O'Reilly News & Commentary

Are You Intimidated By Breakfast Cereal?

An article by Graham Morrison for Tech Radar UK this past week struck a bit of a raw nerve for me. It was one of a type we see periodically in the tech press and the title pretty much tells the story:  The trouble with Linux: there's too much choice. To Mr. Morrison and all the others who have written articles like this one I say: Hogwash!

Build HTML documentation for your C# code with Sandcastle in under 5 minutes

If you've ever used a library that has accurate MSDN-style API documentation, you know how useful it can be. There are lots of ways to create HTML documentation. But the easiest way that I've found is to use Sandcastle. It's an open source documentation generator from Microsoft that reads your assemblies (DLL or EXE files) and their XML Comments and automatically generates HTML documentation. Sandcastle is a very flexible tool, which means it's also a very complex tool. Luckily, there's a companion tool, Sandcastle Help File Builder, that makes it really easy to get up and running with Sandcastle in minutes.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: LED Light Brick

Net neutrailty: What scares you most - It all depends on what you fear.

Behind the principles on both sides of the net neutrality debate lie three sets of fears: competition, censorship, and creativity. In a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes, O'Reilly editor Andy Oram discusses and illuminates each fear, each side, and what's at stake. Read more.

Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 - Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Controlling the Viewport in Mobile Web Applications

In this post, we'll cover a simple addition that you can add to your HTML 4/5 mobile web applications to have them respond more like applications, and less like "web pages" in webkit-based browsers.

FCC.gov poised for an overdue overhaul - FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms.

The Federal Communications Commission is prepping a significant reboot of its website. In this interview, FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel explains how citizen participation and open government are shaping the new FCC.gov.

Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places - Check-ins are only the beginning. Here's what lies ahead for local.

The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience. It works, for now, but it won't be the long-term solution for customer/business relationships and physical point of presence. So what will replace it? Here's a look at the local sector's near-term future.

Which Perl XML module should I use? - What's new in O'Reilly Answers: Choosing a Perl XML module, unstructured data, update databases with Access forms, and much more.

There are many XML modules on CPAN. Which ones should I use for which tasks? Answer the poll but also reply with anything else that you want to share. So far XML::LibXML has 42.86% of the vote, and the O'Reilly Answers community is contributing their favorites. Read more. More from O'Reilly Answers: What is unstructured data? How to update database records with forms in Access 2010 How to configure a Junos security device How to remove an autocomplete email address from Apple's Mail app Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Data Week: Becoming a data scientist - Data Pointed, CouchDB in the Cloud, Launching Strata

Data Week is a new series that brings together notable stories and developments from the data world. Links in this edition include: the connection between visualizations and art, advice on becoming a data scientist, BigCouch goes open source, and more.

Four short links: 2 Sep 2010 - Science Blogs, AppEngine Community, Kickstarter for Good, Manmade Geography

Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic. v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability. Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter...

Pragmatic Design Patterns: Composition Over Inheritance

Many developers have the idea that design patterns are "nice to haves," something that you can add after the fact, if you have time to waste making your code academically appealing for no added benefit. At some level, I...

Fun Project Honeynet Log Challenge: Log Mysteries

Project Honeynet just released its latest Forensic Challenge 5 - Log Mysteries. It is based on logs from a compromised virtual server and requires quite a bit of digging through messy log data.

TOC's Wednesday devices, gadgets and ereaders update - With IFA Consumer Electronics Unlimited just days away, this week brings plenty of buzz about new ereaders, tablets and more.

The IFA traditionally offers an early indication of what gadgets will sell well through Christmas. It's no wonder so much attention is focused on the show with order volume stemming from last year's show reaching nearly $3.8 billion.

