O'Reilly News & Commentary

Saturday's Open MAKE @ Exploratorium: Making Music - Featuring Ga Wang, founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra

This Saturday, 27 March, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Young Makers series is featuring makers who are exploring new and unusual ways of making music. The event is in collaboration with Pixar, TechShop, the Exploratorium's Learning Studio, MAKE magazine, and features performances and discussion with Ge Wang, Krys Bobrowski and Walter Kitundu. Our goal is to encourage more kids to engage in making things, and ultimately, create more opportunity for young makers to participate in Maker Faire.

David Pogue's Windows 7: The Missing Manual Is Here! - Ingenious Tips and Tricks, Disarming Humor

"Already it's clear that Windows 7 is the best-reviewed, best-loved, and just plain best version of Windows ever," notes David Pogue, bestselling author and personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. "I thought it deserved the full Pogue treatment: ingenious tips and tricks, disarming humor, 500 illustrations, outstanding index, spectacular clarity of writing, and, of course, complete modesty." Learn all about Pogue's Windows 7: The Missing Manual here.

Web-TV convergence is already here, just not the way we expected - New data from Nielsen shows consumers are multitasking on their own terms

While manufacturers continue to pursue the super box -- a mythical device that combines the best of television and web -- consumers have already adopted a simple form of convergence: they're surfing the web while watching TV. There's lessons to be learned here for software and hardware companies.

The Five Levels of Cloud Computing

We're at an immature stage in the development of cloud computing. Today, the cloud represents the exception to way organizations manage technology. As the decade progresses, cloud computing will mature and evolve into the core of all IT systems along the path described in these five levels of cloud computing.

Creating ID Cards With Flex

The following is a brief (slightly modified) article from our internal developer knowledge base written by one of my colleagues Nick Karnick. I thought this may benefit others so we decided to publish it here. In one of our recent projects we had the task of using WebCam pictures for printed ID cards within Flex. Here is a brief tutorial on how we went about it.

Joe Stump on data, APIs, and why location is up for grabs - The SimpleGEO CTO and former Digg architect discusses NoSQL and location's future

I recently had a long conversation with Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about location, geodata, and the NoSQL movement. Stump, who was formerly lead architect at Digg, had a lot to say. Here's the highlights, you can find the full interview elsewhere on Radar.

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

YQL and Flash Platform Services' Distribution Service

The concept of an item online going "viral" is one that clients, developers and advertisers alike would love to hear about a project they are working on. In the case that something does become popular, how easy would it be...

PyMOTW: Creating XML Documents with ElementTree

In addition to its parsing capabilities, ElementTree also supports creating well-formed XML documents from Element objects constructed in your application.

Writing Beyond Tech: Bugville Critters

A fun follow up to my previous post about writing outside of technology. This one focuses on my childrens picture books and a series called Bugville Critters. All 16 of my original Bugville Critters books have been published. The latest...

Trapping content on the iPad won't work, even if it's pretty - Wired's latest iPad demo looks great, but the app doesn't want you to leave

Wired is leading the magazine-to-iPad charge with a great looking app, but it's also reverting to some back lock-in habits. Instead of trapping content and readers within a space -- a true exercise in futility -- Wired and other publishers should go the other way with their iPad offerings: create more web hooks, not less.

Four short links: 19 March 2010 - Load Testing, Chinese Manufacturing, Heroic Forking, and Ubicomp

Myth of China's Manufacturing Prowess -- The latest data shows [...] that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China (UN data. China’s data do not separate manufacturing from mining and utilities. So the actual Chinese manufacturing number should be much smaller). Also contains pointers to an interesting discussion of lack of opportunities for college grads in China. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Making HTML more like print - Things are improving, but so slowly

Can HTML rival print for quality? I took a fresh look at hyphenation, body text fonts, sidebars, and dynamic layout.

How to Get Started with Processing

Are you a creative type that would like to get started with designing and prototyping with Processing? In this excerpt from Visualizing Data Ben Fry introduces the Processing Environment and quickly gets you sketching with Processing. Processing is a simple programming environment that was created to make it easier to develop visually oriented applications with an emphasis on animation and provide users with instant feedback through interaction. Read more.

