O'Reilly News & Commentary

Register now for our Gov 2.0 Online Conference - A Free Live Event - March 11 @ 9am PT

Gov 2.0 Online Conference — Gov 2.0 International: Global Innovation Meeting Local Challenges. Gov 2.0 is a worldwide revolution, you don't want to miss this event. The agenda includes: Beyond Borders: Improving Global Diplomacy and Citizen Empowerment with Gov 2.0, Open Government in Canada, Israel Gov 2.0: from Awareness to Implementation, U.K. Innovations in Gov 2.0, and more. Register now for Gov 2.0 Online Conference. It's free! More Upcoming Online Conferences: Velocity Web Performance and Operations Online Conference

Free Book Samplers! - Designing Great iPhone Apps, Being Geek, Power Your House, Your Money, and more.

Check out our free PDF book samplers from these new and upcoming books: Tap Happy: Designing Great iPhone Apps Being Geek Power Your House Personal Investing: The Missing Manual Your Money: The Missing Manual

MySQL migration and risk management - Database expert Ronald Bradford on the pros and cons of migrating from Oracle to MySQL

Ronald Bradford has been guiding DBAs through key aspects of database integration for years. In this Q&A;, he discusses the pros and cons of migrating from Oracle to MySQL (hint: it's not just about cost savings). He also weighs in on how Oracle's acquisition of Sun will shape the future of MySQL and its community.

Four short links: 5 March 2010 - GMail CRM, Django Best Practices, Stats-Think, and WoW Number Crunching

Rapportive -- a simple social CRM built into Gmail. They replace the ads in Gmail with photos, bio, and info from social media sites. (via ReadWrite Web) Best Practices in Web Development with Django and Python -- great set of recommendations. (via Jon Udell's article on checklists) These and more in today's Four Short Links.

Cell phones in the classroom - Surprising field studies suggest cell phones could be effective learning tools

Guest blogger Marie Bjerede examines field projects that are studying the educational use of cell phones. In one limited example, 50 percent of students doing lessons by cell phone had higher math proficiency than classmates who learned the same material from the same teacher.

Four short links: 4 March 2010 - Achievement Design, Estimation, DRM Usability, and Ubicomp v AR

Fundamental Constants and the Problem of Gravity -- huge variation uncertainty in different fundamental constants: we know one to 1 part in 100 million, but another to only 1 in 10 thousand. Led me to wonder whether anyone's done project estimation with error bars, analysing past projects to figure out the error rates in estimates of programmer time, etc. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The implications of a money-making Android app - Car Locator pulled in more than $400 per day when it was featured in the Android Market

Success stories were an important (if overblown) part of the iPhone App Store's development. It looks like the Android Market could be following a similar path. Edward Kim, creator of the Car Locator app, saw his daily revenue jump from around $100 per day to more than $400 per day when the $3.99 app claimed a featured spot in the Market.

1 in 4 Facebook Users Come From Asia or the Middle East

Asia's share of the more than 400 million active Facebook users recently surged past 15%. With a market penetration of 1.7% in Asia and Africa, the company has barely scratched the surface in both regions. While the company continued to add users in Southeast Asia, there were an additional 2.3 million users from South Asia over the past 12 weeks. In fact according to Alexa, Facebook has already overtaken Orkut in India.

Four short links: 3 March 2010 - Most Dangerous Code, 3D Printing, Artificial Irony, and Live Visualisation

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors (MITRE) -- I could play bingo with this on some of the programs I wrote when I was learning to code. Now, of course, I am perfect. *cough*cough*. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Apps for Army Launches - The Hybrid Enterprise?

The Army launches Apps for Army. Contest or harbinger of the hybrid enterprise that combines planning and emergence under one roof? Apps for Army looks to uncork the Army's cognitive surplus and let soldiers start solving their own problems in code without the personal risk of going off reservation to do it.

Report from HIMMS Health IT conference: from Silicon Valley technology to Silicon Valley risk-taking

I'm in Atlanta for the biggest US conference in health care IT, run by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Although many people have been saying that the medical field would benefit from a Silicon Valley approach to technology, it's coming to seem that even more important would be a Silicon Valley approach to risk-taking. Initial report from annual HIMSS conference.

Where the Wild Things Are: an Adventure in Silverlight (Act I)

It seems to me that there is a big culture of misinformation in both the Flex and Silverlight camps regarding how the other gets the job done. I figured the best way to bridge the divide was to investigate how Silverlight, and XAML, does the RIA thang. Through this article, I will focus on Flex 4 and Silverlight 3. That is, Flex 4 Beta 2 (Gumbo), Flash Builder 4 Beta 2, Flash Catalyst Beta 2, Silverlight 3 and Blend 3.