Mobile Tools and Tricks with jQuery

jQuery plugins you can use to build web sites specifically for mobile devices

Sara Ford's 101 Visual Studio Tips in 55 minutes Challenge - A Free Live Webcast - Sept. 1 @ 10am PT

Happening Now – When Sara Ford gets excited she talks fast. Very fast. So fast in fact that she decided to race the clock at the Visual Studio Launch Event in Mountain View, CA and attempt to demo 101 Visual Studio tips in under 55 minutes. This webcast is a rematch of Sara against the clock. Last time she missed by 15 seconds. Will she succeed? Watch and see! Join the webcast now.More upcoming webcasts: Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and UsabilityPresented by Josh ClarkSeptember 9, 2010 @ 10am PT The State of HadoopPresented by Tom WhiteSeptember 15, 2010 @ 10am PT Using Photos and Vectors in PhotoshopPresented by Lesa SniderSeptember 16, 2010 @ 10am PT Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

Four short links: 1 September 2010 - Faces in R, Open Source Web Analytics, Small File Store, Building Mapper

R Library for Chernoff Faces -- faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data) Piwik -- GPLed web analytics package. Pomegranate -- a data...

The New Yorker Praises Cooking for Geeks - Taking Jeff Potter's Book for a Spin

"In a new cookbook, Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food, Jeff Potter, a software engineer, takes a look at what's really going on in your saut?e pan, with the intention of helping even the most hapless chef master some of the magic" writes New Yorker reviewer Monica Racic. Indeed, Monica took the book for a spin, and wound up feeling much more confident in the kitchen. Read the review.

Sara Ford's 101 Visual Studio Tips in 55 minutes Challenge - A Free Live Webcast - Sept. 1 @ 10am PT

Happening Today – When Sara Ford gets excited she talks fast. Very fast. So fast in fact that she decided to race the clock at the Visual Studio Launch Event in Mountain View, CA and attempt to demo 101 Visual Studio tips in under 55 minutes. This webcast is a rematch of Sara against the clock. Last time she missed by 15 seconds. Will she succeed? Watch and see! Register for the webcast now.More upcoming webcasts: Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and UsabilityPresented by Josh ClarkSeptember 9, 2010 @ 10am PT The State of HadoopPresented by Tom WhiteSeptember 15, 2010 @ 10am PT Using Photos and Vectors in PhotoshopPresented by Lesa SniderSeptember 16, 2010 @ 10am PT Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

jQuery Boston Conference coming Oct 16-17

Annual jQuery Conference coming to Boston October 16-17

What we can learn from data, 3-D and a globe - IBM's Julia Grace on social media shifts and why 3-D and data are made for each other.

IBM researcher and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Julia Grace spends her days digging into data. Her tools are a little unusual, though. Instead of spreadsheets and bar graphs, she uses visualizations and a seven-foot-tall, three-dimensional globe. Grace discusses life with a giant globe and explores her recent findings in this Q&A.;

Amazon's cloud platform still the largest, but others are closing the gap

Measured in terms of (U.S.) job postings, Amazon's Cloud Computing platform is still larger than Google's App Engine. What's interesting is that the gap has closed over the past year.

Your App is a Theme Park Part 1

Marty Sklar, former Vice Chairman and Principal Creative Executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, has many times presented a list of rules that are now know as "Mickey's 10 Commandments." We'll take a look at these rules and see how they apply to creating, designing and developing our own applications.

Radar is getting a redesign - A new version of Radar is coming soon. Here's what we have planned.

Radar will get refreshed later this week with a new look and more functionality. This brief overview offers a preview of the design and explains our rationale for the change.

Points of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map - Internet companies are jockeying for positions that will benefit them for years to come.

In our planning for this year's Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and I have expanded on the metaphor of "the Great Game," as we explore the many ways Internet companies at all levels of the stack are looking for points of control that will give them competitive advantage in the years to come.

Mobile site design best practices - What's New in O'Reilly Answers: Mobile site design tips, finding patterns with PowerShell, online safety, ebook conversions, and more

When you are creating a mobile version of an existing desktop website, you need to understand that you are mobilizing the website, not minimizing it. Minimizing (or miniaturizing) a desktop website simply involves displaying the same content on a smaller screen. Mobilizing is more than that; it requires understanding the context and offering your services and content in a manner that is useful and allows for quick access by the user. From avoiding horizontal scroll to reducing the amount of text, here's a quick guide to the best practices when building a mobile version of your website. Read more. More from O'Reilly Answers: How to search a file for a pattern in Windows PowerShellHow to stay safe onlineWhat is a good ebook conversion tool?How to use Windows Communication Foundation Bindings Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Hacking online advertising - Two recent ads contradict common attitudes and hint at something bigger.