Upcoming Webcast: LINQPad: Version 2 and Beyond - Live Event March 23, 2010

Join Joe Albahari (C# 4.0 in a Nutshell and LINQ Pocket Reference) in an interactive session on the new and upcoming features of LINQPad. We'll demonstrate support for C# 4.0, the new extensibility model and some exciting enhancements to autocompletion and other new developments in the next beta. You'll get a chance to talk with Joe on feature requests, future direction, and LINQPad's emerging role as a scratchpad for C# 4. Attendance is limited, so register now! Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Four short links: 18 March 2010 - DIY Newspapers, Saviour Algorithms, Baseline Removal, and Web Scripting

Chickenfoot -- Firefox plugin to let you script and manipulate web pages. Useful for automation, like Greasemonkey, but acts on the rendered page and not the HTML source. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Find Your Inner Leprechaun - A St. Patrick's Day Limerick Contest

Since our limerick contest was such a hit last year, we decided to host it again! Today, we're encouraging you to write a limerick that is either tech-themed or that references O'Reilly Media or one (or more) of our books, conferences, or webcasts. Anything goes, so long as it fits the standard form of a limerick and is a PG rating. We'll run the contest until 11:59pm PDT and then randomly pick three winners out of a hat to win a free ebook of your choice.

Upcoming Webcast: Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel - Live Event March 24, 2010

Even if you're new to Excel, this live presentation with Michael Milton will get you using pivot tables like a champ. Pivot tables let you put together in seconds data summaries that would take forever to create with Excel formulas. That speed gives you the ability to get answers about your data as quickly as you can think up questions for it. Pivot tables are one of Excel's most versatile features, but they can be tough to break into. Attendance is limited, so register now! Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Google Buzz and hybrid blogging - Long form posts and informal conversation find a home in Google Buzz

A couple Google Buzz experiments with long-form posts hint at a new use for the service. It's emerging as a hybrid option in the social/publishing space; a spot that's well equipped for deeper inquiry and conversation.

Google's New Marketplace Has over a Thousand Apps

One week into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com's app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.

Google Fiber and the FCC National Broadband Plan

I've puzzled over Google's Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that's already big and has earned the right to hubris) -- and also not a business Google would want to be in. But the FCC's announcement of their plans to widen broadband Internet access in the US puts Google Fiber in a new context. The FCC's plans are cast in terms of upgrading and expanding the network infrastructure. That's a familiar debate, and Google is a familiar participant. This is really just an extension of the "network neutrality" debate that has been going on with fits and starts over the past few years.

How to get started with Windows Phone Programming

The all new Windows Phone 7 Series holds a promise to be an amazing personal mobile phone with new innovative user interface and functionality, as well as a great development platform on which you can quickly and easily build games and applications. I hope you are ready to start coding your first Windows Phone (WP) application and get hands-on experience with the platform. Learn more about Windows Phone programming now.

Open Data Pointers

After blogging about talking to government departments and scientists about truly open data, talking up an "open source approach" to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses, readers sent me a lot of interesting links. I've collected them all to share.

Four short links: 16 March 2010 - Platform Games, NoSQL Conf, Ratings, and How to Teach

Modeling Scale Usage Heterogeneity the Bayesian Way -- people use 1-5 scales in different ways (some cluster around the middle, some choose extremes, etc.). This shows how to identify the types of users, compensate for their interpretation of the scale, and how it leads to more accurate results. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Why HTML5 is worth your time - Eric A. Meyer on HTML5's future and the skills developers need to acquire

HTML5 vs. Flash debates are engaging. No doubt about that. But if you strip away the bombast, you'll find that HTML5 also offers an interesting feature set that's worth investigating. In this Q&A;, HTML/CSS expert and author Eric A. Meyer explains why HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are the "classic three" skills developers and designers need to acquire.

Four short links: 15 March 2010 - Digital Libraries, Story Analysis, Scriptable Google Apps, Forensic Rooting

There's a Rootkit in the Closet -- lovely explanation of finding and isolating a rootkit, reconstructing how it got there and deconstructing the rootkit to figure out what it did. It's a detective story, no less exciting than when Cliff Stohl wrote The Cuckoo's Egg. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

NoSQL: Staying for the feature presentation

The first reports of BigTable, CloudDB, and the other innovations that have come along now to be casually categorized as NoSQL, emphasized their architecture. I assumed that these experiments would stand or fall on their fundamental designs. I arrived at Boston's NoSQL Live conference hoping to untangle the architectural choices behind each technology and lay out their implications in long, straight lines that could lead to decisions about their deployment. Now I wonder whether they'll compete like other projects do, citing their features more than their architecture.

