With PHP5.3--which is in itself a precursor and somewhat of a teaser for PHP 6--comes something rather new to PHP: Namespaces. As object-oriented developers well know, the point of object-oriented development is to remove ambiguity from development and data access items.

In the last article, Akkana Peck talked about the different types of Linux memory and how deceptive values like Virtual Size and Resident Set Size can be. Today she shows us how to get more useful numbers so we can figure out which programs really are memory hogs.

Recently I came across this article on h-online.com discussing some of the new features and functionality that is to be expected in the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. As I am usually more interested in data storage technologies, it was the file system and other storage concepts that drew my attention. I will only cover a few of the listed topics.

This week, we'll pick up where we left off last week and continue discussing simple kernel and module debugging using seq_file-based proc files.

New performance counters allow developers to take a detailed look at the runtime behaviour of program code to target specific areas for optimisation. The recently introduced tracing infrastructure has been further modified and improved. Other changes affect the architecture, the memory subsystem, and various virtualisation solutions.

Here's a how-to for building a recent 2.6 Linux kernel on your Debian GNU/Linux box.

Red Hat has released paravirtualised network and storage drivers for running Windows guest systems under the KVM

Kismet is a 802.11b wireless network sniffer. It is capable of sniffing using almost any supported wireless card using the Airo, HostAP, Wlan-NG, and Orinoco (with a kernel patch) drivers.