Part of the joy of playing electronic musical instruments is exploring the unique banks of sounds inside. This month, we speak again with Francis Preve, a Top 10 remixer who also works as the principal sound designer for Ableton and a consulting sound designer for Korg. Hear how he creates the sounds behind the hits.

Some data is private. Other data, less so. Secure applications make it possible--and easy--to keep user data visible to the right people and invisible to the wrong people. Vladi Belperchinov explains how access control works and demonstrates with working code suitable for implementing your own access controls.

It's been 10 years since the Open Source Initiative was launched, and what a 10 years it has been. Open Source has gone from an obscure and radical concept to a vibrant sector of the software landscape. For the 10th Anniversary, our faithful newshound Federico Biancuzzi talked to some of the early pioneers of the OSI (such as Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond) about where it came from and how it is relevant today.

Aperture 2.0 is faster, easier to use, and produces better images, says Joe Schorr, Apple Senior Product Manager. In this interview with Derrick Story, Joe explains how Aperture 2.0 meets those lofty claims. This chat covers a lot of new ground.

Virtualization is one approach that you can take to implementing clusters. But you still have to arrange to handle failures in a high-availability environment. Here's one solution, using Xen.

We're back from NAMM 2008 with even more intriguing new gadgets and gear. Once again, the throbbing halls of America's biggest musical instrument trade show introduced a torrent of high-tech goodness. From a $99 Steinway to a truly killer guitar, from audible notation to singing keys, here's what you'll be playing this year.

Katrin Eismann, coauthor of The Creative Digital Darkroom, sat down with Derrick Story at PhotoPlus Expo in New York for a chat about how the darkroom has evolved from chemical-based to digital, and how that evolution has influenced her approach to image making. Katrin touches on many interesting topics, including her explanation on 3-step sharpening.

America's biggest musical instrument show debuted more high-tech wonders than ever this year. O'Reilly Digital Media prowled NAMM's five massive, noisy halls to bring back these high-tech hits.

LILO and Grub are the most popular Linux bootloaders. Usually, your Linux distribution chooses and configures one or the other for you, but this article provides a handy comparison of the two, and offers some troubleshooting and configuration tips if you ever want to do it by hand.

Have you done something stunningly cool or staggeringly useful with Perl in the past year? Conference season will be here soon; it's time to consider giving a talk to your local monger group, a regional conference, or even OSCON. Perl track committee member brian d foy gives several guidelines to help you decide what to talk about and how to present it.

Steve Jobs opened the Macworld surprise envelope at the 2008 keynote address and out slid a sleek notebook computer: the Macbook Air. Daniel Steinberg was on hand for the unveiling and files this report about all the new hardware, iPhone updates, and more.

Adobe's Flex offers a rich client-side user experience, but how do you use it to create practical applications. In this article, you'll see how to hook Flex up to a PHP backend to do some simple MySQL administration.

Sony's newest digital audio recorder boasts many of the exotic features of the flagship PCM-D1 for a third of the price. Once again, guitarist Mark Nelson renews his quest for the perfect handheld recorder — and it looks like the sixth time may be the charm.

Leopard brings a host of new goodies for Aperture users by virtue of the new photography functionality baked right into the operating system. In this interview with Senior Product Manager Joe Schorr, you'll hear some of the most enticing and useful features for Aperture photographers.

It seems like you can't say the word Ruby these days without the word Rails following automatically. But before Rails ever saw the light of day, Ruby was a thriving, robust language. So what can you do without Rails? How about connect a GUI application to a back end web service, using two powerful Ruby frameworks?

Francis Preve produced six Billboard Top 10 remixes last year alone, but he graciously found time to share his insights and techniques. Hear the Preve magic in before-and-after musical examples and learn how he turned a shockingly small pile of gear into a production powerhouse.

Creative Suite expert and author of the Adobe Photoshop and InDesign CS3 One-on-One books Deke McClelland offers a step by step tutorial on how to use InDesign CS3's improved auto-numbering feature. Now InDesign can preserve your sanity by keeping track of your numbered lists automatically.

In this month's installment, Bill Walton tells the tale of how Paul and CB add integration tests to their ever more advanced Rails application. Take a look, and learn how to make your integration as well tested as the individual components.

If you prefer, you can make your Basic tone settings directly from the Histogram. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

Here's a way to create a QuickTime slideshow with Lightroom. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

Stacks are another useful way to organize your images. Learn how to create them! Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

By enabling Lightroom's Auto Import feature from the menu bar, you can automatically import photos into the Lightroom Library module using a designated watched folder. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

Lightroom ships with several templates for creating web photo galleries. You can customize these templates and save your own version. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

What you see on your monitor, even if the monitor is perfectly calibrated, can be deceptive. Let's look at the various tools Lightroom offers to evaluate your images. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.

With Lightroom, you can export one photo at a time, or as many as you wish. Excerpted from Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, check out step by step examples on how to use some of Lightroom's most popular features.