Can you believe that in nearly four years of Paranoid Penguin columns, I've never talked about how to configure FTP services? This month I fix that, using my new favorite FTP server, Chris Evans' excellent vsftpd (Very Secure FTP Dæmon). Because my space here is limited and the best use of FTP is anonymous FTP, we focus on anonymous FTP. The FTP protocol's use of clear-text authentication makes it a terrible choice for anything but anonymous file transfer. But anonymous FTP is still plenty useful.

As almost all of the grid-based designs I could list off at that time were rigidly fixed-width, I was left with a prickly question: how do you create a fluid grid?

As it turns out, it’s simply a matter of context.

Despite the common belief it is actually possible to access private fields and methods of other classes via Java Reflection. It is not even that difficult. This can be very handy during unit testing. This text will show you how.

It was originally thought that the yellowing was permanent and that the only solution to this was to paint the plastic in its original colour and cover the problem up. However, a chance discovery was made in March 2008, by The CBM Museum at Wuppertal in Germany, that immersing parts in a solution of Hydrogen Peroxide could partially reverse the process. This was initially taken up by the Amiga community in Germany (http://www.a1k.org) and the idea eventually found its way to the English Amiga Board (http://eab.abime.net), where a madcap collection of chemists, plastics engineers and retro hackers managed to perfect this concept and put it on steroids, with help from other forums.

Installing DD-WRT on a router in most cases is almost as simple as installing a program onto your computer. Installing programs on a router, known as firmware, are achieved by a method called flashing. This article helps you determine which installation process is for you on your supported router, as well as giving router suggestions and information about flashing each one.

With the test images on these pages, you can easily adjust the settings of your monitor to get the best possible picture quality. Additionally, there are a number of test images that can help you to judge the image quality of a monitor. You can check the images on this webpage or put them on a usb stick and try them in the computer store like I did when I created these test patterns. These test images are much more revealing regarding monitor shortcomings than ordinary photographs.

The aim of this document is to illustrate the steps that I took (minus all the wrong ones, and there were many) to get a successful GPRS data connection using my Sharp Zaurus, a Nokia 6310i, a Socket Bluetooth card and an O2 (UK mobile phone operator) GPRS data account. I'm making the assumption that you already have a Sharp Zaurus (Z) (or are intending to buy one) and that you are OK with using Linux on the command line.

This guide describes how to create encrypted directories. These can come in handy for laptop users, password lists and the like.

This document serves as a primer on financial math issues and as a tutorial on the use of BigDecimal in general and in OFBiz.

With Flex 3, localization support will become much more Flexible! Here’s how: