O'Reilly News & Commentary

Sneak Peek: "First Look: Microsoft Office 2010" - Limited Time! Download this Free Ebook

"First Look: Microsoft Office 2010," by Katherine Murray, offers 14 chapters of early content. This free sneak peek introduces you to changes in Office 2010 and shows you how to make the most of the new features. Download the sneak peek here. Find more information about this free download on the Microsoft Press blog.

Global Ignite Week: 40+ Ignites Coming Next March

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks. This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible.

Four short links: 16 December 2009 - Global Broadband, A/B Testing Stats, Streaming with SSDs, Online Videos Sell

Videos Sell More Product -- Zappos sells 6-30% more merchandise when accompanied by video demos. By the end of next year, Zappos will have ten full working video studios, with the goal of producing around 50,000 product videos by 2010, up from the 8,000 videos they have on the site today (via johnclegg on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Using R to answer a football question

Last Monday night, I was watching the Ravens playing the Packers at Green Bay. Mostly, I was watching penalties. This game featured an astounding number of penalty calls: 23 calls, 310 yards. I wondered whether penalties really affect the outcome of football games. Here's what I figured out in 15 minutes, with a little help from R.

First Look at nook: Not Encouraging

We (finally) received our nooks (pre-ordered quite some time ago), and the early results are ... disappointing. Loading one (any) of our EPUB ebooks causes the nook to hang, and the book never opens. I tried loading a number of O'Reilly Media titles that are valid and work on the Sony Reader and every other ePub device. The Nook only brought up the "Formatting" message, and then hung. Only a full restart would bring it back. This is an extremely serious problem.

Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?

In light of the company's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, Facebook's recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company.

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so: Local governments as experiments The rise of Citizen 2.0 Mobile devices as primary devices Ubiquitous crude video content Always on-the-record

Four short links: 15 December 2009 - Open Source Imagery Analysis, GPL Lawsuits, Small World, Regina v Internet

Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today (Linux Weekly News) -- the Software Freedom Law Center is suing them for selling GPL-derived products without offering the source. They've been unresponsive when contacted outside the legal system. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps - Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.

5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments

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 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments. After relaunching my own blog I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the techniques I have used on larger sites and how they can be applied to smaller ones. Blogs and small sites are excellent times to practice version controlled deployments. This post will discuss what I have learned and recently implemented.

Apps Per Seller Across the US iTunes Categories

Measured in terms of number of unique apps, the Top 5 categories in the U.S. app store have been Games, Books, Entertainment, Travel and Utilities. But comparing categories in terms of number of apps doesn't capture the challenge of developing applications in different categories. As I noted in an earlier post, it's much easier to develop a Book app than an interactive game. One crude measure for the relative complexity of developing apps across categories is to compare the number of apps per seller.

Four short links: 14 December 2009 - Archival Footage, Interesting Visualization, Year of Ideas, Zoomable Time Graphs

Videos from the vault of the National Archives -- the public domain US government videos that public.resource.org have been scanning. Check out China's Great Leap Forward (the Beijing landscape has changed!), John James Audubon's Birds of America, and Nature's Half-Acre. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: Alien Projector

Featured O'Reilly Answers Video: How Twitter followers propagate information

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Four short links: 11 December 2009 - Real Time Text, NoSQL Reading List, New data.gov, and a Breakdancing Robot

It's Official, data.gov 2.0 is Coming -- pointer to the design and philosophy document for the next iteration of data.gov. Interesting to see so much activity on US open government happening now: open government directive and progress report were released, along with a request for ideas on open access to publicly-funded science research. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Happy Birthday Internet!

I love a celebration (who doesn't like cake) - especially for those who really deserve to be recognized. The Internet, as you probably know, turned 40 this month. Maybe it's the mother in me, but I would like to take a moment and reflect on how far it has come since its infancy. It's hit quite a few milestones!

Visualizing and Categorizing the 911 Wikileaks Data Set

On November 25th, Wikileaks released 500,000 text pager intercepts from the 24 hours surrounding the horrific 9/11 attacks. The personal, corporate and governmental come from the Washington D.C. and New York City areas. These can be found on their own subdomain at https://911.wikileaks.org/ and are released under the CC-BY-SA license. As with the AOL search logs and the Enron email archives this data set will be examined and visualized.

Happening Today: Gov 2.0 Online Conference - Facing Challenges and Winning: Five Gov 2.0 Examples

When citizens interact with their government, powerful things can happen. It means doing more with less people. It means breaking down too-familiar "cylinders of excellence." Web 2.0 is the industry which has shown that transparency, participation, collaboration add up to increased efficiency. Gov 2.0 harnesses this for the public good, as we'll explore in these sessions: City of Santa Cruz Budget Crisis: A Blueprint Using Social Media + Q&A; txts 4 africa + Q&A; Transit 2.0 at Bart.gov + Q&A; Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal + Q&A; Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds + Q&A; Register now to participate in this free online event.

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools

All of our clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.

Four short links: 10 December 2009 - Open Source CMS and OPAC, Timely SQL, A Bid Secret, Basic Research

Scriblio -- open source CMS and catalogue built on WordPress, with faceted search and browse. (via titine on Delicious) Scriblio is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Charles Platt on the Basics of Electronics - Make: Electronics and Learning Through Discovery

Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun, hands-on way? Author Charles Platt (@charlesplatt) has created a book in which you will explore all of the key components and essential principles through a series of fascinating experiments. I asked him a few questions about Make: Electronics earlier this week so I could understand a little bit more about electronics (and why he wrote this book) for myself.

Featured Video: What Does Gov 2.0 Mean to You?

Register now for Thursday's free Gov 2.0 Online Conference.

Top security threats to Flash/Flex applications and how to avoid them - Part 1 - Cross-domain Scripting Vulnerability

In this new InsideRIA series I will be covering specific security vulnerabilities, showing examples of how an attacker can abuse Flash/Flex applications, and pointing out ways to help prevent these attacks. The purpose of these articles is to increase awareness so you will take security into consideration when building your applications. In part one we'll examine cross-domain scripting vulnerability.

Four short links: 9 December 2009 - Bioinformatics Myths, Internet Policy, Archivist Tools, Life Visualisations

Nebul.us -- startup that aggregates and visualises your online activity. In private beta, but there's a screenshot and brief discussion on Flowing Data. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

GWT Now With SpeedTracer

Google is releasing v2 of GWT (pronounced "Gwit") tonight at a Campfire One in Mountain View. The open-source Google Web Toolkit enables developers to code Ajax web apps in Java. This latest release is focused on speed (just like the latest iPhone) and improved dev-designer collaboration. I was on a call with Bruce Johnson and Andy Bowers to learn more about the release. There are three new major features being released tonight. Of the three SpeedTracer seems to have the greatest implications.

Poll Revisit: What mobile platform are you most interested in programming for?

Back in October of 2008, I posted a poll that focused on the many mobile platforms and asked which platform you were most interested in developing for. Since that time Android and Palm WebOS have matured a bit and Apple also updated the iPhone operating system. So, I thought it might be interested to run this poll again and see if the results have changed at all.

Featured Video: There's a #Hashtag for That - Baratunde Thurston at Web 2.0 Expo

Getting Real with LCDS 3, Part 2 - Follow Along Development Lesson, Code Included

In Part 1, we experienced the joy of model driven development and built a complete LCDS 3 backend using the new Modeler plugin. Amazingly, no Java was needed to create a full production-ready backend. In Part 2, we will build a complete Flex 4 frontend while exercising some of the cooler client-side LCDS 3 features along the way. And once again, I won't skimp on the details.

