Quite a useful collection of javascript tips geared towards the beginner. Work your way through the examples to be sure you have the basics covered.

Click here for the tips at Builder.com

Ntop is an interesting application, available for both UNIX and Windows platforms. It displays network data in an interactive shell, intop, which mimics the behavior of the venerable top program that most UNIX administrators use. Ntop also has a sophisticated Web interface, providing information on Net traffic and statistics in a variety of tabular and graphical formats. In this article, I’ll provide an overview of the application and show some examples of its use.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) are the native protocols governing most Internet communications. TCP has its roots in the Department of Defense (DoD) Arpanet project and is fully defined in the RFC do*censored*ent #793: Transmission Control Protocol. You are using TCP, along with IP, each time an e-mail is sent or received, a file is downloaded, or a Web site is visited. In this article, I’ll cover the details of TCP and explain how to use UNIX tools to monitor the network and apply security.

The rapid pace of development of free/open source software has always stunned me. In just a few years, Linux and the free BSDs have become serious players in every major computing market, from embedded systems up to enterprise-class servers. Most impressive, however, is the strides they have made on the desktop. KDE and GNOME rival, and sometimes exceed, commercially available desktop environments who have been around for decades. (With apologies to the BSD developers, I am going to shorten “Linux and the free BSDs” to “Linux” for the rest of this essay.)

A handy one page poster summarising the main UML notation:

http://www.rational.com/uml/resources/quick/uml_poster.jsp

from Washington Post
Grubb’s Pharmacy is an unassuming if not seedy two-story clapboard landmark amid the grand brick townhouses of East Capitol Street. Not only is it one of the busiest pharmacies in the District. But being only four blocks from the Capitol, it is also the neighborhood provider of potions and portents to congressmen, lobbyists, super-lawyers, Supreme Court justices, ambitious aides and all those other classic Type A Washingtonians who think that whatever they’re working on is The Most Important Thing in the World. And of course sometimes they may be right.

Yet Grubb’s is filling only about five prescriptions a month for a drug named modafinil. “It’s nothing like Viagra. That was a national explosion,” says Edward F. Dillon, the pharmacist. “Or a drug like Propecia, for hair loss. Or Prozac. Let me tell you. When Time magazine put that on the cover, you could definitely see the spike.”

This may be the calm before the storm, however. For modafinil may have the power to change Washington.

What it does is shut off your urge to sleep.

Click here for full article.

Where can you get a project management tool that runs on Linux? Right here. It’s called MrProject. MrProject ships with Red Hat Linux 7.3 and has all the features you might expect in such a tool.

For example, Gantt charts, with foldable views to collapse/expand sub tasks.

from Builder.net
Here’s one of the facts of life in the software development biz: Some clients are just plain hard to deal with. What I mean by “hard to deal with” is precisely the opposite of what you feel about clients who are a joy to work with.

Certain clients are so difficult that they’ll make you look for ways to bail out of the project, even if it means you’ll be breaking a contract and forfeiting much-needed income.

Read the full article.

PHP::Session 0.11 – PHP::Session is a Perl module which provides a way to read and write PHP4 session files. This allows you to make your Perl Web applications share session data with your PHP4 Web applications.