O'Reilly News & Commentary

A New Way to Learn Python - A Free Live Webcast - Today, May 7 @ 1pm PT

Live today–Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation and the Author of Python Web Programming, introduces his new course Python 1: Beginning Python and discusses the upcoming Python Programming Certificate available soon from the O'Reilly School of Technology. Join us at 1pm - enter as a guest.

Tutorial : Make Your Website Multilingual with a Proxy Server

Building a multilingual site is often a difficult and expensive task, not because there is anything especially difficult about hiring translators, but because web publishing and application development tools tend to treat translation as an after thought. However, there is a cheap and easy way to do this, using a translation proxy server. The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source translation platform which I developed, has released just such a beast.

The changing role of marketing in a consumer-driven world

Marketing 2.0 is about companies engaging and addressing the needs and interests of the consumer or risk losing credibility and quickly becoming irrelevant. Marketing is less about generating one-to-many discussions, in the form of advertisements or press releases, and more about creating an ongoing dialogue with customers...

Get ready to create an Android Twitter app

If you're interested in learning how to build a Twitter app on your Android phone with Java then you'll want to check out our upcoming online course, Developing Android Applications with Java: Building a Twitter App, and you'll want to watch this screencast so you're ready to go on the first day of class. In this screencast, instructor Tony Hillerson walks you through how to register an application and get your authentication keys to use with OAuth on Twitter.

The Story of the O'Reilly School of Technology - part 1

In this multi-part series of blog posts, I'd like to tell the story of the O'Reilly School of Technology, which is also an opportunity for me to explain and justify our overall mission and plans. Part I: My most important...

Tim O'Reilly, on the cover of Inc. - "Silicon Valley's leading intellectual"

The Oracle of Silicon Valley — Tim O'Reilly has been ahead of early every important technology innovation of the past 30 years writes reporter Max Chafin in his cover story for this month's issue of Inc. magazine. "And today the future is something O'Reilly is calling Gov 2.0." Read more.

Happening Now: Web 2.0 Expo

Web 2.0 Expo is now underway in San Francisco. Don't miss the News & Coverage, including photo, speaker slides, and videos. And this year you can Watch Keynotes live online.

The spy who came in from the code - Carmen Medina talks about tech, the CIA, and why government agencies don't play well with others

If you were going to pick an adjective to describe the Central Intelligence Agency, "open" wouldn't immediately spring to mind. But according to Carmen Medina, who recently retired from the CIA and will speak at next month's Gov 2.0 Expo, openness is just what the agency needs.

Live from Web 2.0 in San Francisco - End-of-day updates with Tim O'Reilly, Brady Forrest, Sarah Milstein, and special guests

If you can't make it to Web 2.0 Expo next week in San Francisco, take part in our live broadcast from the conference. We'll discuss the buzz, analyze announcements, interview special guests, and take your questions from the live chat. Click on the times below to participate: 5:00 PT Monday 5:15 PT Tuesday 4:40 PT Wednesday

State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars

As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: $30 Micro Forge

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Understanding the Cloud Landscape

Making sense out of all of the components of cloud computing confuses even many of the major analysts. It's easy to understand how Google, Amazon, or SalesForce.com fit into the picture. But who is Eucalyptus and what do they do? Does CohesiveFT compete with enStratus or does it complement enStratus? And what is this vCloud thing anyway?

Happening Today: Preparing for a Cyber Attack - Join us for this online event at 10am PT / 1pm ET

This one-hour presentation by Jeffrey Carr will separate the hype from the facts regarding ongoing foreign intrusions into government networks and the targeting of government employees. It will also provide practical advice on how to protect yourself and your organization from the actors orchestrating these intrusions. Register now to attend this event.Other upcoming events include: Spear Phishing the Masses: When Open Data is Dark Presented by Jeff Jonas May 6, 2010 Nullology: The Zen of DatabasePresented by C.J. DateMay 7, 2010 5 Reasons Why SharePoint 2010 Will Revolutionize Your Organization Presented by Dux Raymond SyMay 11, 2010 Hiring the Next-Generation of Cyber Security Professionals in GovernmentPresented by Lewis Shepherd May 13, 2010 O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Webcast - Cloud Computing and Security: Can't We all Just Get Along?Presented by Bernard Golden May 19, 2010 CouchApp Evently Guided Hack w/ CouchDBPresented by J. Chris Anderson May 20, 2010 Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Promiscuous online culture and the vetting process - Social networks have forever changed hiring and background checks

Social networks, and the big data to analyze them, will forever change how we vet candidates, whether for security clearance, employment, or political office. Technology can help employers check candidates' backgrounds, monitor their behavior once hired, and protect their online reputations. But using the social tracks we share -- and what we omit -- has important ethical and legal consequences.

