One of the things I dislike about using Irssi in a terminal window on OS X is that I often miss the screen flash when someone mentions my name in IRC. With some fancy SSH tunneling (maybe more on that some other issue) and a really cool pop-up notification tool, if someone mentions my name, I can't miss it. more>>

Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Service sell virtual machines. EC2 revenue is expected to surpass $1B in revenue this year. That's a lot of VMs. more>>

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so on. more>>

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him! more>>

Although it's difficult for me to look at this piece's title and not think of mutant felines, it doesn't make the statement any less true. If you've ever used the tail command on log files, you'll instantly appreciate multitail. My friend (and LJ reader) Nick Danger introduced me to multitail, and I can't believe how useful it is. more>>

When your data and work grow, and you still want to produce results in a timely manner, you start to think big. Your one beefy server reaches its limits. You need a way to spread your work across many computers. You truly need to scale out. more>>

Android is a lot more free than iOS, but there are limits. We need to break through those.

At its birth, Android was the horizontal and open solution to the problem of Apple's vertical and closed silo. On Android, hardware makers and software writers could build devices and apps, free to operate outside the walls of any vendor's closed garden. more>>

Science-fiction geeks have very specific definitions for their (okay, "our") jargon. A cyborg is a hybrid mechanical and organic creature. more>>

Are you using IPv6? If so, what do you do with it? Does your ISP support it natively? We want to hear your IPv6 success stories, and share them with our readers. Either comment below or send e-mail via http://www.linuxjournal.com/contact, and we'll run your response in our upcoming Networking issue. more>>

Since this month was our Raspberry Pi issue, I did some research on "what folks do with their Raspberry Pi". I sent queries out via Twitter, Facebook, the Linux Journal Web site and even the #linuxjournal IRC room. When it comes to doing extra-geeky projects with the RPi, every person I spoke with mentioned buying parts from Adafruit. more>>

I've spent the past few months reviewing shell scripting basics, so I think it's time to get back into an interesting project. more>>

In many scientific disciplines, the research you may be doing is completely new. It may be so new that there isn't even any instrumentation available to make your experimental measurements. In those cases, you have no choice but to design and build your own measuring devices. more>>

The other day in the Linux Journal IRC room (#linuxjournal on Freenode), I was whining to the channel about no-ip.com deleting my account without warning. My home IP address hadn't changed in a couple months, and because there was no update, it appeared abandoned. more>>

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. more>>

Many free software fans, if they were like me, breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Android operating system hit the market. more>>

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS. more>>

New Linux users often ask me "what is the best way to learn about Linux?" My advice always comes down to this: install and use Linux (any distribution will do but something stable works better), and more>>

As Linux users, we tend to take programs like GIMP for granted. Thankfully, as of version 2.8.2, GIMP is available as a native application for OS X! Because everyone reading this most likely is familiar with how awesome GIMP is for photo editing, it's worth mentioning there is another open-source photo-editing application for OS X named Seashore. more>>

Like many folks, I received a shiny new Nexus 7 tablet for Christmas. This brought me great joy and excitement as I began to plot my future paperless life. For most of the evening and an hour or so the next day, I was sure the new Android tablet would change my life forever. Sadly, it wasn't that easy. more>>

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. more>>