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 interpret the reports--not just what they say, but what they mean.

Are you in the market for a new compact digital camera, or are you looking at upgrading? Today's digital cameras come fully loaded with lots of bells and whistles, but do you really need lots of advanced features? What are the features that will benefit you the most? Professional photographer and best-selling author, Derrick Story, steps you through the latest features and provides valuable tips on what to look for.

James Polanco, founder of Fake Science, chats with Jack about his popular radio show and how he started podcasting to cover digital music news, reviews, and to showcase favorite artists. James reveals his gear setup for recording and editing the show.

With increasingly sophisticated spam filters in place, sometimes getting your email to reach the intended recipient can be difficult. Steve Bass and Dan Tynan, authors of the Annoyances series, and PC World columnists, provide expert insights on what you should do. Dan and Steve also talk about taking control of your PC and what you can do to prevent invasions from phishers, spammers, and trojans.

Listen in as Jack Herrington, the author of "Podcasting Hacks", chats with pioneer podcasters, Doug Kaye and James Polanco. Doug is the founder of IT Conversations, the influential site that features podcasts covering important events, programs, and interviews with industry luminaries. James is the founder of "Fake Science, the popular podcast radio show covering all things digital music--news, reviews and profiles of digital artists.

Many programming languages and some databases support enumerated types. They can make domain constraints much more robust and simple. PostgreSQL doesn't currently support them in the core, but they're reasonably easy to add. Andrew Dunstan shows how to use them.

Several BSD-based distributions have emerged recently--and a few are relevant to and accessible by end users. One such is PC-BSD, whose innovations include a binary package installation system. Of course, that requires people to build binary packages for it. Fortunately, as Dru Lavigne demonstrates, doing so is both easy and addictively fun.

Developers now have the right tools and the right motivation to build a wide range of new desktop applications, telephone services, and corporate phone systems that integrate voice with the Web, IM, WiFi, and more. Ed Stephenson talks with program cochair Surj Patel about what's emerging in telephony, and what you can expect to learn at O'Reilly's upcoming Emerging Telephony Conference.

Perl is famous for its text-processing capabilities. However, sometimes the data you want to process is too complicated for regular expressions and you reach for a parser for HTML, RTF, or other common format. What happens you don't have a pre-defined parser, but the text you need to work with is too complicated for regular expressions? Curtis Poe shows how to do proper lexing with Perl.

Now that we have moving paddles for our SDL Pong clone, the only thing standing in the way of some real fun is making the ball move (and adding scorekeeping). Josh Glover delivers the finale to his three-part Pong hack by showing you how to add these last two elements to finish off your very own table tennis computer game.

Dixie Dregs co-founder Andy West discovered that virtuosity can be a liability in the music world, but a benefit in technology. Now this four-time Grammy nominee programs computers by day and pursues his amazing music at night, drawing the best from both disciplines. Here's how.

Mike Fitzgerald gets the new year started right with a look at generating XML in Ruby using Builder.

Maven's not just about building; it's about viewing, understanding, and managing your projects. In this first part of a two-part excerpt from Maven: A Developer's Notebook, authors Vincent Massol and Timothy M. O'Brien introduce Maven's reporting features for issue tracking, dependencies, code style, and more.

In addition to the little blue magnifying glass in the upper-right corner of your desktop, Tiger provides the mdfind and mdls commands for searching. Andy Lester discovered them while working on his updates to Mac OS X Tiger In A Nutshell. Essentially, they provide the power of Spotlight in the Unix shell. Here's how it works.

Dependency injection, also known as inversion of control, is a programming technique being adopted by many programmers and frameworks, including the popular Spring framework. But using it in J2EE 1.4 requires a burdensome deployment-descriptor-based approach. Debu Panda shows how Java EE 5.0 provides relief in the form of annotations-based dependency injection.

Unit testing is one of the tasks that every programmer worth their salt needs to do. Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to use the new Unit Testing feature of Visual Studio 2005 Team System to auto-generate the code needed to test your application.

When you read the articles and weblog posts by prominent Mac users and Mac pundits, do you ever find yourself wondering what kind of computer setup they're using? Giles Turnbull does. He recently contacted a spat of Mac professionals and asked them what they depend on. Here's what they had to say.

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.