Zenoss Core 3: Tips and Tricks

For system administrators, network engineers, and security analysts, it is essential to keep a track of network traffic. Zenoss Core is an enterprise-level systems and network monitoring solution that can be as complex as you need it to be. While just about anyone can install it, turn it on, and monitor "something", Zenoss Core has a complicated interface packed with features. The interface has been drastically improved over version 2. This article will take a look at some tips and tricks for using Zenoss Core 3, such as:

• Zeneventlog—unable to connect to Windows
• Acknowledging an event
• Testing syslog configuration with Logger

Zen Gift of Education

ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux. Since learning is the core idea behind the distro, it goes beyond traditional curriculum subjects and also packs tools that'll teach students the basics of programming and music.

What sets ZenEdu apart from other educational distros is that it bundles other productivity tools as well. This includes general-purpose applications like the IceWeasel web browser, IceDove email client, Pidgin for instant messaging, Kompozer for authoring web pages, and OpenOffice.org for word processing.

ZBrush 4: Modeling a Creature with ZSketch

Since ZBrush was released, it dramatically changed the way game art is created. It is unmatched in its speed for creating highly detailed models and thus, is widely used in the games and film industry. We could even say that if you want to be a game artist today, ZBrush is considered a standard. A few years ago, ZBrush was used only for organic modeling. With ZBrush 4.0 this changed dramatically and you can now sculpt mechanical spaceships as well as organic creatures.

In this article by Manuel Scherer, author of ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide, we'll cover:

• Organizing a complex mesh using armatures
• Freeform sculpting with ZSpheres/ZSketch
• Modeling for animation
• Mesh conversion with Unified Skinning

YUI 2.X: Using Event Component

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX.

In this article by Matt Snider, author of the book Yahoo! User Interface Library 2.x Cookbook, we will cover:

YUI 2.8: Menus

In this article by Daniel Barreiro and Dan Wellman, authors of the book YUI 2.8: Learning the Library, we're going to look at a very common web page element: navigation menus. The Menu widget provides a timesaving and code-efficient solution to common website application requirements.

The skills that you will take away from this article include:

• How to implement a basic navigation menu
• How to override the default sam skin
• How to create an application-style menu bar

Your First ASP.NET MVC Application

When downloading and installing the ASP.NET MVC framework SDK, a new project template is installed in Visual Studio—the ASP.NET MVC project template. This article by Maarten Balliauw describes how to use this template. We will briefly touch all aspects of ASP.NET MVC by creating a new ASP.NET MVC web application based on this Visual Studio template. Besides view, controller, and model, new concepts including ViewData—a means of transferring data between controller and view, routing—the link between a web browser URL and a specific action method inside a controller, and unit testing of a controller are also illustrated in this article.

Yii 1.1: Using Zii Components

Yii is a very flexible and high-performance application development framework written in PHP. It helps building web applications from small ones to large-scale enterprise applications. The framework name stands for Yes It Is.

In this article by Alexander Makarov, author of Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook, we will cover:

• Using data providers
• Using grids
• Using lists
• Creating custom grid columns

XPath Support in Oracle JDeveloper - XDK 11g

XML documents can be used for the transfer of data. The data in an XML document may be retrieved either with the JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) DOM and SAX APIs, or with the JAXP XPath API. Addressing an XML document with XPath has the advantage that a single node may be selected directly without iterating over a node set. In this article by Deepak Vohra, we will explore XPath Support in Oracle JDeveloper - XDK 11g.

Xen Virtualization: Work with MySQL Server, Ruby on Rails, and Subversion

In this article, Prabhakar Chaganti will show us to create virtual appliances that perform one specific function. These appliances can be web servers, database servers or anything else that you can think of which is useful for your business.

The key advantage with these appliances is the fact that they are mostly maintenance free, and can be started up and then used without going through any lengthy installation process. You can use these as needed for your testing and then dispose them off. You can also use them for staging environments or production environments, and you can even share them across the enterprise.