Pew Report: Citizens turning to Internet for government data, policy and services

A new report from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project shows that 40 percent of U.S. Internet users go online for data about government spending and policy. When they visit sites, they're increasingly making transactions and participating in discussion around policies.

Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows - Competitive lessons from the PC era don't always apply to mobile

It's human nature to look to the past to predict the future. That's why it's unsurprising to see knee-jerk conclusion that Apple iPhone vs Google Android will mirror the PC wars. Here's five reasons why this time, it's different.

Looking beyond the digital divide

At a previous point in my career, I benefited from professional development, autonomy in my classroom, and a superb technology infrastructure to become a connected, inspired and effective educator. Now, with the current climate in the field of education in the U.S., I fear that other teachers will lose, or never even experience, similar opportunities. As an education technology advocate interacting with teachers in a variety of settings, I see that our students are receiving vastly different types of education. This divide trickles specifically down to the educational technology experiences our students are receiving in schools, too.

A Very Very Brief History of Flash and the Open Web

Much has been made about HTML5 on the web, particularly concerning what it will do to the future of plug-in-based technologies like Flash. It's been difficult to sort out the truth from the frustration, as people on both sides polarize the issue by calling for the downfall of one technology or another. All of that is pretty standard in these types of transitions I guess, but for the moment I'd like to put all of that aside and just look at this from the perspective of history. You can learn a lot about the future of the web by looking at its past, and I think a lot of the opinions I’ve read about the Flash vs. HTML5 debate either fail to acknowledge this or assume everyone knows it. I want to present a very, very brief history of the relationship between Flash and what has been referred to as "the open web" - a jumble of free web-browsing software and standards-based (sometimes) languages to write content for them that has most recently evolved to include HTML5.

Gov 2.0 week in review - Open Government, transparency, Earth Day and WhiteHouse.gov 3.0

Taking a page straight from Mark Coddington's excellent week in review at the Nieman Journalism Lab, my inaugural Radar post looks at government 2.0 news from the past week. If you have news and tips about the government 2.0 space, please let me know at alex@oreilly.com or @digiphile on Twitter.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: Compressed Air Rocket

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Marketing 2.0: It's All about Communications - Talk Less, Listen More

Less Spin, More Value — Today, "marketing is less about generating one-to-many discussions and more about creating an ongoing dialogue with customers," writes Sarah Sorensen in O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com. In the column, the author of The Sustainable Network explains how businesses can successfully market to folks today. Learn more.

Preparing for the realtime web - How the shift to realtime will affect the web (and why info overload is overblown).

The stream of updates and links that powers the realtime web is giving static websites a run for their money. In this Q&A;, "Building the Realtime User Experience" author Ted Roden discusses the impact of the realtime web on developers and users.

Happening Today: Introduction to Apache CouchDB - Join us for this free live webcast at 10am PT / 1pm ET

CouchDB is a distributed document database accessed via HTTP and JSON and queried using JavaScript Map Reduce. CouchDB focuses on simplicity and reliability, with a data replication model that makes it well suited for mobile and offline applications. In this webcast, J. Chris Anderson will give a technical overview and describe some of CouchDB's existing users, with plenty of time for audience-driven questions and answers. Attendance is limited, so register now!Other upcoming webcasts include: Web 2.0 Expo PreviewPresented by Brady Forrest, Sarah Milstein, Tim O'Reilly April 22, 2010 An introduction to building mapping applications for the iPhone and iPadPresented by Alasdair Allan April 28, 2010 5 Reasons Why SharePoint 2010 Will Revolutionize Your Organization Presented by Dux Raymond SyMay 11, 2010 Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Where do developers draw the line with Apple? - Two developers, one out of iPhone development and the other still in, examine the App Store.

Dan Grigsby and Dan Pilone have both developed iPhone applications. Both have concerns about development restrictions, too. But only one remains within Apple's ecosystem. Here, the developers examine the App Store from two viewpoints: one that's in and one that's out.

Grids With Many Columns In Flex

In one of our recent projects, my collegue Nick Karnick and I ran into a problem (or maybe a bug) where Flex's DataGrid control would begin acting strange if there was a large (>45) amount of columns. In order to circumvent this and to keep the system usable we developed a user interface for dynamically selecting which columns a user wants displayed.

What will the browser look like in five years? - Opera's Charles McCathieNevile on the web browser's near-term future.

The web browser was just another computer application five years ago. Now, it's become not just a portal to the Internet, but an application hub as well. In this Q&A;, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile looks ahead to the web browser's next five years.

AIR on devices: Android

I was recently given the opportunity to develop an application using the AIR Packager for iPhone and wow, that was fun! I'm sure all of you reading this have heard about the new license agreement, and what may or may not happen. Well I know one thing that's for sure happening, and that's AIR apps running on Android devices. It's not only happening, but, it's already happened! It took me literally less than an hour to port my app to Android.

