Scott Berkun Talks about Innovation in Guy Kawasaki's New Book

Scott Berkun, the bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, discusses how innovators and inventors get their ideas in Guy Kawasaki's popular new book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

The sky is not falling (re: today's PKI attack)

In my last post I talked about how anybody with enough money (a small 6-figure sum) could create a rogue certification authority (CA). This would allow them to generate certificates for any web site that seem to be genuine. That...

Design patterns for public activism

Programmers know the impact that design patterns have had on designing and coding. Could patterns have just as strong an impact on people taking action in their communities? That's the thrust of the patterns published at the Public Sphere Project. The most fleshed-out patters are now published in the book Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution by the initiator of the project, Douglas Schuler.

Everyday Automation - Processing Downloaded Files

If you live a highly Internetworked life, there will likely be certain types of files that, after downloading them from the 'Net, you perform the same regular tasks on: say, archiving bank statements to a folder, printing electronic invoices, etc. You can highly automate processing such files by using Folder Actions attached to your downloads folder.

An attack on public key infrastructure

About three years ago I was having breakfast with a friend of mine, who was talking about a particular appliance product that claimed to be able to transparently/silently intercept all SSL/TLS traffic, so that it could be inspected. He was...

2008: my year of living smaller

I tried a little experiment in 2008: living smaller. I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I froze my own dumplings. I didn't buy any gadget. I didn't buy any CD. I didn't get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV; no new art; no gin.

Software for Civic Life: An Interview with Mike Mathieu of Frontseat.org

In this interview Mike Mathieu, founder of Frontseat.org, discusses how he is helping to build “software for civic life”. Using publicly available data and web services (many of their applications use S3 and EC2) Frontseat creates simple, highly functional tools like Walkscore (rating neighborhood walkability) and Countmore (helping students in the recent elections decide which state to cast their...

iPhone without Cocoa?

There are a ton of people attracted by the iPhone gold rush who want to write iPhone apps without taking the time to learn Cocoa. Come for the phone but stay for the Mac.

Hawaii Power Blackout Emergency Preparedness Tech Grades: Is There an F-?

I gave a tech scorecard for emergency infrastructure after a major earthquake here two years ago. I return to that scorecard for the island-wide power blackout we had over the weekend. The results aren't good. The only bright spot was Twitter.

Sustainability, Boxing Day, and Open Source Software

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

PyMOTW: zlib

The zlib module provides a low-level interface to many of the functions in the zlib compression library from GNU.

Thinking About Wendell Berry's "In Distrust of Movements"

I'm just reading a Wendell Berry essay from 2000, entitled In Distrust of Movements, reprinted on a blog with the inspired name The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles. I was going to just tweet the link, but realized that more people need to read this, and I ought to quote more extensively. (I hope that fans of Michael Pollan's books like...

Four short links

Hahlo - a very sweet-looking mobile (iPhone in the particular) optimised Twitter interface. Although, as I said, every time a Twitter API-consuming web site makes me type in my username and password, a little piece of my soul dies. Thanks to @sogrady for the pointer. Prius as emergency generator - New York Times story about a clever gent who...

O'Reilly Media on Twitter

Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O'Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people who were controlling departmental or project-based O'Reilly twitter accounts like the following: Official O'Reilly account: @oreillymedia: The top level O'Reilly Media site. @oreilly_verlag: O'Reilly Germany Number of O'Reilly...

Palm's Third Act

2009 marks another year when Macworld and CES are scheduled for the same week. It'll be a great week for product announcements, but it'll also be a week of information overload. RSS feeds will overflow with gadget coverage. For those of us covering technology, it presents some logistical challenges, too. Which conference to attend? I'll be at Macworld again this...

The App Store Effect

Snapper-brand lawn mowers are expensive. Many Snapper products cost thousands of dollars, and even their simplest push mower is hundreds of dollars more than some competing products. Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap. What they are, however, is reliable. They're...

Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise

What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business. I get frustrated when I see people highlighting use of social media--blogging, wikis, twitter, customer feedback systems like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucksIdea--as if they...

