The Jawbone UP electronic bracelet measures the wearer's daily activity and nocturnal sleep patterns. If you are bored by the official smartphone app, you can create your own Perl scripts and access your data via the unofficial web API.

Test-driven development with a full-coverage regression test suite as a useful side effect promises code with fewer errors. Mike "Perlmeister" Schilli enters the same path of agility and encounters a really useful new CPAN module.

With a small GPS receiver on his wrist, Mike has been jogging through San Francisco neighborhoods. While catching his breath, safe at home, he visualizes the data he acquired while running with Perl.

Instead of manually rearranging windows in a development environment time and time again, the Tmux terminal multiplexer can restore them from a configuration script.

The Vagrant package provides easy management of virtual machines with VirtualBox as the hypervisor on the command line. Provisioning tools like Puppet let customers try out products in pre-installed environments.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

USB sticks and SD cards quickly lose their value, but if a script distributes the data across several such devices, flash memory is still useful as a fast and shockproof backup medium despite limited capacity.

A Perl script calls various plugins that sniff around on FTP and HTTP servers run by the major Linux distributions to discover when Fedora, Debian, and other distros update their packages.

Samba 4.0

• FTC ends Google investigation
• Samba implements Windows AD
• News Bites

Linux Phones

• Ubuntu launches a new phone OS
• Samsung announces Tizen phone
• Perl turns 25

Big Data DB

• vert.x project leader
• Apache Cassandra v1.2 released
• HPC app contest

A human observer can register clusters in a two-dimensional set of points at a glance. Artificial intelligence has a harder time getting it done; however, the relatively simple k-means method delivers usable results.