings us up to date with Atom Publishing Protocol. Fast on the heels of the Atom Syndication Format becoming an internet standard, it's time to see where the APP stands.

Uche Ogbuji's Agile Web column returns with a look at handling some of the trickier issues in the Atom Syndication Format, which has recently become RFC 4287, an internet standard.

Our book excerpt today is for all you Java gamers, especially the 3D junkies--we know you're out there. In part one of a two-part series taken from Chapter 15 of Killer Game Programming in Java, author Andrew Davison describes how to create a scene in a Checkers3D application, using Java 3D. And check back next week when Andrew shows how to create a floating sphere for the Checkers3D app.

O/R frameworks map Java classes to database tables and SQL code. While popular, this approach is unpopular among DBAs, with the database at the mercy of an external tool. Another approach is to go the other direction: write tables and stored procedures and generate Java classes from that. Norbert Ehreke introduces Amber, a framework that embodies this approach.

It's certainly true that building a MythTV system is not for the faint of heart. In the course of his installation, Matthew Gast had four major problems to get through: two performance problems, one display problem, and one maddening mystery (solved). He tackles all four in this article.

Dashboard is a great container for your Web 2.0 application. In this tutorial, Luke Burton walks you through a Dashboard implementation of Virtual Earth, highlighting the various components and showing you what they do.

Virtualization lets you have multiple "virtual machines," each with its own operating system running in a sandbox, shielded from each other, all in one physical machine. But why would you want to do this? Wei-Meng Lee explains, and takes you on a tour of some of the most popular virtualization software available: Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, VMware Workstation 5.0, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

eBay and O'Reilly are sponsoring a coding contest for applications built on eBay web services: the eBay Developer Challenge 2006. This contest encourages the development of great tools that the eBay community will love. Winners will be announced at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego in March.

Photoshop's Variations tool simplifies color correction by presenting you with visual options in realtime. In this training video, Deke McClelland shows you how perform simple color correction quickly.

It's like a sound lab on your Mac -- with Audio Hijack Pro you can digitize legacy music, time-shift radio shows, and even repurpose your legally purchased music. Erica Sadun shows you five of her favorite AHP tips.

We recently ran a survey on ONLamp.com to find out more about our readers. Here are some of the interesting tidbits of information we learned.

If you don't know where you are and what you're doing, how do you know where you're going? A crucial part of any successful web site is statistical analysis. AWStats is a powerful open source tool for collecting, summarizing, and reporting web statistics. Sean Carlos shows how to install, configure, and understand the output of the program.

Perl's a great server-side programming language. It's also good for developers and administrators. Where are the client-side uses? Recently, Jiann Wang and Hitachi GST had to solve a thorny software licensing reporting problem. They used Perl--distributing a small client program to each desktop--and solved their problem quickly, effectively, and elegantly. Here's how.