IBM has published the following new technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks website. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Some require free registration. Enjoy . . . !

• Lies, Statistics, and Benchmarks — Since the second computer was built, users have compared the performance of different computers. Performance matters. Sometimes, a performance difference is just a question of whether a job will be done sooner or later; in other cases, a performance difference might prevent a job from being done at all.
• Initializing Memory Efficiently on Power Architecture Platforms — Learn to efficiently initialize memory on Power Architecture systems. Software Developer Carlos Cavanna compares simple loops clearing one bit at a time to more elaborate algorithms, including the dcbz instruction to zero whole cache lines at a time. The article concludes with some rough performance numbers to help you tune your own applications.
• Eclipse for Linux on POWER — Eclipse is an open source community that provides a development platform and a collection of application frameworks for building software. Learn how to use Eclipse to compile and run applications through sample Java and C programs.
• Discover how to use XML in your UNIX application — This article, for UNIX developers who are unfamiliar with XML, explores the XML libraries developed by the Gnome project. After briefly explaining XML in general, you'll examine example code that a UNIX application developer might use to parse and manage configuration files that are in the XML format using the LibXML2 libraries.
• Ajax powers user-directed mashups — The subliminal message that most Ajax applications send out is the power of aggregation. Often, advantages of Ajax are described in terms of reducing round trip costs to the server. However, the real benefits will come when Ajax applications move beyond the stage of being simple portals to performing truly transparent client-side mashup. This article provides examples of successful Ajax applications that adopt the things that work best, and avoids the mistakes of others.
• Using RFID to track people — There are many situations when you might need to know where someone is at any given time. This article introduces one of the most popular (and controversial) scenarios for RFID technology — people tracking. Learn about the challenges of tracking people, the devices used, and what hardware and software are needed to implement an RFID-enabled people tracking system. This is a companion article to Lightweight RFID Framework and Greenlight your RFID System.
• Rescue terrible HTML with TagSoup XHTML — The problem is that the Web is still mostly populated by the scary legacy of poorly structured HTML, much of it not even compliant to the more lenient SGML standard. XHTML is a friendly enough format for parsing and screen-scraping, but the Web still has a lot of messy HTML out there. In this tip Uche Ogbuji demonstrates the use of TagSoup to turn just about any HTML into neat XHTML.
• Database development with Apache Derby — Learn about several basic database concepts, including schemas, tables, and column data types, and get a simple introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL). This article — focusing on the database developer role — presents the basic data types you can use to store data in an Apache Derby database.
• Six Approaches to Eliminating Unwanted E-Mail — The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.
• Dual Booting AIX and Linux — This mini how-to shows you how to dual boot between AIX and Linux operating systems in a clustering environment, where available hardware resources are limited. The information presented in this document is based on actual experience.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.