O'Reilly News & Commentary

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Featured Make Magazine Video: Build a Retro Wireless Handset

Looking for experts - Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services Framework, WCF Data Services

Hi. I'm Russell Jones, formerly Executive Editor at DevX.com. It's good to be at O'Reilly where I'll be working to publish developer-focused titles. I'm looking for information about the rapidly name-changing project Astoria, aka ADO.NET Data Services Framework, now WCF Data Services. If you're an expert in this technology, or if you know someone who is, I'd like to start a conversation.

Four short links: 8 January 2010 - Healthcare Data, GNU Econometrics Library, Visualizing Changes, View Source Under Attack

View Source is Good? Discuss (Alex Russell) -- fantastic post, mandatory reading. View-source was necessary (but not sufficient) to make HTML the dominant application platform of our times. I also hold that it is under attack -- not least of all from within -- and that losing view-source poses a significant danger to the overall health of the web. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

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Understanding Social Business - Webcast

The term, "Social Business" has been gaining currency over the past year among influential thinkers such as Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeff Dachis and Jeremiah Owyang. I am excited to announce that I will be moderating an O'Reilly panel discussion with this group on January 14 to discuss Social Business and how it can impact strategy, design, technology and customer experience. I would love to hear about any questions you would like to see addressed during this upcoming webcast.

Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020 - Will Google Make Us Stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

Pew Research, which seems to be interested in just about everything, conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. I took the exercise as a chance to hammer home my own choices of issues, like: Will Google make us stupid? and Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

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Four short links: 7 January 2010 - London Data, SEO Deathspiral, Subversion Search, Entity Extraction APIs

London Datastore to Launch -- the Mayor of London will launch a site full of London data. (via Ed Dumbill)

Millions of Plastic Guitars Can't Be Wrong

If you make a process easy enough, you can change the world. In 1995, two MIT graduates set out to make music-making easy. Now millions of people play their product, and the inventors are releasing the developer tools for free.

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A Box's Life

I bet any parent can acknowledge that the wrapping paper and boxes the toys come in are often more exciting and inspire more imagination than the toys themselves. What kind of imagination can we apply to ensuring that boxes (and resources in general) are not overlooked for their usefulness? What extended life can we give to those things we create and what can we conserve in their creation?"

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Nilofer Merchant: The New How

The fate of WIPO, ACTA, and other intellectual property pushes in the international economy

Intellectual property wars are fiercer than ever, although the institutions most affected (including the media) prefer not to talk about them. But we may be in for a pendulum shift. I recently put out a tweet on this topic and was asked to expand on it. The issues are too big and complex for me to give them a proper...

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The Renaissance Developer

When I transitioned from artist to developer, once I learned Flash I didn't go any further. Sure I know PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and a few other languages but not as well as I know ActionScript. Where am I going with this? Well, when I was an artist I picked the right tool for the job, but as a programmer I locked myself into one language and made that my focus. In 2010 my New Year resolution and life goal is to become a Renaissance Developer just like I was as an artist. Here, in no particular order is my list of the languages I want to learn in 2010: Silverlight, Unity, HaXe, Object C. I would love to hear your thoughts and if you want to also become a Renaissance Developer?

Four short links: 6 January 2010 - Market Forces, Enterprise Fail, Analytics X Prize, Open-Sourced Privacy Subsystem

Analytics X Prize -- The Analytics X Prize is an ongoing contest to apply analytics, modeling, and statistics to solve the social problems that affect our cities. It combines the fields of statistics, mathematics, and social science to understand the root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Understanding these relationships and discovering the most highly correlated variables allows us to deploy our limited resources more effectively and target the variables that will have the greatest positive impact on improvement. The first contest is to predict homicides in Philadelphia. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

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Africa's "Gutenberg Moment?"

This post from Publishing Perspectives about publishing in Africa came in over the break, and it's worth a look: Five years later, [Muhtar] Bakare is still a confident believer in the power of the internet to revolutionize the African publishing industry. "The internet is our own Gutenberg moment," he told the Oslo audience."The internet is going to democratize knowledge in Africa." Publishers taking a long view should be sure to pay attention to what's happening in Africa and the Middle East. We'll have speakers from both regions at next month's TOC conference.

What Company Will Be the eHarmony of Microblogging?

A New York Times article by David Carr rehashing common knowledge on "why Twitter will endure" got me thinking about the ways in which it will not endure, or the ways in which it may endure via which no one will really care about it. So, what does it mean to "endure"? To stay in business? So what - Lord and Taylor is still in business, but there are so many better stores if you ask me. RC Cola has endured. We always think of Coke and Pepsi when we think of soft drinks, and maybe now we even think of carbonated things like Perrier or some sports drinks. But, still, RC Cola endures. Classmates.com is still enduring - but when was the last time anyone cared? So what does it mean to say that Twitter will endure?