Grand and bold declarations about the demise of online advertising -- and the web itself -- get all the attention. But two recent ads serve as countermeasures to the gloom: hackers are calibrating online advertising to serve their own specific needs.

Four short links: 31 August 2010 - Revolutionaries, Sentiment, UX, and Data Warehouses

Rules for Revolutionaries -- Carl Malamud's talk to the WWW2010 Conference. Video, slides, and text available. Self-Improving Bayesian Sentiment Analysis for Twitter -- a how-I-did-it for a homegrown project to do sentiment analysis on Twitter. LUXR -- the Lean User Experience Residency program. LUXr brings user experience and design services to early stage teams in a lower cost, more...

Why project managers should care about development

In a recent post on Building Better Software, I wrote about why developers should care about project management. But I think it's worth making the opposite case: why project managers should care about development.

The network neutrality debate: It all depends on what you fear

Network neutrality confuses a lot of laypeople because of all the different levels on which it's being argued and the opposing ways language is used by different participants. Andy Oram takes a look at the loaded words in the net neutrality debate.

Adding Rich Animation to your iPhone and Android Web Sites

Both the iPhone and Android Web browsers are built using the same technology, WebKit. With this in mind, you can create Web sites optimized for WebKit that will run on both phones. The focus of this article is animation for the mobile phone. We will cover CSS3, SVG and CANVAS techniques you can use today.

The VC-free startup - The big-bet model works on occasion in Silicon Valley, but it seldom works elsewhere.

The big-bet venture capital model works on occasion in Silicon Valley, but it seldom works elsewhere. Dale Dougherty mulls the trajectory of non-VC startups: the small firms that don't need an exit strategy because the business creates its own type of fulfillment.

Four short links: 30 August 2010 - H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

Vale Java? Scala Vala palava - and Go too

Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that...

Bug Scrub Day

As a way of addressing our burgeoning bug list my manager instituted something that we call Bug Scrub Day. One day a month we drop everything that we are doing and focus only on addressing bugs. The need for such...

Gnash 0.8.8: A Huge Improvement Over Previous Versions

Early this week Gnash 0.8.8 was released. Despite the small increment in version number, which would make this seem like a minor maintenance release, the difference between version 0.8.8 and the earlier 0.8.7 is like night and day.

Applying the lessons of Enterprise 2.0 to Gov 2.0 - Professor Andrew McAfee on the potential of social software for government

In this podcast, MIT professor Andrew McAfee applies the insights from his research into the use of social software in the enterprise to understanding how and where technology will change government.

Early Flex 4.5 SDK released on Adobe Open Source

Adobe has posted a build of the Flex 4.5 SDK, code named "Hero", on their open-source site. This build does not contain features that rely on future versions of the Flash Player or AIR runtime, which is to say there's no AIR for Android goodness in here. Still, the new build adds the much-anticipated Spark DataGrid, a few other Spark components, and a number of bug fixes.

How to remove an autocomplete email address from Apple's Mail app - What's New in O'Reilly Answers: Removing autocompletes in Mac Mail, Google Analytics, data.gov, pivot tables, and much more!

Anyone who has used Apple's Mail app has likely experienced an embarrassing failure of its usually helpful autocomplete feature for email addresses. Sometimes, either old or seldom-used addresses for your contacts will sneak into your address book (within Mail, that is, not in your actual Address Book app). All it takes is collaborating with Google Docs for me to get someone's personal gmail.com address to override their preferred business oreilly.com address. As has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion, this is not good. I finally investigated how to solve the problem. Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:What is a pivot table and why should I use one?How to track events using Google AnalyticsHow to measure conversions in Google Analytics with Goals and FunnelsUsing BeautifulSoup to parse data.govShare knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Is Your Survey Data Lying to You? - a primer on interpreting statistical data

Statistical nuggets are great because in isolation they give us a glimpse into why people do what they do, and how we can adjust our business to match market needs. But how often do we blindly accept data because it comes with pretty graphs and sound bites that seem to make sense? Probably more often than we'd like to admit. The best way to ensure that we are not led astray, is to look at what biases have been introduced into a study before using its data to make a decision.

Four short links: 27 August 2010 - Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...

