IBM has published the following eight technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its developerWorks Website. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics. Some require free registration. Enjoy . . .

• Basic use of pthreads — Threads strike fear into the hearts of many programmers. UNIX's process… model is simple and well understood, but it is sometimes inefficient. Threading can often allow for substantial improvements in performance, at the cost of a little confusion. This article demystifies the POSIX thread interface, providing practical examples of threaded code for consideration.
• Programming Linux sockets, Part 2 — This intermediate-level tutorial extends the basics covered in Part 1 on programming using sockets. Part 2 focuses on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and demonstrates how to write UDP sockets applications in C and in Python. Although the code examples in this tutorial are in Python and C, they translate well to other languages.
• Security: Preventing today's top vulnerability — This article discusses the top vulnerability in Linux/UNIX systems: buffer overflows. This article first explains what buffer overflows are and why they're both so common and so dangerous. It then discusses the new Linux and UNIX methods for broadly countering them — and why these methods are not enough. It then shows various ways to counter buffer overflows in C/C++ programs, both statically-sized approaches (such as the standard C library and OpenBSD/strlcpy solution) and dynamically-sized solutions, as well as some tools to help you. Finally, the article closes with some predictions on the future of buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
• Professionally document any project with Eclipse help system — he Eclipse Platform, which provides a very powerful IDE, includes its own help system based on an XML table-of-contents referencing HTML files. What isnt immediately obvious is that you dont have to write Eclipse plug-ins to use it. Any project can use a cut-down version of the platform to provide professional, easy-to-use, and searchable documentation.
• Cultured Perl: Fun with MP3 and Perl, Part 2 — The author continues his look at manipulating and guessing MP3 tags with Perl, FreeDB, and various CPAN models via his autotag.pl application. This article is the second of a two-part series. Before reading this article, please take a look at Part 1, which will introduce you to the autotag.pl application and the rationale for the various modules used in it.
• Plug into the grid with Perl and Globus — The focus of this tutorial is using the Globus grid toolkit in combination with Perl through the Perl Commodity Grid (CoG) kit. You should take this tutorial if you want to be able to build grid applications and systems that use the Globus system using Perl as the interface and control language for submitting work and operations to the grid. You should already know the basics of the grid, the Globus system, and Perl. You should be able to write basic Perl scripts and use external modules and libraries.
• Perspectives on GRID: Next-Generation Computing — Two major needs have dramatically increased the value of the concept of grid computing in the last few years. A lean economy has forced those with a limited IT budget to more fully utilize their existing computing assets and to become more flexible to respond to rapidly evolving markets by being able to intelligently allocate finite resources to the appropriate business applications. In this first of a series of articles, the author provides a cursory analysis of the similarities and differences between grid computing and such distributed computing systems as P2P, CORBA, cluster computing, and DCE.
• Business Service Grid, Part 6: In operation — A service domain applies autonomic computing principles for aggregating Web services and grid services. The service domain technology provides a service grid and can create, filter, discover, cluster, organize, select, route, recover, and switch Web services and grid services autonomically. Using service domain objects enables you to implement business solutions easily and quickly. In this article, we discuss how to invoke and access a service domain to start the operational phase.
• Index grid services using Globus Toolkit 3.0 — The Index Service of Globus Toolkit 3.0 is a helpful component for building grid applications. It can be used to index Service Data carrying state information from multiple grid service instances for use in resource discovery, selection and optimization. In this article the author explains how to set up the Index Service for static and dynamic indexing, and how to improve the reliability of the indexing. The primary way of writing a grid service with custom Service Data and how these data can be queried from the Index Service after aggregation are also covered.
• Taming Tiger: Pre-release of Tiger now available — Sun has quietly released an alpha version of J2SE 1.5, also known as “Tiger,” and developer John Zukowski is in the big top ready to start his Tiger-taming act. This new column picks up where Magic with Merlin left off, detailing the changes to the platform and providing examples for quick reference. In this first article, John shows you where to get the pre-release software and how to install it.

 
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