O'Reilly News & Commentary

Video: Roger Magoulas on The Next Device - Future at Work Series: Pico Projectors and OLED Screens

I recently sat down with Roger Magoulas, Director of Research at O'Reilly to talk about what he is paying attention to these days. I thought we would do a single, quick segment for Radar. I was mistaken. I have broken out the interview into several parts and will release them weekly... Call it Wednesdays with Roger. This episode touches on new devices that will shape how we work and get things done in the future including Pico projectors and OLED screens.

Metadata and the Flash Platform

Metadata has the ability to give us context to the media we are dealing with. It also makes for an interesting data source. Using the Flash Platform we can combine information all ready contained in files that you are using along with web services to create an interesting user experience. This tutorial will combine id3 metadata from your mp3's to power an Flickr image search. Our final output will be an AIR application written with Flex Builder 3.

Participant Sensing - An Interview with Deborah Estrin

While the iPhone doesn’t ship nearly as much as its humbler brethren - the iPhone opened up many minds about the potential of phones to do a whole lot more than talk. In that regard it is a peek into the future. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with onboard sensors. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer),...

John Hagel on The Social Web

I am releasing my conversation with John Hagel in three segments. In the first segment we discussed the real-time web. Here we discuss the move from the information web to the Social Web. John makes the point that the rise of the Social Web feels “a bit like Back to the Future” for people who have a long history with...

Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows - A Conversation with John Hagel

This interview covers three “Big Shifts” that have dominated 2009 (1) The move to the real-time web, (2) the move from the information web to the Social Web and (3) the rise of mobile. Since John co-chairs Deloitte’s Center for the Edge I wanted to get his take on each in terms of its impact on larger organizations. This first video covers the Real-Time Web.

O'Reilly Books Example updated: Show a different image for each book

I got some great feedback on my first screencast - thank you! A few of you asked: how can you show a different view for each of the rows in the table view, instead of just showing the same view for each row? I can think of a couple of ways to do this. Here's a new screencast that expands on the previous O'Reilly Books example, with code samples.

Silicon Valley's First Phone Company - A conversation with Ted Griggs

Ribbit bills itself as "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company." Recently I sat down with Ted Griggs, Ribbit's CEO to talk about that tag line, Ribbit's business and what's behind their recent acquisition by British Telecom. It will be interesting to see how the telecommunications industry is going to handle the coming disruption as the public becomes accustomed to near-free calling and outside competitors like Google Voice and Ribbit accelerate the pace of innovation.

Tab bars and Navigation bars together

The TableView is a common way to display data on an iPhone. Combining a tab bar with a table view and navigation bar isn't very difficult, but it took me forever to figure out how to do it properly. In my screencast, learn how to avoid common beginner errors and enjoy a practical follow-along exercise to build an app with a tab bar, navigation bar and table view controllers.

Security and Data Risk in the Age of Social Networks

Over the past four years we have seen an explosion in the volume of personally identifiable information (PII) online as social software and user generated content have allowed millions of people to create, manage and share their data in the cloud. While the rewards have been pretty clear (lower barriers to participation and collaboration) the risks have not been understood...

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...

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.

Knight Foundation Scholarship: Bringing Developers to the Newsroom

Rich Gordon, Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, discusses the Knight Foundation Scholarship for working developers to attend a one-year Master's program in Journalism. Gordon discusses the current trends in news and technology, and how developers will play an important role in the continued evolution of "news".

First Steps in Rails (on Heroku)

If you want to explore Rails, heroku.com offers an easy way to get started, using a web-based interface that neatly hides the complexity of installation and database management.

First Steps into Rails (on the Mac)

Once you have Rails installed, it's time to explore the foundations of how Rails applications are put together. It's not quite programming yet - it's more looking around to figure out how the pieces fit together.

Interview with Andy Oram: Upcoming Books and Current Trends

This is a brief interview with Andy Oram about the state of the technology publishing market. What are the trends in online publishing, and how does it affect O'Reilly? In this interview, I ask Oram about his views on free books and I ask him to talk about some of the trends he has identified in computing and technology.

Interview with Jason Hunter of MarkMail.org

At OSCON 2008, Mike Hendrickson interviewed Jason Hunter about MarkMail.org a site which archives 34 million email messages from 6,470 open source mailing lists. Mike asks Jason about the technology behind Markmail.org and how MarkLogic's products can scale to handle Petabyte-scale data

Installing Rails on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Server)

Want to install a Rails development environment on a bare-bones Ubuntu server setup? It's not that hard.

Installing Rails on Hardy Heron (Desktop)

There are way too many operating systems and choices within those operating systems to provide a straightforward explanation of installing Rails. To solve that, I'm creating screencasts that show how to install Rails, demonstrating both how to do it and that it actually is possible.

Online Communities: The Tribalization of Business

Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation). The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point....

Swapping Custom Views with RubyCocoa

Learn how to swap custom views using RubyCocoa in your interface.

Technology, Politics and Democracy

Recently I spoke with Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and co-founder of Blue State Digital about how technology is affecting politics and democracy in the U.S. Blue State Digital was born out of Jascha's experience helping Howard Dean’s seminal run for the White House in ’04. and is the technology and strategic services company powering Barack Obama (and many other Democratic leaders...