Lookup Performance in R

Recently, I became interested in maximizing lookup performance in R. Many problems require looking up values in tables. I decided to perform some tests to show how different lookup mechanisms performed in R. If you're not familiar with R, here's a short description. R is a very popular language (and environment) for working with data. You can download a current version from The R Project web site. R was designed to make it easy to define and manipulate vectors and matrices.

Four short links: 12 March 2010 - Seasonal Colours, Fast Peripherals, Wikipedian-in-Residence, Location Abomination

If you chose to tweet with a place, but not to share your exact coordinates, Twitter still needs to use your coordinates to determine your Place. In order to improve the accuracy of our geolocation systems (for example, the way we define neighborhoods and places), Twitter will temporarily store those coordinates for 6 months. Because how could anything go wrong if there's a database containing 6 months of my precise locations stored on the Internet even when I've chosen not to share my precise location? This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Example of Flex 3 and ColdFusion 9 ORM (2)

In my previous blog entry I demonstrated how easy it was to mix ColdFusion 9's new ORM features with a fancy (ok, simple) Flex front end. I left off the application in a rather simplistic state. On the server side, I had designed a ColdFusion CFC to interface with the Art table. On the client side, Flex used a simple datagrid and Flash Remoting to fetch the data via a service component. Our data model was just a set of properties, string and numeric based, and nothing more. In this entry, I'm going to demonstrate how we can being to work with slightly more complex data. I'll demonstrate how to work with related data in our Art table and how Flex can handle this more complex result.

Comparing Apples To Oranges with Flex

Occasionally you might find the need to compare completely unrelated data in your applications. This may sound a bit odd, but it does happen, especially in cases where you may want to observe and compare trends within your data sets. This could include completely different data sets, using different value ranges on both axes, with variable numbers of data points. Hence: comparing apples to oranges. With Flex it is actually not difficult to to create multi-scale visualizations on the same component. In this post, we will examine the application of Flex charting components to view multiple data sets with multiple scales, and multiple collection sizes.

Happening Tomorrow: Introduction to Gearman - A Free Live Webcast - March 12 @ 10am PT

Introduction to Gearman – Come learn the fundamentals of how to leverage Gearman, the open source, distributed job queuing system. Originally designed to scale LiveJournal.com, Gearman is now faster than ever and can help you build your own scalable applications. Gearman's generic design allows it to be used as a building block for almost any use--from speeding up your website to building your own Map/Reduce cluster. Attendance is limited, so register now!

Hacking Ribbit

Ribbit enables developers to combine the richness of voice calling with the interactivity of Web 2.0 experiences. Finally there's a technology able to record and manage voice mails directly from a web site. This great feature has millions of possible implementation scenarios, but here's just one, in my step by step tutorial.

NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform

You'd never think it from the right-wing media hysteria around the administration's health care initiatives, but some of the best thinking about minimal government intervention is happening right now in healthcare. In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I've been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector compete to flesh out the offerings.

How crowdsourcing helped Haiti's relief efforts - Lukas Biewald on CrowdFlower's emergency shift from microtasks to Kreyol translations

Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower founder and CEO Lukas Biewald shares his story in this guest post.

Four short links: 11 March 2010 - Digital Inclusion, Bookwriting Revealed, Chip Tips, and Mobile Marketshare

January 2010 US Mobile Subscriber Market Share (ComScore) -- Android just overtook Palm, and is growing faster than the other smartphone platforms. And for a reality check, 28% of mobile customers used a browser on their phone. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Gov 2.0 invades Harvard: A report from #gov20ne - Politicians, advocates, techies and citizens discuss open government

Last Saturday, several hundred folks gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to spend the day discussing Open Government. I attended, and Laurel Ruma (O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 Evangelist) was one of the organizers.