Four short links: 2 March 2010 - Visualising Tweeted Data, Voting Licenses, Space-Time Mining, and Processing for the iPhone

SatScan -- Free software that analyzes spatial, temporal and space-time data using the spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistics. It is designed for any of the following interrelated purposes: Perform geographical surveillance of disease, to detect spatial or space-time disease clusters, and to see if they are statistically significant; Test whether a disease is randomly distributed over space, over time or over space and time; Evaluate the statistical significance of disease cluster alarms; Perform repeated time-periodic disease surveillance for early detection of disease outbreaks.

Mashables' 10 Reasons to Attend or Watch a Global Ignite Week Event

"Today marks the start of Ignite's most ambitious endeavor to date: Global Ignite Week. This week-long Ignite extravaganza has been eight months in the making and is a first of its kind," writes Jennifer Van Grove in her Mashable piece, 10 Reasons You Should Attend or Watch a Global Ignite Week Event. You can find an Ignite event to attend or watch online, but either way you'll want to familiarize with the movement that is Ignite by reading Van Grove's story.

Foursquare wants to be the mayor of location apps - Dennis Crowley on Foursquare's gameplan and the secret sauce that drives the mobile service

Dennis Crowley cut his teeth on location services at mobile pioneer Dodgeball. Things didn't work out there, but he used his Dodgeball experience to shape Foursquare, an on-the-rise app that blends mobile, location awareness and a clever points system. In this Q&A;, Crowley discusses Foursquare's revenue streams, its unexpected adaptations, and the one feature that gets new users hooked.

Climate Wars: Global Warming, ClimateGate, Web 2.0 and Grey Power - The Revenge of the Codgers?

The UK newspaper The Guardian has a really useful long 12-part series Climate Wars. I don't think anyone wanting to get up to speed on the so-called Climate Wars could find a better introduction, given the controversy, and without having to buy in to every statement there of course. Pearce summarizes his view that In many ways, ...(this)... is a Shakespearean tragedy of misunderstood motives. He is scathing about professional skeptics and the media.

Four short links: 1 March 2010 - War Games, Cloud Metaphors, Plain English, and Event Correlations

Meet The Sims and Shoot Them -- America's Army has proven so popular globally that, with so many users signing on from Internet cafes in China, the Chinese government tried to ban it. Full of interesting factoids like this about US military-created first person shooter America's Army and other military uses of games. (via Jim Stogdill)

Continuous publishing through Live Editions

One of the biggest challenges of technical publishing is that sinking feeling you get a few moments, days, weeks, or months after you first see a book in print: it's...

Lessons From Haiti Will Aid Chile

Earlier today Chile experienced a massive earthquake (you can see images of the damage on The Big Picture). Now, just hours after the event online disaster relief sites are being spun up to aid the survivors. These are all variations on sites that were created to help Haiti survivors. Google quickly sprang into action reusing many Haiti built-tools.

Magic Photo Cube - A MAKE Magazine Weekend Project Video

Make a fun and easy desktop cube that magically reveals photos. Subscribe to Make Magazine today!

Intro To Git

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - Intro To Git. Everywhere you look it seams like Flash Developers are abandoning Google Code in droves for the green pastures of GitHub. Git has been on my radar as a Version Control for some time now but with the cool factor GitHub provides I finally made the switch over and never looked back. Here are some tips for getting started, how to use GitHub and why I suggested making the switch.

Ignite Videos -- Inspiration in 5 Minutes - Be a part of Global Ignite Week March 1-5, 2010

Get fired up by the hundreds of 5-minute videos available at igniteshow.com, our new video portal featuring geeky, heartfelt, and pithy talks from Ignite events around the world, including "Causal inference is hard (or how I learned to stop worrying and love counterfactuals)," "What Makes the Greenest Cab?," "The Secret Underground World of Lego," "The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom," and "How to Play the Didgeridoo." Visit igniteshow.com now!Don't miss being part of Global Ignite Week happening March 1-5, 2010 in cities around the world. Attend, present, or lead an Ignite in your city.

It's Alive!! Makers Market Debuts

After almost a year of development, our colleagues at Make are proud to take the wraps off of our newest offering -- Makers Market, a curated marketplace of wonderful science, tech, and artistic creations created and sold directly by some of our favorite Makers from around the World.

How I use Social Media: Part 4--LinkedIn

Over the past month, I've been covering how I use various social media to gather information, connect with others, document and share my information, and advance my career. In Part 1, I share how I use Twitter. In Part 2, I reveal how FaceBook keeps me in touch with my friends. In Part 3 I discuss how blogging helps me record my thoughts in a way that is useful to myself and others. This week, I want to talk about LinkedIn.

