Introduced in Mac OS 9, Keychain Access is an API and an application designed to provide secure storage for all your sensitive information. It has continued to evolve in Mac OS X, and Giles Turnbull helps you unlock its mysteries.

We recently talked to Norman Lewis, the director of research for France Telecom's Home office and a keynote speaker at our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference, about the state of the VoIP industry and the role of telcos in the future.

Adobe's Camera Raw is arguably the most popular RAW-format converter available today. In this video, Deke McClelland introduces you to this tool and shows you tips for making image adjustments.

Perl isn't the last, best programming language you'll ever use for every task. (Perl itself is a C program, you know.) Sometimes other languages do things better. Take logic programming--Prolog handles relationships and rules amazingly well, if you take the time to learn it. Robert Pratte shows how to take advantage of this from Perl.

Is your home directory full of thousands of poorly organized files? Do you have deep directory hierarchies you are unable to navigate and barely remember creating? Are you sinking in a sea of data and just can't get out? Karl Fogel explains how he organized his life and his home directory.

Premature optimization is the root of all sorts of evil in programming, but meaningful and necessary optimization is vital to effective and efficient programming. When your Python program just doesn't perform, don't reach for C or C++ without first playing with the Python profiler. Jeremy Jones shows how to find and fix bottlenecks in your programs.

One of the great things about the games of yore is that they tended to be pretty simple, and as Josh Glover explains, Pong is one of the simplest to implement. In this first article of a three-part series, Josh shows you how to clone Pong all by yourself. Josh contributed a number of the hacks in O'Reilly's Retro Gaming Hacks.

In what direction could the internet have gone if it were not for the FSF/GNU movement and how would the internet have looked today? Tim O'Reilly offers his perspective.

Hibernate uses mapping files to express the mapping of Java classes to database tables. In a complex project, keeping mappings in sync with your Java code can be burdensome and error-prone. Fortunately, the hbm2java tool can automate this by generating POJO classes from the mapping files. John Ferguson Smart shows how to use hbm2java with Ant and Maven, and how to customize the behavior of the generated classes.

Ten years before remix entered the musical lexicon, Josh Gabriel was inventing machines that remixed electronic dance music, eventually leading to Mixman, the first popular remixing program. A dozen No. 1 Billboard dance mixes followed. Now his inventor's mind has turned to the internet.

In part one of this two-part excerpt from Killer Game Programming in Java, author Andrew Davison strode through some complex programming issues for developing Java 3D graphics, such as how to add shapes, lighting, and backgrounds to a Checkers3D application. Here in part two, Andrew continues the theme by demonstrating how to create a floating sphere for the Checkers3D app.

Mark Woodman shows us how to enhance the usability of RSS and Atom syndication channels with an idea he calls Immediate Action Feeds.

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.