O'Reilly News & Commentary

RailsConf is Now Underway - The Official Event for the Ruby on Rails Community

RailsConf is now underway in Baltimore, Maryland. Don't miss the News & Coverage, including speaker slides, live stream, videos, and photo. Watch Keynotes live online.

Ignite NYC IX This Wednesday, 6/9

Ignite NYC is returning for its 9th edition during the third Internet Week; I'll be co-hosting with Igntie NYC Director Tikva Morowati. We've got a great set of speakers and we'll be holding the event this Wednesday at Internet Week's Headquarters (Metropolitan Pavilion; 125 W. 18th Street - register). As always each speaker will get just 5 minutes on...

The Top 6 Reasons to Attend Flashbelt

Flashbelt is approaching quickly. If you are already planning to attend here are highlights to look forward to, if you are on the fence these are some reasons to attend, and if you are decided not to go here is...

Ebook Reseller Wishlist/Scorecard

I spend a lot of time talking with companies that want to resell O'Reilly ebooks. Some are large companies you've certainly heard of, others are small startups that haven't yet...

An Introduction to Robotlegs AS3 Part 1: Context and Mediators

This is the first in a series of Robotlegs articles that will appear here on InsideRIA in the coming weeks detailing core Robotlegs concepts and working through some more advanced concepts involving third party utilities and libraries built to interact with them.

Four short links: 7 June 2010 - JS UI, Teeny Open Source Notebook, On The End of a Mobile Age, and Modern Education

UKI: Simple UI Kit for Complex Web Apps -- Uki is a fast and simple JavaScript user interface toolkit for desktop-like web applications. It comes with a rich view-component library ranging from Slider to List and SplitPane. Includes the now-ubiquitous Mail.app mockup, which has become to UI library webpages what the bucket of grease and dirt is to household...

Make it a Game - really?

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard the phrase "make it a game" or "make it like a game" or "give it some game-like features" in my career, I'd be retiring in luxury next week. Games provide an important proving ground for interface methods that drive technology forward and have the potential to bring about a sense of accomplishment, inspiration, and engagement unparalleled in other avenues of life. n this post I want to examine the value of this statement, if any, and what we as RIA developers might learn from games.

Brian Sawyer, co-author of Best Android Apps, shares his 5 favorite apps

Gizmodo says: "O'Reilly makes some of the best tech books around, so we were super excited to hear about their new title Best Android Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders. Here are ten of those best Android apps for ten different activities." Get your copy today.

VMware and partners point to benefits

At a VMware forum, a sense of expectancy about cloud computing seemed to be expressed more by speakers than by attendees.

RobotLegs for Framework Beginners

Recently, I've been experimenting with various microarchitectural frameworks. I decided that it might be useful to others to share my thoughts as I work through this process as an absolute framework beginner. Last time, I tackled Maté. This time,...

Enterprise RIA Usage "Ineffective" - Gartner

"HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash" was published April 30 2010 by Ray Valdes, David Smith and Eric Knipp of Gartner.  The last paragraph is most interesting.   Read the entire document to learn more.This matches my experience as a contractor who focuses...

Interview With Jobe Makar

Jobe has developed over 200 Flash games and 9 virtual worlds over the last 10 years and has authored several books on advanced Flash, ActionScript, and game programming. Jobe took some time out to answer a few question for insideRIA.

Four short links: 4 June 2010 - Arduino Home, DIY Lightning with Water and Gravity, Graph Visualization, and Neglected Diseases

HomeSense -- an open user-centered research project investigating the use of smart and networked technologies in the home, with uber-Arduino-rockstar Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. (via titine on Twitter) Kelvin's Thunderstorm (Instructables) -- "create lightning from water and gravity". Simple and impressive science. (via Paul Fenwick) Graph Visualization Code in Javascript (Stack Overflow) -- good pointers to interesting libraries. ChEMBL - Neglected...

Ruby Schematron

Francesco Lazzarino has a project up at RubyForge for a Ruby runner for ISO Schematron. (Open source: MIT/ Consortium License) Schematron is a small ISO-standard language for making assertions or reports about patterns in and between XML documents, typically using...

