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Most websites and applications ask users to create accounts with secure passwords so that they can provide tailored user experiences. While this tips the odds in favor of website developers, it certainly doesn't make life easier for users.

Sometimes the rules for creating passwords are so strict that it's hard to get a good and allowable combination. It would be much easier to have a tool that generates secure passwords that meet whatever rules the website or application requires.

This is the third in a series of articles that explain how to improve your Linux personal computer's performance. My first article described how to unleash performance by identifying and resolving bottlenecks. My second article showed how to improve performance by upgrading your PC's hardware.

When you write an application, you often want users to be able to configure how they interact with it and how it interacts with their system. These are commonly called "preferences" or "settings," and they're stored in "preference files" or "configuration files," or just "configs." There are many different formats for config files, including INI, JSON, YAML, and XML, and every language parses these languages differently.

I'm a Mutt user. I like viewing and composing emails in the convenience of my Linux terminal. With a lightweight and minimal client like Mutt, I know that I can have my email available regardless of system specifications or internet access. And because I have a Linux terminal open more often than not, my email client essentially has no footprint on my desktop real estate.

Many of the documents you receive come in PDF format. Sometimes those PDFs need to be manipulated. For example, pages might need to be removed or added, or you might need to sign or change a specific page.

Whether good or bad, this is the reality we all live in.

There are some fancy graphical user interface tools that let you edit PDFs, but I have always been most comfortable with the command line. Of the many command-line tools for this task, the ones I use when I want to modify a PDF are qpdf and poppler-utils.

How do you ensure the stability of your Kubernetes (K8s) clusters? How do you know that your manifests are syntactically valid? Are you sure you don't have any invalid data types? Are any mandatory fields missing?

Most often, we become aware of these misconfigurations only at the worst time: when we're trying to deploy the new manifests.

Specialized tools and a "shift-left" approach make it possible to verify a Kubernetes schema before it's applied to a cluster. This article addresses how you can avoid misconfigurations and which tools are the best to use.

Passwords are particularly problematic for programmers. You're not supposed to store them without encrypting them, and you're not supposed to reveal what's been typed when your user enters one. This became particularly important to me when I decided I wanted to boost security on my laptop. I encrypt my home directory—but once I log in, any password stored as plain text in a configuration file is potentially exposed to prying eyes.

Allow me a bit of introspection. I've been working in the software engineering field for 31 years. During those 31 years, I've modified a lot of legacy software.

Where I live, there are lots of trails and roads lined with flowers and trees. My community is famous for its annual maple festival, and maple trees are easy for me to identify. However, there are many other trees I cannot identify by name. Flowers are the same: dandelions are easy to spot, but I don't know the names of the wildflowers that line my walking path.

Recently my wife told me about PlantNet, a mobile application that can identify these flowers and trees. It's available on iOS and Android, and it's free, so I decided to try it out.

Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting system that provides insight into the state and history of a computer, application, or cluster by storing defined metrics in a time-series database. It provides a powerful query language, PromQL, to help you explore and understand the data it stores. Prometheus also includes an Alertmanager that makes it easy to trigger notifications when the metrics you collect cross certain thresholds.

Events have become an essential piece of modern reactive systems. Indeed, events can be used to communicate from one service to another, trigger out-of-band processing, or send a payload to a service like Kafka. The problem is that event publishers may express event messages in any number of different ways, regardless of content. For example, some messages are payloads in JSON format to serialize and deserialize messages by application.

The make utility and its related Makefile have been used to build software for a long time. The Makefile defines a set of commands to run, and the make utility runs them. It is similar to a Dockerfile or Containerfile—a set of commands used to build container images.

No matter what industry you work in, a key aspect of sustaining your business is keeping your customers. In the customer-relations domain, we call this customer retention.

Qt Creator is the Qt framework's default integrated development environment (IDE) and hence the glue between Qt's rich set of libraries and the user. In addition to its basic features such as intelligent code completion, debugging, and project administration, Qt Creator offers a lot of nice features that make software development easier.

In this article, I will highlight some of my favorite Qt Creator features.

Applications typically include some type of default or "out-of-the-box" state or configuration, as well as some way for users to customize that configuration for their needs.

Jim Hall is best known as the computer programmer who founded the FreeDOS project. Jim began the project in 1994 as a replacement for MS-DOS while he was still a student at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. Jim created FreeDOS in response to Microsoft ending support for MS-DOS in 1994. Recently Jim agreed to an email interview. Correspondent Joshua Allen Holm joined me in posing the following questions to Jim.

Don Watkins: What kind of skill set invites you to write your own operating system?

VirtualBox makes it easy for anyone to try Linux. You don't even need experience with the command line to set up a simple virtual machine to tinker with Linux. I'm kind of a power user when it comes to virtual machines, but this article will show even novices how to virtualize a Linux system. In addition, it provides an overview of how to run and install a Linux system for testing purposes with the open source hypervisor VirtualBox.

A master was explaining the nature of The Tao of Programming to one of his novices. "The Tao is embodied in all software—regardless of how insignificant," said the master.

"Is Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.

"It is," came the reply.

"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.

"It is even in a video game," said the master.

Earlier in this series on talent management, I argued that emerging, talented leaders need space to flow to those places in the organization where they add value based on their unique talents and intrinsic motivations. If the organization's management and senior management set the right examples, extend trust, and listen, they can greatly accelerate the organization's transformation to a more open culture.