Syntax coloring utility

I often write HTML pages or documentation that includes code samples. When the code is presented this way, it's much easier to follow if it features syntax highlighting. I had found a script that could highlight Perl code, and then I realized I needed the same thing for C code as well. I've posted a new script on my web site that inserts HTML markup into source code files to provide colored syntax highlighting.

Protecting Children Online - Part II: Quick Tips

My last blog focused on some general guidelines to protect our children online, here are some quick, concrete tips to keep them safe. The smallest piece of identifiable information could lead a predator to you - remember they are highly motivated. eMarketer found that 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.

Big data analytics: From data scientists to business analysts

The growing popularity of Big Data management tools (Hadoop; MPP, real-time SQL, NoSQL databases; and others) means many more companies can handle large amounts of data. But how do companies analyze and mine their vast amounts of data? For companies that already have large amounts of data in Hadoop, there's room for even simpler tools that would allow business users to directly interact with Big Data.

Using CSS Media Queries to Style Your iPhone and iPad HTML

In my previous post, I showed how you can use JavaScript to detect orientation and style your iPhone and iPad pages. As reader Jason Grigsby kindly pointed out, you can also do this purely with CSS Media Queries! I've reworked the file I made for that example to use CSS Media Queries to do just that. The behavior of the web page is the same in the previous example, but doesn't require any JavaScript to make it all work.

Nominations Open For O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2010 - Recognizing community contribution and leadership

The O'Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted this July at OSCON 2010 in Portland, OR. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2009 include Brian Aker, Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Bruce Momjian, Chris Messina, David Recordon, and Andrew Tridgell.

MySQL conference 2010: thriving as one of many

A database is just a place for data. You can make it fancy with cross-linking and even stick in stored procedures, but it remains a passive repository that takes on value only as a part of a surrounding environment for processing. There are more tools for manipulating data than ever. The various solutions called as NoSQL have value in their own right and in conjunction with MySQL. Let's look at the future course of MySQL in an environment with many new and intriguing alternatives to relational databases, and multiple versions of MySQL itself.

Protecting Children Online - Part One

We need to remove the idea that stuff online is "not real," or that it doesn't have consequences. We need to drill into them that they will be held accountable for what they do and say when they are online, just as they would be when they are at home or at school. Explain to them that they need to think before they post and they don't have a right to post whatever they want...

Happening Today: What will users pay for? - Join us for this free live webcast at 10am PT / 1pm ET

If advertising alone won't pay the bills and paywalls are tough to get right, how can web-based businesses make money? This is a question Instructables.com CEO Eric Wilhelm has already confronted. We'll dig into the Instructables model and consider potential solutions in this video Q&A; with Eric Wilhelm. Attendance is limited, so register now!Other upcoming webcasts include: LinkedIN: Beyond the Basics Presented by Irene KoehlerApril 20, 2010 Introduction to Apache CouchDBPresented by J. Chris AndersonApril 21, 2010 Web 2.0 Expo PreviewPresented by Brady Forrest, Sarah Milstein, Tim O'Reilly April 22, 2010 An introduction to building mapping applications for the iPhone and iPadPresented by Alasdair Allan April 28, 2010 Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Ebook annotations, links and notes: Must-haves or distractions? - O'Reilly editors discuss ebook functionality and connected reading experiences

Should ebooks be chock full of links, annotations, and sharing tools? Or is a quiet and disconnected experience the way to go? O'Reilly editors recently tackled these questions in a great back-channel discussion. We decided to share a handful of notable excerpts

Web operators are brain surgeons - Our increased reliance on web-based intelligence makes speed and reliability even more important.

As we become more dependent on our collective consciousness, web operators will be much more involved in end-user experience measurement, from application design to real user monitoring. We're in the century of the distributed nervous system, and web operators are its brain surgeons.

Adding Rounded Corners to HTML with CSS - Thanks to HTML5 and CSS3 it's never been so easy!

Adding rounded corners to an object in your HTML should be easy. Heck, open up Photoshop or your favorite image editor and it is easy to around rounded corners to any rectangle you create. When it comes to creating Web pages it is a different matter. Creating rounded corners to a block of text, a tab or a background is not easy. The only effective way to add a rounded corner is to create a HTML table with image files that look like corners. This is a lot of work and not very easy to update. HTML5’s update to Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3, now supports a new feature that allows you to added rounded corners to elements in your HTML. Rounded corners suddenly have never been so easy.