Top security threats to Flash/Flex applications and how to avoid them - Part 2

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a vulnerability that allows attackers to inject client-side script. XSS stands for many of the attack we see on the Web today. Attackers find some kind of a creative way to inject script into web pages, which than allow them to expose the user to many security risks

"Hackers" at 25 - It's been 25 years since "Hackers" was published. Author Steven Levy reflects on the book and the movement.

In mid-1980s, Steven Levy wrote a book that introduced the term "hacker" to a wide audience. In the ensuing 25 years, that word and its accompanying community have gone through tremendous change. In this Q&A;, Levy discusses the book's genesis, its influence and the role hackers continue to play.

Game Audio In The Cloud - Part 3 (Conclusion)

Gameplay parameters are sent up to the server, the application running in the Cloud mixes the appropriate beeps and booms into the audio output buffer, which then streams the game soundtrack to your device. The data being transmitted up is small, the server has all the CPU power, memory storage, and data bandwidth you could ask for, and the download stream is like listening to a digital radio station.

The power of promotional pricing

We've been running an ebook "$9.99 deal of the day" promotion for some time now, and customer response has been quite positive. There's also some very interesting sales data coming...

Connecting the dots with Intellipedia - U.S. intelligence agencies are using an internal wiki for knowledge sharing.

The United States' sixteen intelligence agencies are using an internal wiki, dubbed "Intellipedia," to share information. We take a look at how Intellipedia is helping these agencies work better.

The iPad in Europe (real live units)

UK, German and French book publishers have all provided content for the ipad and while there remain some grumbles about legality, the agency model for bookselling now seems to have passed it's first challenge, actually existing.

How Facebook satisfied a need for speed - Facebook boosted speed 2x. Director of engineering Robert Johnson explains how.

Robert Johnson, Facebook's director of engineering and a speaker at the upcoming Velocity and OSCON conferences, discusses an in-depth optimization and rewrite project that boosted Facebook's speed 2x.

Four short links: 3 June 2010 - Passionate Users, Mail APIs, Phone Hacking, and Patent Data Online

How to Get Customers Who Love You Even When You Screw Up -- a fantastic reminder of the power of Kathy Sierra's "I Rock" moments. In that moment I understood Tom's motivation: Tom was a hero. (via Hacker News) Yahoo! Mail is Open for Development -- you can write apps that sit in Yahoo! Mail, using and extending the...

Velocity Culture: Web Operations, DevOps, etc...

Velocity 2010 is happening on June 22-24 (right around the corner!). This year we've added third track, Velocity Culture, dedicated to exploring what we've learned about how great teams and organizations work together to succeed at scale. Web Operations, or WebOps, is what many of us have been calling these ideas for years. Recently the term "DevOps" has become a...

Benefits and Impediments to Health IT

HealthIT can help broaden the reach of medical expertise and care to rural areas. It can support skill building and improve access to information and resources for medical professionals to better equip them to diagnose and treat those who walk through their clinic's door...

@RIARadio Lost Episode: Michael Plank, Jesse Freeman, and FDT

Notice this episode was recorded at the end of 2009 and was lost. Although a few references are a bit dated it is a fantastic episode. Since this is being released late at no fault of FDT please make...

Making Data Work: Practical Applications of Data Science - An Online Conference, 9 June 2010

This online conference brings together four experts on data and data analysis to show you how data is used in successful enterprises, what kinds of tools you use to work with the data, how do you use visual techniques to provide insight into what the data is saying, and present those conclusions to others. If data is the key to success in the 21st century, and if the businesses that thrive are the ones who understand how to use their data effectively, you can't afford to miss this event. Register now and save 40%. Use code MD10RDX.

What is data science? - Analysis: The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products.

The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. In this in-depth piece, O'Reilly editor Mike Loukides examines the unique skills and opportunities that flow from data science.

Making community health information as useful as weather data - Open health data from Health and Human Services is driving more than 20 new apps.