RubyCocoa and NSTables De-Mystified

Screencast showing how to create a RubyCocoa application which pulls search results from Amazon using their Web API and populates a table.

Jason Fried of 37Signals on Business, Focus, and Avoiding Interruption

Jason Fried discusses the day to day operations of 37signals and some of his ideas for minimizing distraction in the workplace. Fried talks about his view that startups should focus on profit and product before accepting venture capital. In this video, Fried's focus on the fundamentals of product design suggest an austerity and simplicity uncommon in an industry suffering from a pandemic of hype.

A New Science of Music: Digital Cantometrics and the Evolution of Music

Armand Leroi is an Evolutionary Biologist with the Imperial College in London. Leroi is leveraging the ability of computers to analyze sound to create a Cantometric description of traditional music from various cultures. Leroi discusses his research and his new initiative to create a digital Cantometric survey of traditional music.

Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview with Lane Becker

The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong. Lane (co-founder of...

The Ever-Dynamic John Lam on Iron Ruby, Open Source and Microsoft

John Lam, who heads the Iron Ruby effort at Microsoft, stopped by to tell O'Reilly News all the exciting work going on with dynamic languages at Redmond. John spent some time discussing what makes a language dynamic, what the benefits of dynamic languages are, and how Microsoft is trying to leverage the power of lanaguages such as Ruby inside their CLR framework.

Video: Google's GeoWall with Michael Weiss-Malik

Google's Michael Weiss-Malik gives us a brief look at Google's GeoWall: a visualization of search traffic on Google's infrastructure.

Duane's World on Adobe TV

Duane Nickull has another new episode of Duane's World posted and this one includes two interviews. One of which is with the founder of this company Tim O'Reilly! Here is Duane's description of the episode. This episode of Duane's World...

The Mind of Damian Conway: Science, Computer Science, the Future of Perl 6, and Advice for Today's Aspiring Programmers

At this year's OSCON, Terry Camerlengo sat down with Damian Conway, author of Perl Best Practices and Perl Hacks, to get his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, including the what-and-when of Perl 6 and what he thinks is important for the next generation of computer scientists. Watch the video (or read on) to hear what he says.

Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson: Rails Culture, Scaling Basecamp, and Building Successful Companies

In this video interview, DHH discusses the current state of Ruby on Rails adoption. Who is using Rails? How was the culture changed over the past five years? Hansson also comments on the technologies that are catching his attention and how they might affect Rails in the months to come. Hansson also comments on his Startup School presentation, and why he thinks Chicago is an ideal environment for technology and innovation.

Hackerteen Book Trailer

Hackerteen is an educational project that trains teenagers to work with computer security. With an innovative and fun methodology, young people learn how to protect companies - not to break into them - while reducing time spent on computer...

Alex Martelli at OSCON: Google's Uber Tech Lead On Code Reviews!

Alex Martelli, a well-published Python developer and Google's Uber Tech Lead, has some fairly strong convictions about code reviewing, and he's not afraid to share them. Alex believes that there's not enough code reviewing being done in the open source community, and enumerated several of his convictions for O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008. He also addresses the increasing availability of tools for organizing code reviews, and some lessons that even the largest companies can take to heart.

Nathan Torkington at OSCON: What's Coming up on the Radar

O'Reilly blogger Nathan Torkington spent some time with James Turner of O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008 in Portland. He shares some of the trends and technologies that he thinks will play a big role in the near future, including open source biology and the rise of mobile computing.

Tim O'Reilly Reflects on 10 Years of OSCON

It's been 10 years since O'Reilly held the first OSCON. At the latest edition of O'Reilly's open source convention, Tim O'Reilly sat down with O'Reilly News to talk about the anniversary. He also reflected on how open source has changed in that period, whether Web 2.0 (a term he helped coin) has met his expectations, and how the nature of technical book publishing has changed.

Larry Wall at OSCON: Open Source as a Parenting Experience

Larry Wall, father of perl, likens the history of perl to raising a child. In this live interview at OSCON 2008, Larry talks about perl's rebellious teen years, the role of the benevolent dictator, and dual licensing as a quantum physics phenomenon.

Anthony Baxter at OSCON: Google Apps Engine and You

Anthony Baxter, one of the lead engineers working on Google's new App Engine, spent some time at O'Reilly's source convention, OSCON, talking about the features that App Engine can offer to developers. James Turner interviews Baxter for O'Reilly News at OSCON in Portland.

At OSCON: Pia Waugh, President of Software Freedom International

Pia Waugh, President of Software Freedom International sat down at O'Reilly's open source convention, OSCON, to talk about some of her interests. These include how women are entering the computer field worldwide and her work getting laptops into the hands of children across Australia and the Pacific islands.

Jim Zemlin at OSCON: The Mysterious Work of the Linux Foundation

Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, talked with O'Reilly News at OSCON, the O'Reilly open source convention. He demystifies the role that the Linux Foundation plays in helping to promote Linux use, provide legal defense, and broker cooperative work between Linux related projects.

Dan Kaminsky: Upgrade Your DNS Now!

DNS is the fundamental human-friendly abstraction of the Internet. It maps names such as oreilly.com to addresses computers can understand. Yet there are flaws in the protocol, which mean that malicious users can redirect your request for oreilly.com for their own nefarious purposes. Security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered this danger and convinced the major DNS providers to work around the flow. Here's how you can protect yourself and your information.