After years of development, version 1.0 of the Parrot virtual machine has arrived for Perl, Python and other dynamic languages. Whether the Parrot will take a firm foothold in software development is still up in the air.

To identify the geographic regions from which link spam originated, a database locates IP addresses and the Google Charts service puts them onto a world map.

Instead of souped up CPUs, simple programming tricks are often all it takes to speed up a program. Profilers can discover bottlenecks that need more TLC from the developer.

Advisory Check (advchk), a small tool for monitoring installed software security, is now available in version 2.20. It has extended its source feeds and is now supported on HP-UX.

Instead of just monitoring incoming requests in your web server's logfile, a sound server makes them audible and lets you listen to the tune of users surfing the site.

Barcodes efficiently speed us through supermarket checkout lines, but the technology is also useful for totally different applications. An inexpensive barcode scanner can help you organize your private library, CD, or DVD collection.

Open source developer Tobias Oetiker, in his presentation at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego, described how he could help one thousand Windows users at Swisscom.com speed up their computers.