Four short links: 26 February 2010 - Gov App Building, Android FPS, Graph Mining, Keeping Fit

Quake 3 for Android -- kiss the weekend goodbye, NexusOne owners! My theory is that no platform has "made it" until a first person shooter has been ported to it. (via BoingBoing) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Register Now for our Velocity Online Conference - A Free Live Event - March 17 @ 10am PT

Velocity Online Conference is the meeting ground where emerging trends are examined, predictions are made, and business models vetted in the performance and operations ecosystem.Topics include: diagnosing and preventing JavaScript/AJAX performance issues in IE, provisioning toolchain, keeping track of your performance using Show Slow, MySQL abuse, and site performance in Google Webmaster Tools. Register now for Velocity Online. It's free! More Upcoming Online Conferences: Gov 2.0 Online Conference

An expert view of unicorns and digital rights management

Kirk Biglione is a digital rights management (DRM) historian who brings a clear-eyed perspective to an inflammatory topic. While others jump on soapboxes, he actually does the homework. Case in point: Biglione's in-depth look at the music industry's stormy history with DRM.

Evaluation Questions for Flex Programmers

Sometimes I am asked to interview potential Flex programmers for clients. A common requirement is to assess the candidate's ability to design and develop custom components. Today's blog post is dedicated to the hiring manager who called after regular business hours today and illustrates some great skill tests for evaluating flex programmers, code included.

Four short links: 25 February 2010 - Rap Python, Being Believed, Hot Maps, and Old School Secrets

gheat -- add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre's blog. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The Sacred Barrier - A discussion with open source cloud API developers

Should public cloud providers reach into the guest operating system to perform various functions? I've always held that a public cloud provider should treat the border between the hypervisor and guest operating system as a sacred barrier that should never be breached. The fear in public cloud computing is giving up control. When a public cloud provider reaches into your virtual machine, you lose too much control.

Are Books Dead - What Happens When Too Much Information Isn't Enough?

As we struggle to stay on top of everything that crosses our paths, are we missing opportunities to get more out of the information? Are we becoming too much of a "right now" society? Are we able to delve into an issue at length or stick with a topic that doesn't have a quick pithy answer? My fear is that in our quest for quick information, we may be losing a vital tool in books.

NoSQL conference coming to Boston

On March 11 Boston will join several other cities who have host conferences on the movement broadly known as NoSQL. Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, HypergraphDB, Hypertable, Memcached, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, SimpleDB, Voldemort, and probably other projects as well will be represented at the one-day affair. The interviews I had with various projects leaders for this article turned up a recurring usage pattern for NoSQL. What connects the users is that they carry out web-related data crunching, searching, and other Web 2.0 related work. I think these companies use NoSQL tools because they're the companies who understand leading-edge technologies and are willing to take risks in those areas. As the field gets better known, usage will spread.

Four short links: 24 February 2010 - Mapping Data, Publishing Advice, Data Packaging, and User Reputation

Maker! Map the World's Data -- web-based tool to make elegant maps from public data. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Global Ignite Week: Starts Monday with 65 Cities, 6 Continents, 500 Speakers over 5 Days

From March 1-5 there will be ~65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. There are lots of Ignite videos online.

When it Comes to Tweets, the Key is Location, Location, Location! - Raffi Krikorian works to make geotagging tweets fast and efficient

When you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you have to depend a lot on context. For Twitter, a big part of that context has become location. Knowing where someone is tweeting from can add a lot of value to the experience, and it's Raffi Krikorian's job to integrate location into Twitter. Raffi will be talking about this and other location-related topics at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference. We began by asking him how Twitter determines location, and whether it will always be an opt-in option.

Announcing New Digital Services for Publishers - Ebooks. Digital formats. Mobile Apps. And more.

O'Reilly Digital Distribution Service — O'Reilly Media announced today an innovative new digital service at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York CIty. Pascal Honscher, an 11-year veteran with O'Reilly, will lead this digital distribution service. The new division aims to help publishers meet the demands and challenges of the 21st century. For the past four years O'Reilly has invested in a technical tool chain that allows us to easily open new markets and channels. And starting today O'Reilly will make our digital tool chain and sales and marketing capabilities available to every other publisher. For more information, see: oreilly.com/go/digital

Learning Python Gets 9/10 on Slashdot - "This book continues to be Python's bible."

Slashdot reviewer Ahmed Al-Saadi gives Learning Python, Fourth Edition, by Mark Lutz, a 9/10 rating, and says, "Like many O'Reilly books, this is a well-written, coherent, and beautifully type-set book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to, or already does, program using python. It should help the novice in the transition to an excellent programming language or, otherwise, make an already familiar environment more powerful in the hands of veterans." Read more.