Apple's New Position on App Acceptance

As best as we can piece together, Apple changed its criteria for iPhone application acceptance sometime in early December. The first we heard of this change was from Sam Magdalein, creator of Pull My Finger. Earlier this month, he received...

Virtualization: host security's silver bullet?

The biggest problem with host-based security has always been what happens when your protection fails. And yes, all traditional host-based protections will have the potential for failure, especially when you consider that it's generally easy to trick users into installing...

Useful Core Graphics functions

Last week, I introduced several handy utilities that let you convert standard Core Graphics structures to and from strings. This week, I thought I'd continue to explore utility functions, moving on to ways you can work with points and rectangles for on-screen calculations. Like the string utilities, these are functions, not methods, and are as such called using standard C rather than Objective C.

Needed: A New IT Employment Model

It's Christmas Eve as I write this, but after having put the children to bed and turning off the tree lights, I find that my thoughts are not on Santa Claus tonight ... at least not in a very positive way.

Admiring Bill Gates

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why. This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates...

Microsoft's Cloud Tax

The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.

Timely policy talk: The Ghosts of Internet Time

A parable about the Internet's past, present, and future: The Ghosts of Internet Time. Still relevant today, nine years after I wrote it...

VirtualBox 2.1.0 Released: A Look at the Mac Version

VirtualBox 2.1.0 adds Intel VT-x hardware virtualization support as well as the ability to run 64-bit Guest OSes on a 32-bit host OS. I installed Xubuntu (based on Ubuntu 8.1.0) and brought in the previously built Windows 2000 Guest OS for testing. The results look good so far.

First (well, sort of) O'Reilly podcast

Below is my first podcast for this page. It's technically not my first podcast for O'Reilly, because a couple of years ago (Summer, 2006), Andy Oram and I sat down and created a podcast about the LPI Linux in a...

A little holiday blogging

Welcome everyone! Just so you can get to know me, below are some additional blog sites I run: Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/jamesstanger. CIW Community: www.ciwcommunity.org/drupal5/?q=blog/4. Linux Pro Magazine: https://linuxpromagazine.blogspot.com. Each of the above URLs will pop on you, which means that they...

Richard Jefferson Interviewed in Com Ci?ncia

I enjoyed this interview with Richard Jefferson (caution: PDF) from Com Ci?ncia No. 102, October 05, 2008. Richard runs CAMBIA, a group that fights for open innovation in biological sciences. He's particularly cautionary about the potential for patents to greatly restrict the development of Synthetic Biology (SB): But don't doubt there will be some very interesting biological understanding that emerges...

TOC Editor Note: Light Posts Through Holidays

The O'Reilly offices are closed through the remainder of the year, so TOC blog posts will be light until January 5, 2009. We're thrilled with the interest and enthusiasm we've...

Creative (Suite) Self-Destruction

What do you do when your primary creative tool stops working? It's an increasingly common problem as our tools become digital. I've lost great programs from companies that tanked, but when a program from a company that's still in business refuses to launch, it really chaps my hide.

O'Reilly Week in Review for December 22, 2008

This week's podcast looks back at an interview we ran with physics rapper Katherine McAlpline in the fall, as well as announcing our first podcast quiz winner, and the new quiz question, that can win you your choice of any in print O'Reilly book.

iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes

We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes...

Some Apps They Like at Apple

Whenever there is a major Apple presentation, the demo machines are meticulously prepared, showing a well-managed list of documents and a sparkling-clean Applications folder. Some of the video tutorials on the Apple website, however, provide a more candid view at which applications Apple employees like.

A national direction for international standards

Governments need to get a (and financially encourage the) vision of the open research, open development, open source, and open standards communities as a chain that promotes an efficient market for markets.

John Adams Interviewed on KQED

Michael Krasny gabs with John Adams on KQED's Forum about his music, book and life. A must listen. And don't forget to enjoy his opera "Doctor Atomic" about Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. Playing now on your local PBS station....

XO Laptop delivered in Columbia

I haven't mentioned the OLPC XO laptop for kids in a while. But, it's worth noting that Nicholas Negroponte has delivered XO laptops to Columbian children in an area that was once controlled by guerrillas. In this TED Video he discusses the project, on the road, and why laptops are important for children around the world. This line stood out...