The chief technology office of Health and Human Services, Todd Park, is fond of using the National Ocean and Oceanographic Association as a metaphor for the innovation that may be unlocked through releasing public data. NOAA data underpins Weather.com and nearly every commercial meteorological service in the United States. Park has been working closely with other government officials and the technology community to create a framework for government to act as a platform through the Community Health Data Initiative.

Four short links: 2 June 2010 - WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO

Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) -- Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to ("exit node") and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first:...

Announcing: Flex on Java eXchange

Skills Matter is organizing the first annual Flex on Java eXchange in London on June 16th. This highly interactive, intimate event will feature Tomas Lin, who will give a talk on Grails with Flex... Spring BlazeDS project Lead Jeremy Grelle will fly over from the US to give the opening keynote on Spring and Flex integration with BlazeDS. There will also be a talk by Christophe Herreman on the Spring ActionScript framework and a talk by Jens Halm on the Parsley framework. Adobe is sending expert Michael Chaize over to talk about Flex/Java communications... You can find the full conference programme here: https://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/flex-on-java-exchange-2010/wd-938

Australian Government procurement policy on Open Standard document formats - Open Source and Open Standards: Chicken and Egg or Apples and Oranges?

Over the last few years I have linked to various national government policies on Open Source software and procurement policies. But I see I omitted us in Australia. So here is what I can find, from 2005: Guide to Open...

5 Things I Learned from Flixel

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 - 5 Things I Learned from Flixel....

Flex 4 / PHP Data-Centric Photo Transfers

Have you ever-wondered why you mostly see Flex client example code where the photo display galleries are rendered using the ActionScript 3 (AS 3) Loader.load (request:URLRequest, context:LoaderContext=null) class.method? There’s another way to render photos in a Flex client gallery using the AS 3 Loader.loadBytes(bytes:ByteArray, context:LoaderContext=null) that you see used to a lesser degree. Why is this? There are a couple of valid reasons. First, using a URL, whether it is photos included with the Flex client package or remotely from a Web server, making a simple HTTP calls to load the photo is a snap. Second, photo files are stored as bytes of data and not a convenient AS 3 ByteArray data type.

Four short links: 1 June 2010 - Legal XML, Big Social Data, Crowdsourcing Tips, Copyright Balkanization

XML in Legislature/Parliament Environments (Sean McGrath) -- quite detailed background on the use of XML in legislation drafting systems, and the problems caused by convention in that world--page/line number citations, in particular. (Quick gloat: NZ's legislature management system is kick-ass, and soon we'll switch from print authoritative to digital authoritative) Large-Scale Social Media Analysis with Hadoop -- In this...

Initiating the Privacy Arms Race Against Facebook: The AntiSocial Firefox Extension

It is my opinion, that regardless of the platform, the online social space has created a condition where the end users must ultimately collaborate to initiate an ongoing privacy arms race to poison the intelligence collected of them. To promote this sentiment, and to further the cause of research in this field, I'd like to announce the AntiSocial project.

The "How, What, Why" framework for Experience Design

Lately I've been looking closer at the way people use things as part of usability studies I'm doing in my job. One of the best things that has came out of this work is a new framework (for me) of thinking about how users interact with content. I believe this is fairly similar to other things I've read in the field usability, but as I've never heard this type of framework formalized before I'd like to present it briefly here. We're calling this the "How, What, Why" framework, for reasons that will become quite obvious in a moment if they aren't already.

Four short links: 31 May 2010 - Data and Context, Twitpic Hot or Not, Failing to Save Journalism, Flash in Javascript

Transparency is Not Enough (danah boyd) -- we need people to not just have access to the data, but have access to the context surrounding the data. A very thoughtful talk from Gov 2.0 Expo about meaningful data release. Feed6 -- the latest from Rohit Khare is a sort of a "hot or not" for pictures posted to Twitter....

Pass the EventDispatcher, Please

One advantage of being married to someone who does similar work, but with different tools, is that I can run ideas for my next post past Steve and look for places where my explanation doesn't make sense from the...

