Turn your data and functions into professional-looking graphs with Gnuplot 4.0, a freely distributed plotting tool. In this article, get a hands-on guide to gnuplot that emphasizes the idioms you'll need to use this tool effectively.

Most modern Unix-based operating systems (e.g. Linux, MacOS X, and BSD) come with a little console-mode utility called GNU Screen. It's a powerful tool in the hands of the console warrior, a veritable Swiss Army knife of text-mode human-computer interaction.

This utility, despite its considerable usefulness, goes unused by a great many people. Why is this? Few people even know it's there, and those that do rarely understand the problem it solves. In this article, I will explain what screen does for you, and provide a simple set of instructions for accomplishing basic tasks using screen. My audience is those that are skilled with the command line but who have little or no experience with screen itself.

Screen is a command line utility that comes with lots of Unix variants (including Linux). It is a bit hard to describe and to discover. It provides two main features: multiplexing a terminal and detaching/re-attaching sessions.

Ubik aims to provide a set of distributed computing APIs that complement Java's current "official" offerings - such as EJB and Jini. The main API of the Ubik project is a RMI-like framework that allows to easily and transparently perform method invocations over the wire. The whole process is simplified by (not exclusively): generating stubs dynamically; not enforcing the declaration of remote exceptions.

In a more general fashion, Ubik tries to offer an alternative to the complexity of Jini, and to the overkill and limitations of EJB. In the long run, the Ubik project's aim is to make the distribution of objects as transparent as possible, without compromises on scalability, robustness and performance.

The Java Conduit Manager manages the installation and de-installation of Java based conduits to the Palm HotSync Manager and gives an overview of all conduits installed using the Java Conduit Manager.

Want to provide PalmOS-based handheld data synchronization support to your application? Looking to build your own data synchronization application based on the jSyncManager engine? Looking to write a platform-neutral conduit for your databases that will work on any platform? The jSyncManager can help.

Believe it or not, I've really warmed up to server side development with Tomcat 5. Now that I can find most of the knobs and buttons that I need, have run it at work and on my personal server for six months or so, and have found a really comfortable way of developing with different web app configurations that was never available to me with other platforms, I can honestly say that I prefer it over many of the other app servers I've used. I'm actually quite surprised at how nice it is to develop with, even on a modest dev computer, the server will restart within just a few seconds. In terms of production, with the proper settings it doesn't suck resources on the server, and has held up quite fine serving up static content as well without me bothering to put Apache in front of it.

This is nothing extraordinary, its just for my own reference. It's a list of Java Message Service (i.e. JMS) implementations that are open source.

Once in a while Java users and developers run into problems where their Java application simply seems to hang. No core file is generated, no IO is detected, the process just sits there waiting...for something. Usually these problems can be traced to OS and JVM level threading.

The following is very Solaris oriented, maybe I'll write up something from a Linux threading perspective soon.

Thread dumps and stack traces are probably some of the least understood features of java. Why else would I come across developers who have no clue what do do after looking at an Exception stack trace?