If you're writing production code in Ruby and haven't been exposed to optimization strategies, take a look at this tutorial. Learn how to profile and optimize Ruby code (free reg. req.) with RubyInline and ZenOptimize, two tools that make this process easier.

MadPenguin interviews Bruce Perens about the new Debian Common Core Alliance. "As former Debian lead Bruce Perens discusses in this article, Debian has long played a central role in helping people all over the world share the fun, frivolity, fascination, and occasional frustration that is the world of free Open Source software."

Here's a review of SuSE 9.3: "Right now I'm looking at a SuSE 9.3 installation which offers me everything I'm used to plus more. It's hard to say if and when I'll switch, but it sure looks tempting. In more than one way SuSE feels so much better than Ubuntu, and it's hard to resist all the small details and finishes Novell put into the product."

The Java NetBeans IDE has plenty of support for troubleshooting and optimizing applications. Its built-in debugging support allows you to step through your code incrementally and monitor aspects of the running application, such as values of variables, the current sequence of method calls, the status of different threads, and the creation of objects. In this sample book chapter, you'll learn about NetBeans debugging features, so you can get your code working right as fast as possible.

"OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt has bumped the version identifier from 3.7-current to 3.8-beta in CVS HEAD. Now is an especially good time to test snapshots."

ExtremeTech explains how to build a rendering farm out of old computers. "At its core, a render farm is pretty simple: Seven or so machines on a network, a network-accessible storage location, a rendering app, and a queue manager. Putting it all together should be equally simple, right?"

Graphics hardware has grown from a simple display controller to a full fledged specialized processing unit, in the last 10 years. The amount of included memory has increased from a mere few Kilobytes to hundreds of Megabytes. But what other uses can be found for your videocard when you’re not playing a game or using the latest CAD package?

GTK+ 2.8.0 has been released. You can download it from here, and read the release notes here. GTK+ 2.8.0 depends on the Cairo vector graphics library for rendering most of the GTK+ widgets, bringing graphics capabilities as antialiased shapes, alpha blending, and gradients.

Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab serves as both a place to examine the threat posed to Microsoft products by open-source offerings and a venue for testing software from Microsoft and others that's designed to span that divide. The lab is home to hundreds of servers and desktops that run dozens of different types of Linux and Unix. Here are photos of the lab.

Knoppix, a Linux live CD, will boot a computer from the optical drive and give a slow but usable graphical user interface. The most recent version comes with Firefox and OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta, so if you're already using the Windows equivalent, Knoppix is that much easier to pick up. This still leaves the question, what can be done on a computer without a hard drive?

Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you tote your home or office desktop around on an iPod or similar portable device so that you could run it on any PC. The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.

Many reviews of Apple's new Mighty Mouse have already appeared on the web, and most of them were quite negative. Walter Mossberg even concluded: "Microsoft has beaten Apple on hardware design, at least in this one case." Are these findings correct? To find out, we put the Mighty Mouse to the test.

Kellen wrote a nice introduction to incremental encrypted backups which might be useful to Linux users who've never setup anything similar. Often Encryption isn't given a lot of focus when creating remote backups; but if you don't trust the remote host it is essential.

Cheetah templates are easy to understand and maintain. This article shows you how to generate any kind of text-based content quickly. One aspect of Cheetah's philosophy: "Python for the back end, Cheetah for the front end." Follow this rule of thumb, and you should have no trouble reaping the benefits of this templating system.