Putting Online Privacy in Perspective

When I wrote last week about Facebook privacy flap, I was speaking out of the frustration that many technologists with a sense of perspective feel when we see uninformed media hysteria about the impact of new technology. (How many of you remember all the scare stories about the risks of using a credit card online from back in the mid-1990s,...

TDD Myths

While Extreme Programming remains a valuable template for project success, the decade of its adoption also saw the rise of many dilutions and derivatives. This post debunks some common myths about TDD.

Comparing Files in Eclipse

To compare two files in Eclipse, first select them in the Flex Navigator with control-click.  Now right-click on one of the files, and the following context menu will appear.Select Compare With / Each Other.  A file comparison window will open.You...

EGovernment at the Legislature - From Emerald Isle to Emerald Slippers

Sean McGrath is writing a series around the design issues for KLISS (Kansas Legislative Information Services System) which his company is doing.

California: There's an app for that - The state of California will partner with Microsoft, Google and Programmable Web to run an apps contest this summer.

Can California's budget-stricken government be improved through citizen engagement and civic developers? If a new application contest that launches this week bears digital fruit, there just might be an app for that. The state of California will partner with Microsoft, Google and Programmable Web to run an apps contest this summer. For those keeping score, that means two of the...

Ghost Phone - A MAKE Magazine Weekend Project Video

Make a creepy ghost phone that brings back the sounds of the dead. Thanks to Greg MacLaurin for the original article in MAKE Volume 16.

Effective Data Destruction Practices, Presented by Ben Rothke - A Free Live Webcast - June 8 @ 10am PT

Changes in data storage technologies, new Federal and State data privacy regulations and other factors have created an urgent need to have effective electronic records destruction practices. This session will detail the specifics of these changes and how organizations can protect themselves from huge financial liabilities. Having a defined data destruction strategy not only ensures a greener environment, but also ensures that the terabytes of stored data on the hardware are completely and permanently deleted. This session will discuss: legally compliant electronic records destruction policy; effective data destruction methods; degaussing, dismantling and refining; documentation and reporting; hardware and software vendors. Register for this webcast now.  Upcoming Webcasts: High Dynamic Range Imaging and Adobe Photoshop CS5 Presented by Jack HowardJune 11 @ 10am PT First Steps with Arduino Presented by Brian JepsonJune 16 @ 10am PT Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

Free O'Reilly Book Samplers - Topics include: iPad, Flex 4, JavaScript, Programming the Mobile Web, and more

Check out our free PDF book samplers from these new and upcoming books: iPad: The Missing Manual Buying a Home: The Missing Manual Flex 4 Cookbook High Performance JavaScript Developing Large Web Applications Java: The Good Parts Programming the Mobile Web C# 4.0 in a Nutshell View a complete list of book samplers.

Data and simplicity can build the government platform - Aneesh Chopra and Tim O'Reilly on government as a platform, open data and more.

Tim O'Reilly and Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, had a wide-ranging discussion at this week's Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. Here's archived video and a breakdown of key insights from their chat.

Four short links: 28 May 2010 - Understanding a Shuffle, Bias, Open Source a Success in Malaysia, and Guardian APIs

The Intuition Behind the Fisher-Yates Shuffle -- this is a simple algorithm to randomize a list of things, but most people are initially puzzled that it is more efficient than a naive shuffling algorithm. This is a nice explanation of the logic behind it. Wikipedia and Inherent Open Source Bias -- a specific case of what I think of...

Writing Beyond Tech: Introducing Ripple Reader and Recorded "Bugville" Books

Last fall, all 15 of the original Bugville Critters books were released in a special "e" format for the beta of the Ripple Reader. Just recently, the Ripple team officially launched their Reader. If you are a parent with young...

Tim Berners-Lee on Data.gov.uk, open linked data and open standards - Gov 2.0 Expo Keynote Video and Exclusive Interview

Can you explain open linked data using a bag of chips? Tim Berners-Lee did precisely that yesterday in his keynote at the Gov 2.0 Expo. After the jump, you can watch an exclusive interview with Berners-Lee exploring open linked data, how governments' open data efforts should be judged, and more.