A New Take on the Coffee Table Book - Sideways Takes the Coffee Table-Style Book to the iPad

In one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, Kramer comes up with the brilliant idea for a coffee table book with fold-down legs that makes it into a little coffee table--a...

Want a Free Pass to 360|Flex WADC?

John Wilker has started a contest over on the 360|Flex blog. The requirements are simple and the stakes are high - tell John why you want to go to 360|Flex in the comments and John will pick someone to win a free pass to 360|Flex in Washington D.C., September 19-22. Entrants will be judged on "zest for life and creativity", and the winner will be chosen by midnight on 8/30 (that's soon.) What are you waiting for - go leave a comment on the 360|Flex blog!

My Favorite Slogan Explained

Someone asked me recently about mattfrye-isms. If you've ever worked for or with me, you've heard them, and I have a favorite. They asked me why I say it. Is it cool? Is it funny? Well, it can be...

Self-Service Business Intelligence with Microsoft PowerPivot - A Free Live Webcast - August 26 @ 10am PT

Happening Now – Ever wonder why there's no "light" version of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)? Find yourself wishing that SSAS offered an in-memory operation model akin to some of its competitors? And why are OLAP cubes nearly impossible for end-users to build while comparable capabilities have existed for relational databases for at least 15 years? Enter PowerPivot, a feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 that joins together SSAS, Excel and SharePoint to make end-user analytics feasible, fun, publishable and discoverable by IT. Andrew Brust will show you how it all works in this not-to-be-missed online session. Join the webcast now.More upcoming webcasts: Sara Ford's 101 Visual Studio Tips in 55 minutes ChallengePresented by Sara FordSeptember 1, 2010 @ 10am PT Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and UsabilityPresented by Josh ClarkSeptember 9, 2010 @ 10am PT The State of HadoopPresented by Tom WhiteSeptember 15, 2010 @ 10am PT Using Photos and Vectors in PhotoshopPresented by Lesa SniderSeptember 16, 2010 @ 10am PT Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

Self-Service Business Intelligence with Microsoft PowerPivot - A Free Live Webcast - August 26 @ 10am PT

Happening Today – Ever wonder why there's no "light" version of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)? Find yourself wishing that SSAS offered an in-memory operation model akin to some of its competitors? And why are OLAP cubes nearly impossible for end-users to build while comparable capabilities have existed for relational databases for at least 15 years? Enter PowerPivot, a feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 that joins together SSAS, Excel and SharePoint to make end-user analytics feasible, fun, publishable and discoverable by IT. Andrew Brust will show you how it all works in this not-to-be-missed online session. Join the webcast now.More upcoming webcasts: Sara Ford's 101 Visual Studio Tips in 55 minutes ChallengePresented by Sara FordSeptember 1, 2010 @ 10am PT Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and UsabilityPresented by Josh ClarkSeptember 9, 2010 @ 10am PT The State of HadoopPresented by Tom WhiteSeptember 15, 2010 @ 10am PT Using Photos and Vectors in PhotoshopPresented by Lesa SniderSeptember 16, 2010 @ 10am PT Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

Great Twitter Accounts to keep up to date on jQuery news

Twitter is a great way to get news instantly. I particularly like getting updates as text messages to my phone. There are some great jQuery accounts you should be subscribing to. They are: @jquery - the official word from THE...

Welcome Matthew David as a new jQuery Blogger

Hello, my name is Matthew David and I am a new blogger for InsideRIA.com. The goal of this blog is to cover jQuery content. This means we will be covering the following: The jQuery Core Illustrate plugins you can use...

Earthquakes are HUGE on Data.gov - Checking in on Data.gov roughly one year later

After launching just over a year ago with only 47 data sets, the Data.gov catalog now has 2,326 entries that have been collectively downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times. The big Data.gov winner so far? The Department of the Interior's "Worldwide M1+ Earthquakes, Past 7 Days" data set. Here's a look at the top 10 downloads.

Four short links: 26 August 2010 - Economic Growth Without Copyright, Ebook Numbers, Hypothesis Analysis Tool, Who Pays for Open Data?

Germany's Industrial Expansion Fueled by Absence of Copyright Law? (Der Spiegel) -- fascinating article about the extraordinary publishing output in 1800s Germany vs other nations, all with no effective and enforceable copyright laws. Sigismund Hermbst?dt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his...