Waking Up from the 'Nightmare on Tech Street'

Reading Om Malik's Nightmare on Tech Street piece, I wonder if we're actually just waking up from the nightmare. Yes, the abrupt collapse of demand for consumer electronics and their ilk will hurt tech companies--I'm bracing my own for the slowdown--but the icy bath that brings down a killing fever trades pain for gain. In a recent conversation with my...

Photographing Domes

It's a good observation that a difference between professional and very serious amateur photographers on the one hand, and snapshooters on the other, is that those in the pro group are always trying to create thematic links between their photos. This kind of grouping can imply a narrative, or revolve around a common technique, or involve the subject of the...

Updated a moment ago

The latest trend in interface design seems to be making computers speak like humans would. This is why many interfaces today have eschewed precise wording or technical terms in favour or lighter-hearted, vaguer words. We're no longer "processing data," we're "thinking about it," and a post wasn't made "seventeen seconds ago" but "just about now." Everywhere blogs and usability books...

Through A Glass (Very) Darkly: XML 2009 (Part 1 of 2)

A year later, the IT industry was in the worst recession that it had faced in fifteen years, a time that became known as the Tech Nuclear Winter. Senior programmers with thirty years of experience and post graduate degrees - people who sat on standards committees boards and often served to shape the industry - could be found at coffee shops "working on their next projects" while waiting for a job to open up.

Installing Instant Rails on Windows

Instant Rails is getting old, but it's still a quick way to install Rails and start coding. This screencast shows how to download and install Instant Rails, and shows off how it works with a simple example from Chapter 2 of Learning Rails.

Antipodean Python: Wellington, NZ PUG

I recently moved down to Wellington, New Zealand, and was excited to learn that Python is very popular on this side of the world. A few of us on the NZPUG mailing list decided to arrange a meeting a local...

Zappos: If You Are Great at Something - Let It Go... (Or Resell It)

I am fascinated by what I see as Zappos' ongoing evolution from a simple, online retailer to a leading online innovator. A few months back I wrote about Zappos pioneering what I called “Experience Syndication" with their Powered by Zappos (PBZ) service. In brief, PBZ syndicates the end-to-end value of shopping with Zappos - from the online store experience...

Flickr Community Fills Gap

In the recent round of Yahoo! layoffs was someone I'd just met, George Oates. She started the Flickr Commons, where galleries, libraries, archives, and museums can post photos and the community can tag them. She was a tireless ambassador, as well, with a gruelling travel schedule to bring the word to other institutions on what's possible. Her blog post about...

App Store Glitches

Last Monday, Rogue Amoeba's first iPhone product Radioshift Touch was finally released through the App Store. After many months, we're very happy to have finally shipped. Doing so, however, has highlighted a few glitches in the App Store that developers...

Wikipedia and Nature

I love the RNA Biology journal's new guidelines for submissions, which state that you must submit a Wikipedia article on your research on RNA families before the journal will publish your scholarly article on it: This track will primarily publish articles describing either: (1) substantial updates and reviews of existing RNA families or (2) novel RNA families based on computational...

Hard Work and Practice in Programming

At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart's "mother of all demos" in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the unwillingness of people to work hard to learn new skills. I'm quoting from memory, so the lines below are not exact, and there's no way I can...

App Store Glitches

Last Monday, Rogue Amoeba's first iPhone product Radioshift Touch was finally released through the App Store. After many months, we're very happy to have finally shipped. Doing so, however, has highlighted a few glitches in the App Store that developers...

Does Java Run Faster On .NET VM and Windows Azure?

Looking for ways to tweak the performance of your Java applications? Look no further than the .NET platform and Windows Azure.

Java in the Cloud

Every one is talking about building apps in cloud or moving the apps to cloud. There are plenty of jobs on job boards looking for the people with the skills: "familiarity with cloud" or "expertise in cloud". The latest buzzword is "Cloud Computing". What is Cloud? Why all of sudden Cloud is a buzz? What are my options to move Java app to the Cloud? What are the features and limitations of the Cloud? How IaaS and PaaS will fit in the Cloud? Read 'Java in the Cloud' for details ......