A Few Thoughts on the Nexus One

There will be many posts focusing on the look, feel, and features of the Nexus One, so I'm going to focus on what Android's latest incarnation says about the competitive landscape - what I've elsewhere called the war for the web. Android vs. iPhone is one important front in that "war." News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

The Changing Workforce - Meeting the Needs of a New Generation

The Diverse and Digital Workforce — "The face of the workforce is changing," writes Sarah Sorensen in a new O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com. "It is increasingly female, global and digital." In order to attract and retain the best and brightest talent, businesses need to create a new work order insists the author of The Sustainable Network: The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet. Read Sorensen's suggestions on how to achieve this competitive advantage.

The Google Android Rollout: Windows or Waterloo?

Watching Google's rollout of Android to date, including this weeks announcements around the Google-branded, HTC built, Nexus One phone, I am left with two conflicting thoughts. Is it the beginning of their assent into Windows-like dominance or the fortnight of their 'Waterloo' moment?

Four short links: 5 January 2010 - Computational Advertising, Timing Attacks, Climate Visualized, and Context Assembly

Introduction to Computational Advertising -- slides to a Stanford class on a new "scientific discipline" whose central challenge is to find the best ad to present to a user engaged in a given context, such as querying a search engine ("sponsored search"), reading a web page ("content match"), watching a movie, and IM-ing. You could devise algorithms, measure performance, and write papers about the best way to put carrots up your bottom or the best way to pick pockets, but those still aren't complex enough activities to be trumpeted as "new scientific disciplines". This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Working Together to Create a National Learning Community

National Lab Day is a National Barn-Raising for hands-on learning. Using the internet and social computing technologies, with the support of the White House, and the business and scientific communities, National Lab Day reaches out to the education community, providing a tool set that brings context, community, and passion to education, and that has the potential to transform our educational system into a true learning community.

Skinner Box? There's an App for That

The very technology that makes our collective integration possible also distracts us from advancing it. In equilibrium, distraction and ambition square off at the singular point of failed progress. If the next generation of Moores, Joys, and Kurzweils are half as distracted as I am, we are going to find ourselves frozen right here, nodes in a wormy borg that never becomes a butterfly. My computer is turning out to be the interface to a giant network Skinner Box. But maybe Twitter is just God's way of making sure we're too distracted to destroy ourselves.

Four short links: 4 January 2010 - Code for Speed, Wooden Locks, Font Design, and a Java Distributed Data Store

Wooden Combination Lock -- you'll easily understand how combination locks work with this find piece of crafty construction work. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The Women of RIA

It's no secret that I was really inspired by RIAdventure - I've been to and spoken at many conferences, but this was the first I had been to that was devoted to RIA's. One thing that was kind of nice and kind of odd was that I had the womens' bathroom to myself. This was nice, because the bathroom closest to our conference room had only one stall, but it underlined that I was the only woman there. This made me really curious about what other women might have been there had I been at a different conference. It's kind of difficult to find out much about conference attendees, so I thought I'd look at the women who have been speaking at recent conferences or are scheduled to speak in the next few months. Some of these women are ones I've known for a while, and others I discovered by going on this search.

Cloud Forensics using EBS Boot Volumes

In December, Amazon introduced a new feature for their cloud: EBS Boot Volumes. An EBS boot volume essentially provides the ability to boot from a virtual SAN. This new approach to booting virtual machines offers up a wealth of new capabilities in the Amazon Cloud. Among the security uses of EBS volumes I find most intriguing, however, is the use of EBS volumes in cloud-based forensics.

The Art of Estimation Part 2

In my last article I talked about growing the skill of time estimation, and the different levels there are to the skill. In this article I'm going to discuss the different types of estimates you can provide. It's important to be explicit in the type of estimate you are providing, and to make sure your audience understands the type of estimate that they are receiving. For instance, there's SWAG. A swag is a Stupid Wild Ass Guess. I've also heard the first S sometimes stand for super, or scientific or sophisticated. It's not to create a timeline from. It's not to set expectations, its simply to give a rough idea of how long something or a piece of something might take.

Airline Security and Proportional Response

I am flying to London this coming week on business. I have no idea if I will be able to use my laptop, emerge from my seat during the last hour of flight or be required to wear my underwear inside-out during the security check-in. Do I believe that any of these measures will contribute to passenger safety? No. After the recent foiled airline bomb incident one thing seems clear; we are constantly retrofitting our security measures to defend ourselves against the last attack. Often these measures seem like what Bruce Schneier in a great CNN article calls "Security Theater".

IE8 64-bit Windows 7 and the Mobile Code Bug (Part 2)

William Stanek here, continuing to talk about a scripting/programming bug that was driving me absolutely bonkers. The code bug is this: Often when you visit web sites and are using Internet Explorer 8 on 64-bit Windows 7, you are redirected...

Commerce and the Wealth of Nations

I was struck the other day by an article in the New York Times that describes the different approaches of the US and China to Afghanistan, in which the US shoulders the burden of war, while China reaps the benefits of commerce. As we head into the second decade of the 21st century, we as a nation, we as a world need to make good choices about where we invest our time, our resources, and our ingenuity. It's the job of our leaders to make choices that give us leverage, that is, that create multiplier effects on our efforts. I'd love to see, in this New Year, this new decade, deeper thinking about the society we want to build, and what kind of policies will encourage the market to make the right choices. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about policy choices that might encourage 21st century industries here in America and around the world.