Four short links: 8 December 2009 - Python Moratorium, Math Pictures, Assemblers Needed, Tennis Vision

Python's Moratorium -- Python language designers have declared a moratorium on enhancement proposals (feature requests) while the world's Python programmers get used to the last batch of New And Shiny they shipped. I'm reasonably sure that the ALGOL designers went through exactly the same discussions, and I know Perl did too. So, don't be afraid of it - don't think that Python is evolutionarily dead - it's not. We're taking a stability and adoption break, a breather. We're doing this to help users and developers, not to just be able to say 'no' to every random idea sent to python-ideas, and not because we're done. Reminds me of Perl god Jarkko Hietaniemi's signature file: "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Japanese Standard for ODF

Based on a cryptic twitter from Dr Murata, it looks like the Japanese standard for ODF has been released. Congratulations to all involved, it is a good step forward to enable competition, substitution and industry in this area.

Flex 101: Creating a Swipe/Slide Effect With Flex

In this example, we will walk through the creation of a swipe/slide effect inspired by the transitions that you often see in touch-capable devices when you use a finger to swipe from one screen to the next. One piece of content slides off to one side, and another piece of content seamlessly slides in from the opposite side.

Twitter Approval Matrix - November 2009

This is the sixth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of November and different sources such as klout.com, tweetsentiment.com, twopular.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. I have included Twitter Trends which is simply the raw trend found on Twitter. The matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter.

Confessions of a Public Speaker -- Slashdotted! - Excellent Review of Scott Berkun's New Book

"Confessions of a Public Speaker is unique in that it takes a holistic approach to the art and science of public speaking. The book doesn't just provide helpful hints, it attempts to make the speaker, and his associated presentation, compelling and necessary," writes Ben Rothke in his Slashdot review. "Confessions is Scott Berkun's first-hand account of his many years of public speaking, teaching and television appearances. In the book, he shares his successes, failures, and many frustrating experiences, in the hope that the reader will be a better speaker for it."

Four short links: 7 December 2009 - Touchscreen++, Data Analysis, Open Science and Social Software, Google Makes Good

3D Touchscreens -- Japan Science & Technology Agency and researchers at the University of Electro-communications have made a "photoelastic" touch screen. The LCD emits polarized light, picked up by a camera over the screen. Transparent rubber on the screen deforms when pressed, and the camera can pick this up. Interesting hack, though it's not yet a consumer-grade product. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Climate Changers - Plus some quotes on climate change from the most cited authors

What is interesting to me is that each of these positions have pretty clear policy ramifications: if you are Know-Nothing, the appropriate policy is Do-Nothing: invest in more studies perhaps, but don't base any policy on it. If you think CO2 is by far the most important thing, then carbon schemes are the only game in town.

Linux Is Regaining Netbook Market Share Quickly

Even those who support and advocate for Linux on the desktop largely believed that Microsoft would retain market dominance. Here we are six months later and the promised ARM powered netbooks have not arrived in any quantity as of yet. Despite this ABI Research published some new data last month and the results may surprise you. They place the 2009 market share for Linux on netbooks at 32% with 11 million units preloaded with Linux shipping this year.

Makezine Weekend Project: Rubberband Power - Build a fun-for-all-ages mini car launcher for next to nothing

The Lessons We Don't Learn

In my Twitter stream today, Sylvia Martinez (@smartinez) retweeted a link to Seymour Papert's 1980 paper written for a Presidential commission that proposed that we provide a computer for every child in America. Long before One Laptop Per Child, Papert saw that computers should not be an "auxiliary" aid to learning but "fundamental" to changing how we learn. He understood that the computer by changing education could change our culture for the better. After thirty years, Papert's call for action is still fresh today.

Google Android: on Inevitability, the Dawn of Mobile, and the Missing Leg

If for no other reason than the 'Anyone but Apple' crowd needs an alternative, there is an 'inevitability' meme associated with Google's Android initiative. But, is their success in the market really inevitable? Over a year after Android's launch, the jury is still out.

Climategate and XML

One interesting artifact to come out of the stolen Climategate material is an epic file HARRY_READ_ME.txt. It seems to be a year long log by a programmer (Harry?) who has to port old data and various old FORTRAN (and MATLAB?)...

