In this second of two articles, Martin Redington shows you how to add a new style preferences window to your application that behaves in all respects exactly like the Apple preferences windows.

Jack Herrington talks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Brad Templeton about wiretapping, Brazilian technologist Bruno Souza explains why software freedom is important in his country, O'Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest wants to turn down the volume on all the noise in his various in-boxes, and Derrick Story and Chuck Toporek report from Macworld. (DTF 01-27-2006: 28 minutes 53 seconds)

Someday your program will have to parse text. If you're lucky, a few regular expressions will handle it. Otherwise, you need to write a parser. Don't be afraid of that dragon book from college--writing a parser in Python is easy with Pyparsing. Paul McGuire explains everything you need to know.

The most popular "proper" way to build a web application seems to be to use the Model-View-Controller design pattern. While it sounds complex, the concepts are sound and the ease of development it provides are compelling. Joe Stump shows how the View works by developing a working version in PHP 5.

Virtualization is an old idea--running multiple distinct operating systems atop a powerful box has a lot of advantages. Xen is a new virtualization platform. Despite its youth, its Linux support is very good. Kris Buytaert explains the basics of virtualization and shows how to configure and install Xen and to create new virtual machines.

What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has changed over the years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO. Now a lot of it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways to work more smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.

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.

In his latest Agile Web column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to use Python to interact with Flickr as a lightweight web service.

The NAMM show is Mecca for musicians—acres upon acres of sparkling new instruments, pro audio gear, and music software, most of it not even released yet. But the show is not open to the public. Our team spent four days combing the halls and prodding the prototypes to round up this audiovisual gallery of what you'll be playing this year.

As podcasting takes off, a number of podcasts specifically tailored to the Java developer have become available. Ranging from the serious to the silly, covering the whole Java realm or just a single product, there seems to be something for every developer with a set of headphones. In this article, we interview the voices behind the Swampcast and Java Posse podcasts.

Spring is powerful and popular, but in practice, the configuration files it needs for beans, dependencies, and services can quickly become confusing and hard to maintain. Jason Zhicheng Li offers some real-world advice on how to keep control of your configs.

Many reviewers have given Apple a pretty good thrashing over its new professional photography software, Aperture. After delving into Aperture, Scott Bourne has come to some conclusions about where the critics went wrong, and he puts forth his ideas in this article.

There's some pretty interesting stuff on Google Video. In this article, Erica Sadun shows you how to download videos, convert them to an iPod-friendly format, and load them onto your new 5G video iPod.

Emulators are a must-have for anyone developing mobile applications. To get you started, Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to use the emulator tools that shipped with Windows Mobile 5.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

In this first of two articles, Martin Redington shows you how to add a new style preferences window to your application that behaves in all respects exactly like the Apple preferences windows.

Based on his work developing a stable wireless mesh platform that allows true peer-to-peer multi-hop network connectivity, Chris Ngan discusses some proof-of-concept applications that demonstrate the power of this network infrastructure and the ease with which text/chat, voice, and video applications can be made location-aware. Chris will discussing these concepts in more detail at the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference.

Kendrew Lau taught HTML development to business students. Grading web pages by hand was tedious--but Perl came to the rescue. Here's how Perl and HTML parsing modules helped make teaching fun again.

Where are the all-in-one PHP frameworks that make building well-factored and maintainable applications as easy as building simple sites? Brian Fioca shows how to make a simple database-backed site with WASP in just a few lines of code.

Regression and unit tests are your first line of defense against bugs, bad design, and silly mistakes. Unfortunately, C programmers rarely use the good testing tools of other languages--but now there's libtap. Stig Brautaset explains how to test your C code using libtap and the wonderful Perl testing tools.

Perl's DBI module makes it easy to use a database. That's not the only way to interact with a database, though. If your PostgreSQL database doesn't do exactly what you want, you can write server-side extensions--in Perl. Andrew Dunstan shows how to enable PL/Perl and how to store and retrieve database data with it.

Dave Hoover shows us how to use AJAX, Ruby, and the new HTML canvas element to add simple animation and interactivity to web apps.

Podcasting expert Jack Herrington reveals how to set up, conduct, and record an interview that will delight your listeners.

iBATIS is one of the object-relational (OR) frameworks embraced by the Spring framework, and it's an ideal choice for those seeking a middle ground between full-blown OR and hand-written JDBC. In this excerpt from Spring: A Developer's Notebook, Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland show how to integrate iBATIS with Spring.

Most uses of the Java-based Lucene search engine are for searching typical text documents. But what if you want to search Java code itself? Renuka Sindhgatta argues that this would be a boon for finding reusable code, and shows how to adapt Lucene to parse Java code for maximum searchability.

IPSec management tools are not particularly intuitive in XP. But things are going to be better in Vista. Mitch Tulloch, author of Windows Server Hacks, takes a look at IPSec support in Vista, and clues you in on what you can expect.