The iPad isn't a computer, it's a distribution channel

The iPhone was a relatively open phone and we accepted it, but the iPad is a relatively closed computer designed to be a controlled distribution channel, and that's a bummer. The thing is, Jobs' argument was always a bit disingenuous. Closed follows from his brain architecture, not from an argument on behalf of his customers or their network providers. Those are post facto justifications supporting an already-held point of view. And the reason the iPad is going to stay closed isn't because it is good for users, it's because it is good for Apple.

Government transparency: Using search data to connect with your audience

When Americans want to know about health care reform, they don't go to opencongress.org and search for "H.R.3200" or H.R.4872". They go to Google and type in "health care reform". One key to making sure that the information you are working so hard to surface makes its way to the citizens who are looking for it? Use free search data to find out the language people are using to refer to that information. At Transparency Camp, I demonstrated a number of these tools.

My Days with the iPad - Kindle killer or not?

By day I'm the pr manager for O'Reilly Media. Most workdays I face three screens--my MacBook, a large monitor, and my iPhone--in order to keep an eye on several Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, email accounts, instant messaging and texting. These...

Grumpy old men, the "Inmates" and margins - iPad, iPhone and the future of computing

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions vary widely. The yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

Flash Next - Part 1

A few weeks ago, Andrew Shorten, Bill Heil, and Deepa Subramaniam from the Flex PM team came to New York to talk to companies and my NY Flash user group about "Flex Next". Flex Next is what adobe is considering for the next two releases of Flash Builder and the Flex SDK. Although I would love to talk about what they presented, I think I would be breaking a NDA or two. Instead, I thought I would outline some key features of what I would like to see in the SDK and IDE in the next few releases.

Happening Now: O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 - MySQL: An Ecosystem, Not Just a Company

The O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo is now underway at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Check the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo site for news coverage and more. Morning events include: MySQL Cluster Tutorial with Andrew Morgan (Oracle), Geert Vanderkelen (Sun Microsystems), Andrew Hutchings (Oracle Corporation) MySQL Configuration Options and Files: Basic MySQL Variables (Part 1) with Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) MySQL Dual Master Setups with MMM with Arjen Lentz (Open Query), Walter Heck (Open Query) The Replication Tutorial with Mats Kindahl (Sun Microsystems), Lars Thalmann (MySQL) Using Partitioning in MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 with Giuseppe Maxia (Oracle) Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems with Baron Schwartz (Percona Inc.), Morgan Tocker (Percona, Inc.) MySQL DBA Certification Tutorial, Part 1 with Kai Voigt (Sun Microsystems)

Citizens as public sensors - The co-founder of SeeClickFix on how crowdsourcing can help local government

Gov 2.0 discussions tend to center on transparency and making data available to the general public. But information can flow in both directions. SeeClickFix believes citizens can offer as much to local government as government can offer to the people. SeeClickFix co-founder Jeff Blasius discusses the service in this Q&A.;

The Wellington Declaration

This week marks the start in Wellington New Zealand of the next round of ACTA negotiations, nominally the US-led Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The scope of the agreement, however, has extended well beyond trade in fake medicines and knock-off Gucci handbags into the technical realms of file-sharing, ISP liability, disconnection, and DRM. Such issues have been contentious where they've arisen in New Zealand, France, the UK, USA, and elsewhere, yet negotiators seem ignorant of consumer and technology concerns. To correct this, the open PublicACTA conference two days ago drafted and released the Wellington Declaration.

We are iPad. Resistance is (not) futile - Apple may have closed the iPad, but you don't need permission to open it.

A lot of people are upset about how closed the iPhone, and now the iPad, are. Cory Doctorow wrote a lengthy piece about the evils of the iPad and its awful closed system. I agree that Apple has taken far too much away. I agree that it is infantalizing to require us to send in the iPad to get its battery replaced. But, my gosh, when did developers ever need permission to break things? When did Steve Jobs become not just rule maker, but some sort of deity that actually prevented me from ignoring said rule maker, and doing whatever I could with my device?

Games & Entertaiment account for Half of all iPad apps

98% of apps in the U.S. iTunes app store label themselves as "iPad compatible", but most were written for iPhones or iPods. One week into its launch there are about 2,300 apps that run only on iPads. Measured in terms of number of unique apps, Games and Entertainment account for about half of all the iPad apps.

Foursquare. What's It All About? - Brady Forrest Explains How This Hot Location-Sharing Game Can Attract New Customers

Foursquare: Making Games Pay--"Businesses have long wondered about the people who walk through their doors. Foursquare and other mobile apps may be able to help them," writes Brady Forrest in a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com. The co-chair of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco and avid Foursquare players discusses why businesses should pay attention to the new gamers and mayors checking in to their establishments. Read more.

Brian Aker on post-Oracle MySQL - A deep look at Oracle's motivations and MySQL's future

In time for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo, Brian Aker discussed a number of topics with us, including Oracle's motivations for buying Sun and the rise of NoSQL.