Four short links: 23 February 2010 - Disaster SMS, Open Source Win, Confidence, Pirate Experience

Inside Open Source's Historic Victory -- open source developer wins against someone who took his work, added it to an open patent application, and then sued the open source developer for violating his patent. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Flex 4 New Features: Two-way Data Binding

Data Binding is the action of passing values from one object to another automatically. When an object undergoes a change in his particular property, this change is reflected in some attribute of another object. In Flex 3.x Data Binding enabled mirroring of information from one object to another but the reverse did not occur automatically, so we were forced to create another Binding. In Flex 4.0, Adobe has prepared a great surprise to solve this problem: Two-way Data Binding.

Live in New York: O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference - Watch the TOC Keynotes Live

TOC is now underway in New York! For the first time, we'll be streaming all the TOC keynote presentations live online. Information on how to watch will be available soon. Keynotes include: Content, Community, Commerce. How COPIA Drives Revenue in a Digital World Extending Your Content to Digital Format: How Your Technology Choices Can Make or Break the Consumers Experience Publishing is Dead; Long Live Publishing! A Future for Books: BookServer Find videos, presentation slides, photos, plus the full session schedule at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference site.

Remember: Change isn't Always Bad - History Shows New Technologies Will Push the Media Industry Forward

Media: Don't Fear New Technologies — "A common fear among those in large media businesses (book publishing, music, newspapers, movies) is that the Web and digital technology threaten existing business models, organizational structures and industry dynamics. This fear is both reasonable and justified!" says Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Iniatives. In his new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com, Andrew explains the irony of our typical response to change, even though it's something we face on a regular basis. Learn more.

Controlling animation using CSS3

Transition and animation control is new to Cascading Style Sheets Level 3, CSS3. With a basic understanding of CSS you can add animation to your Web site without needing to know complex JavaScript or use a jQuery library. The goal of this article is to explain how transitions and animation work in CSS3 and how you can use them to build your own animation sequences.

Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive

In an earlier post, I examined the average price of the Top 100 PAID apps and noted that the relationship between price and popularity was somewhat dependent on the category. But in the Book category, I concluded that the Top 10 PAID apps were on average cheaper than those ranked 91-100. But what if we examine all Book apps, will the long tail apps be pricier?

Four short links: 22 February 2010 - Schuyler in Haiti, Data Principles, Damn Internet Get Off My Lawn, and Leadership Lessons

Panton Principles -- basic groundrules for useful open data in science. Raises the flag of licensing: arbitrary license clauses or hastily-repurposed software licenses lead to a quagmire of incompatible licenses and prevent useful combinations of data, just as license proliferation in open source created a confusing and difficult environment for people trying to combine multiple open source projects' code. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

How Much Is the Fear of Cloud Security Worth?

It's absurd to talk about the cloud as being "more secure" or "less secure" than an internal data center. In fact, for most needs, a cloud infrastructure can be secured appropriately to an organization's risk profile. Even if you are concerned about the security issues with cloud computing, it's highly unlikely those concerns justify the extra costs associated with internal data centers and managed service providers over the cloud.

The Skill of Interviewing Part 3

In my previous two articles I discussed the skill of interviewing from the perspective of a candidate being interviewed. I will now shift the perspective and discuss the skill of interviewing from the perspective of the employer evaluating a candidate. This is a useful exercise because this is something that not enough people have given thought to, and often times the hiring process is haphazard and unfocused.

The Raygun - A MAKE Magazine Weekend Project Video

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Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem - "Search Patterns" author Peter Morville looks at the next wave of search and reveals the one innovation that led to a watershed moment

We may think of search as static and mature, but it's a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs signal big changes ahead. In this Q&A;, "Search Patterns" author Peter Morville shows how experiments at the periphery and weird ideas will shape search's future. He also reveals the one semi-recent innovation that unlocked a watershed moment for search (it's not what you'd expect).

How a Mobile Policy Can Benefit Your Business - Stay Competitive and Reap the Rewards

The Mobile Future Is Now — "People who cannot afford a landline phone or a computer usually can afford a cellphone, making it the most popular gateway to the wealth of resources available on the network," writes Sarah Sorensen, the author of The Sustainable Network: The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet. In her new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com, Sorennsen explains how you can turn the mobility trend into a business benefit. Learn more.

Living Stories can reinvent the article - Google's Living Stories platform fills a big gap in the content universe

Article-based content is limiting. It's static and can't capture the energy surrounding newsworthy events or interesting topics. That's why Google's Living Stories format -- released this week as an open source project -- holds so much promise. It can reinvent the form in a way that works with the web, not against it.