10 Suggestions for 2010 - Rekindle Your Passion for Photography in 2010

Can you believe it? 2009 is over! Where does the time go? Are you satisfied with your photography this year? Do you have photographic plans for 2010? Lightroom is an excellent program but it still needs you to feed it images. If you find yourself in a creative slump or the shooting doldrums don't despair! Leave all that in 2009 and look to the new year with fresh eyes! Here are ten suggestions to help you rekindle that passion for photography! You may have seen some (or all) of these elsewhere but it never hurts to see them again. Lightroom is an excellent program but it still needs you to feed it images. If you find yourself in a creative slump or the shooting doldrums don't despair! Leave all that in 2009 and look to the new year with fresh eyes! Here are ten suggestions to help you rekindle that passion for photography! You may have seen some (or all) of these elsewhere but it never hurts to see them again.

Four short links: 31 December 2009 - BotNets, Integration, Conference Videos, and Brain Interfaces

Botnets and the Global Infection Rate (PDF) -- fascinating insights into botnets, control tools, and business models. Atlassian Uses OpenSocial for Internal Integration -- they use it inside their firewall to build a better dashboard.

Being online: Conclusion--identity narratives

Identity online is created by combining many discrete items into a coherent picture. This concluding section of the article suggests that Social networking gives individuals more control over the picture.

A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project

A small fraction of our stimulus package in the United States should be invested in a National Scan Center, a 5-year effort to scan paper, microfiche, audio, video, and other works across the government, with a particular focus in reducing the digitization backlog faced by agencies such as the National Archives.

Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth

Back in August The New York Times reported that the word 'statistics' had replaced the word 'plastics' in the famous career guidance given in the film The Graduate. And more recently the same paper reported that data and its analysis are the future of science. And it's not just in business and ivory towers that statistical analysis of masses of data is becoming important: just understanding the wealth of percentages, risk factors and charts that confront us all requires a form of 'data literacy'.

The Myth of Music Ownership

The idea that you own your music is a MYTH, promulgated by the record companies to ensure their continued profitability! But soon, all that's going to change, because Cloud services will dramatically change the way you listen to music.

Android Rising: O'Reilly Android Apps Gaining Ground on iPhone

O'Reilly sells apps in both the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Most apps (for now) are just app presentations of our ebooks, built using ereader apps popular on each platform (Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Android). That means many of our apps are essentially the same on each platform, so any difference in sales can be at somewhat...

Featured Video: The Known Universe - From the American Museum of Natural History

A Story Before Bed

I'm totally gaga over Jackson Fish Market's new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of those things that parents and grandparents will flip out with happiness about while everyone else scratches their heads, but as a new parent, finding it made me feel like a special delivery had arrived expressly for my daughter. The idea of the site is to make it easy for people far from kids they love -- grandparents in another city, parents on a business trip, soldiers in training or deployed -- to read a story to a child. But you really have to watch a demo video to see what a jewel of a product they've made.

Playing With Foursquare Data

Foursquare is the new Dodgeball. Which is to say that it is my (and many other people's) method for tracking where we go (and in most cases our social activities). On a daily basis I use the iPhone app to announce some of my whereabouts to friends. I share specifics selectively, but in aggregate my information is shared publicly. (Disclosure: Foursquare is an OATV investment)

Four short links: 21 December 2009 - Social Networking Data, Memory Tech, Sim News, Microbe Jalopy Breakthrough

See Bacteria-Powered Micro-Machines. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Being online: Your identity online--getting down to basics

What men daily do, not knowing what they do!The Internet provides minimal information about us when we go online, but compensates by providing immediate, dynamic exploitation of that information. This post in the identity article series shows what we tell others just by connecting to the Internet. Previous posts in this series explored the various identifies that track you in real life. Now we can look at the traits that constitute your identity online. A little case study may show how fluid these are.

Does your UI work for the masses? Test it with Google Browser Size

I was perusing the Google Code blog recently, and stumbled across a post explaining the new Google Browser Size tool. This is a tool that allows you to compare the size & layout of your design against data showing the most common browser sizes of client machines.

Surviving a Re-Org

End of year is a time when companies and departments reflect on the previous year and begin planning for new projects and challenges in the coming year. It's also a time when departments usually restructure to bring more focus and fortification to the challenges ahead. It's a time to re-org. Re-orgs can be stressful. If you've spent the previous year in one role it's natural to be a little intimidated if your role has changed. But re-orgs are a good thing.

Why Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy

Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences. The article focuses on the use of applications like ShopSavvy and RedLaser to do comparison price checking while in the store. On the surface, these are great tools for consumers (and there are other applications besides price comparison.) But remember, cutthroat pursuit of the lowest price will hasten the demise of many retailers, while strengthening others (usually, the biggest and most efficient, who can make money on the slenderest margins.) But what happens once those mega-retailers are the last one standing? Prices are likely to go up.