What We Can Learn from Super Heros - A Video by Nilofer Merchant, author of "The New How"

If you like this video, pick up a copy of Nilofer Merchant's book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy.

We're about to scratch the real-world data itch - Mobile location tools will finally provide analytics from the physical realm

Folks in the web world are accustomed to granular information, yet brick-and-mortar businesses are still largely in the dark on the data front. But what if business owners could gather hard data? What if they could use that information to entice customers and adapt their offerings? Mobile location tools are poised to make this possible.

Four short links: 10 March 2010 - Publishing Business, Google Apps Marketplace, iPad Design, and Visual Communication

Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace -- this is sweet. It looks like the play is to become the home page for authenticated apps rather than to make commissions from selling the apps themselves. This may be the Google business model vs the Apple business model in a nutshell. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Truly Open Data

I'm kicking myself. I have spent a non-trivial number of hours talking to government departments and scientists about open data, talking up an "open source approach" to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses. I've had more successes than failures, met and helped some wonderful people, and now have more mail about open data in my inbox than about open source. So why am I kicking myself? I'm kicking myself because I've been taking far too narrow an interpretation of "an open source approach".

Happening Tomorrow: Where 2.0 webcast on mapping, mobile, and local trends - A Free Live Event at 10am PT

In this webcast, moderated by Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media, you'll hear from the following: Diann Eisnor of Waze will discuss the creation of realtime mapping data sets. Joe Stump of SimpleGeo will discuss tying mobile services to webservices. Kara Nortman of CitySearch will discuss local data trends online. Attendance is limited, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts: Introduction to Gearman Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

IntelliJ Idea9 ActionScript 3/Flex Workflow Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my IntelliJ Idea 9 ActionScript 3/Flex workflow series. If you followed part 1 you should have a HelloWorldProject setup along with a HelloWorld module. Now it is time to learn how to compile our SWF and go over the other core features IntelliJ Idea 9 has to offer. Lets not waste any more time, here we go!

The state of open government in Canada - David Eaves on Canada's open government success stories and the folly of non-beta thinking

David Eaves, a public policy entrepreneur and a speaker at this week's Gov 2.0 International online conference, discusses the rise of open government in Canada's cities. He also looks at the country's federal inertia, and he explains how a beta mindset could benefit government projects.

Four short links: 9 March 2010 - Cooperation is Catching, 3D Visualisation Tool, News Dump, and Fighting Censorship

Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) -- Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the 'right' or 'normal' way of behaving....

Mobile phones and smartphones are not the same thing

Comparing a basic mobile phone to a spiffy new smartphone is like comparing a circa-1993 desktop computer to a Macbook Pro. They're related in a basic sense, but the discrepancies are immense. Arthur Attwell, co-founder and CEO of Electric Book Works, expands on the divide between mobile phones and smartphones in an interview.

Three lessons from the Chipotle iPhone app - How centralization, a defined use case, and a uniform menu shaped Chipotle's iPhone app

The iPhone app from Chipotle, the restaurant chain best known for its burritos, is an interesting mix of simple design, e-commerce functionality and location tools. Digging into the app's development reveals three aspects that could prove useful for businesses and programmers pursuing their own mobile paths.

Four short links: 8 March 2010 - Vigilantes, Yawn Digital, Interactivity Advice, eBook Design

China's Cyberposse (NY Times) -- is vigilante justice ok if the cause is right? Is it okay if there wouldn't be justice without it? Does the end justify the means? Many interesting questions raised by this large-scale Internet-based "human-flesh-search" in China. In the future we are all 4chan. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

PyMOTW: tabnanny - Indentation validator

Consistent use of indentation is important in a langauge like Python, where white-space is significant. The tabnanny module provides a scanner to report on "ambiguous" use of indentation. The simplest way to use tabnanny is to run it from the command line, passing the names of files to check. If you pass directory names, the directories are scanned recursively to find .py files to check.

Teamwork: It's About Trust, Not A Technique

Building a great software team requires more than just a good tool, technology, or technique. That's something we learned time and again from the many brilliant people who contributed to Beautiful Teams. It's an idea that seems to really fascinate people: that when a team build great software, even the right programming tools or best practices, solid processes or methodologies can't make up for a team that doesn't start with trust and respect (not to mention skill, talent and good ideas).