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

• Smashing performance with OProfile — Analyzing the performance of the Linux operating system and application code can be difficult due to unexpected interactions between the hardware and the software, but profiling is one way you can identify such performance problems. This article looks at OProfile, a profiling tool for Linux that will be included in the upcoming stable kernel.
• Tutorial: Intro to vi — This free tutorial shows how to use vi, a powerful visual editor. Using an accelerated “cheat sheet” method, this tutorial aims to make you a proficient vi user without requiring a huge time commitment. You'll quickly learn how to move around, edit text, use insert mode, copy and paste text, and use important vim extensions like visual mode and multi-window editing.
• Store objects using the JDK 1.4 Preferences API — The Preferences API — a lightweight, cross-platform persistence API introduced in JDK 1.4 — is designed to store small amounts of data (string, simple byte arrays, and so on.) and was not intended to be an interface to a traditional database. It can, however, be effective as a storage device if your data can be expressed as simple objects. This article offers an introduction to the API, explains how objects are stored, demonstrates the process in action, and provides a code library to do the work.
• Cultured Perl: Inversion lists with Perl — Inversion lists are an essential part of any Perl programmer's toolkit, especially for those who deal with ranges and Unicode. In this article, the author explains inversion lists, illustrated by a Perl implementation that he wrote and put on the CPAN network, and shows how inversion lists can be used to compress normal data in addition to bit strings.
• Web Services Architectures and Best Practices — This article covers some of the architectural challenges posed by Web Services, examines how to use (and not to use) Web Services, and defines the best practices in applying Web Services for solving tough architectural problems, such as cross-language or cross-system integration.
• Build a Web Service from a Java class — Here's an easy way to build your first Web Service. This tutorial delves into the subject of RPC-style Web services with Java programming and XML, and how to use them with the free WSDK download for Web services V5.1. It shows you how to write Web service implementations, and how to build and deploy them with the WSDK, as well as describing how to create clients to invoke them. Build scripts are provided to make building and deploying the example applications easier and more reliable.
• Build a Grid app with Python — This tutorial teaches the basics of a Grid design and how different components of the Python language can be used to support the design through its various stages. It demonstrates the functionality provided within Python to support basic Grid components.
• Build grid applications with the Python Extensions for the Grid (PEG) — Learn about Python Extensions for the Grid (PEG), a suite of Python interfaces to existing grid support libraries and applications from the Grid Research and Innovation Laboratory at the University of California in San Diego. The PEG system provides a wrapper around these libraries to enable them to be used from within Python.
• Create Web applets with Mozilla and XML — To go beyond simple HTML, historically the only options have been to use Java technology or plug-ins. Now, you have a new way — write and display applications natively in XML. The Mozilla platform provides such a mechanism. This article introduces XUL (the XML User-interface Language). XUL is set of GUI widgets with extensive cross-platform support that are designed for building GUI elements for applications that have traditional, non-HTML GUIs.

 
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