A well-written Perl program should, in theory, beat a shell script, right? In theory. In practice, sometimes the details of your Perl installation have more to do with why your program is slow than you might believe. Jean-Louis Leroy recently tracked down a bottleneck and wrote up his experiences with making Perl programs start faster.

There's never been a better time to put together drum tracks in your computer. But Stylus RMX stands apart from the software crowd due to its inspired sound design, creative randomization engine, and vast customizability. In this hands-on tutorial, MIDI meister Jim Aikin reveals how you can get the most out of this amazing percussion plugin.

Building and bundling web applications hasn't exactly grown easier over the years. This is especially true if you customize your projects for different clients. Don't go crazy with manual solutions--automate them. Michael Kimsal shows how the Ant build tool can make building, bundling, and deploying PHP applications much easier.

Security-minded laptop users live in fear of theft, not only of their computer but also of their precious secret data. NetBSD's CGD project is a cryptographic virtual disk that can protect sensitive data while acting like a normal filesystem. Federico Biancuzzi recently interviewed its author, Roland Dowdeswell, on the goals and implementation of the system.

Jason Levitt returns with a piece explaining how to use AJAX and JSON to interact with web services from JavaScript in a seamless, cross-domain, cross-browser fashion.

2005 may not have seen a new version of Java, but it was a year of tremendous activity that saw Java assert its popularity, even while some wondered how well-suited Java is for its second decade. In this article, ONJava editor Chris Adamson wraps up the year in Java by looking back at some of the year's most popular articles.

In part one of this three-part series on hacking Pong, Josh Glover detailed how you can write your own Pong clone, using SDL. So what's next? Adding the paddles. Today Josh walks through how, with the help of sprites, you can create and animate player-controlled paddles for your Pong clone. Tune in the first week of '06 for Josh's conclusion--you'll need to add the ball and scoring next, right?

Maintaining transaction integrity, and rolling back failed steps, becomes more difficult on a cluster. One option is to move some of the load balancing decisions to your code, and accounting for which cluster nodes you're using. Sachin Shetty shows how this works in the context of an Oracle Real Application Cluster.

One of Jesse Liberty's clients has a problem: she has a database with 2 million records and wants to display these records in a data grid, but does not want to load them all into memory from the database. She wants them loaded "just in time." Jesse shows how to use the new DataGridView to neatly solve the problem.

Macworld SF 2006 is shaping up to be a busy show for O'Reilly Media. We have great specials, lots of books, a full speaker lineup, and a menu of activities. Here's a comprehensive overview.

RAGI combines Asterisk's VoIP handling capabilities with the power and efficiency of Ruby on Rails. Joe Heitzeberg will lead a tutorial using his bindings for Asterisk with the Ruby on Rails framework at the Emerging Telephony conference.

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.