How to Replace Yourself with Very Small Shell Script - An Ignite Video

Four short links: 3 December 2009 - History Lesson, Historic Science, Hospital IT, and Predicted Consumption

How Robber Barons Hijacked the Victorian Internet (ArsTechnica) -- cautionary tale of the exploitation of a monopoly. Once installed as the dominant proprietor of the nation's telegraph system, public trust in the confidentiality of Western Union transmissions evaporated. Gould "scanned the telegraph, or manipulated it, as an open book to the secrets of all the marts," Josephson wrote.

Good News: The Daily Me is a stop on the way to richer discussion

Surveys show us cocooning ourselves in worlds of information that reinforce our existing prejudices. It's not enough to read opposing viewpoints because our assumptions and interpretive lenses differ. When we get tired of power plays, we'll start communicating.

Four short links: 2 December 2009 - Dow Jones Tanty, When a Purchase Isn't a Purchase, Surveillance Surprises, and an Open World Bank?

8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight -- Sprint set up a self-service portal for law enforcement and returned 8 million requests for cellphone GPS locations in the first year. This is an incredibly comprehensive analysis of published and revealed numbers of surveillance--it's orders of magnitude larger than anyone had realised. See also the leaked law enforcement howtos from Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo!. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

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.

Inside Exchange Server 2010: A First Look

William here, talking about my new book Microsoft? Exchange Server 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant. This book is designed to be a concise and compulsively usable resource for Exchange Server 2010 administrators. Exchange Server 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant covers everything you need to perform the core administrative tasks for Exchange Server 2010, whether your servers are running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 Release 2. Because the focus is on giving you maximum value in a pocket-sized guide, you don't have to wade through hundreds of pages of extraneous information to find what you're looking for. Instead, you'll find exactly what you need to get the job done. In short, the book is designed to be the one resource you turn to whenever you have questions regarding Exchange Server 2010 administration.

Getting Real with LCDS 3, Part 1

Enterprise RIAs are big, and not the "big-in-Japan" kind of big, but big as in I use one every day. New apps are born almost daily and buzz across the blogosphere. It's usually dashboard-this and data-viz-that, but every once in a while we get an amazing look-ma-I-made-a-heat-map. The forthcoming LCDS 3 is something different and something wonderful. To me, LCDS 3 changes the game, and I fully expect the richest of the next generation enterprise RIAs to have LCDS 3 under the hood. In this article, we will build a "real" application while exercising some of the cooler features of LCDS 3 along the way. And check this out: we won't need to write any server-side code!

Four short links: 1 December 2009 - Open Source Cinema Camera, Collaborative Filtering, Message Queue for Replication, Facebook Data Warehouse Numbers

Apertus -- open source cinema camera. (via joshua on Delicious) A Survey of Collaborative Filtering Techniques -- From basic techniques to the state-of-the-art, we attempt to present a comprehensive survey for CF techniques, which can be served as a roadmap for research and practice in this area. (via bos on Delicious)

No More Chief of Answers - Nilofer Merchant on Challenging the Status Quo

Leaders Need to be Collaborators Too -- "Crowning yourself the Chief of Answers sets your team up to be the Tribe of Doing Things. You become the bottleneck restricting productivity, because you have to be involved in every decision," writes Nilofer Merchant in a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com. According to the author of the soon-to-be published The New How, collaboration must be baked into the process for an organization to rise. Read more.

Over 600 Microsoft Press Titles Now Available on oreilly.com - New Ebook Initiatives Launched Today

You can now purchase Microsoft Press books direct on oreilly.com. Select from over 600 print titles, and 200 DRM-free ebooks. All ebooks are available in four convenient formats, all for the price of one: ePub, PDF, MOBI, and Android. And there's more to come. All new titles will release in ebook formats as they're published, and we're working our way through the Microsoft Press backlist to make all titles available. So check back often. You can also find Microsoft Press titles at: Safari Books Online: Over 400 titles available. iTunes store: 200 ebook apps available now. Android Market: 200 Android ebook apps available now.