One panel has a neat collection of applets and another has spectacular looks – but a combination of the two is rare. Now help draws nigh for the desktop: PerlPanel is extensible with do-it-yourself widgets.

If you are a bargain hunter, you might enjoy this Perl script that monitors price developments at Amazon and alerts you if Amazon suddenly drops the prices on the products you have been watching.

The netstat utility reveals how your Linux box interacts with the local network. With a few Perl modules, you can develop a tool that displays the data dynamically, exactly the way top does.

The Netfilter team has long been mulling over rework of firewall code in the Linux kernel. Now team lead Patrick McHardy ends months of work by announcing nftables.

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.