Blogs
The Price of Fame? About $750
By Kurt CagleJanuary 8, 2009
I spent about an hour yesterday morning on the phone (at Canada's rather obscene cell phone rates) speaking with an "editor" for Continental Who's Who. The pitch is pretty typical (and I had an idea what was going on, so I decided to follow through with it) - you get an email congratulating you on being selected for inclusion in the Who's Who directory of "famous people", please send in the email in order to confirm your selection.
SOA Still Alive and Well--Sell it to the Business
By David A. ChappellJanuary 8, 2009
In case you need to catch up, Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group declared that "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession!".
Black and White for the Digital Era
By Harold DavisJanuary 8, 2009
What is the appeal of black and white photography? After all, we see the world in color, and a gray day is emotionally perceived as depressing and monotonous. Historically, black and white is easy to understand. Monochrome photographic processes were invented long before color. Even once color arrived on the scene, it was largely "yellow box": you snapped the photo,...
When you're SMIL-ing, when you're SMIL-ing...
By Philip FennellJanuary 8, 2009
...the whole world smiles with you. No it's not a typo, the acronym for the W3C's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is pronounced "smile", and the SMIL Animation module sure makes me smile; even more so given the fact that I've seen it mentioned, outside of the usual multi-media circles, three times last year and once already this year...
Now Do As You've Been Told!
By Darwin GrosseJanuary 8, 2009
This article is about my new collection of Korg Nano devices - or it was going to be until my hard drive died.
Is It Time for an EXQuery.org?
By Kurt CagleJanuary 7, 2009
For the most part, new EXQuery functions would simply represent wrappers around existing XQuery extension functionality in order to provide a consistent interface between databases. It would also set a bar that determines the minimal expectation of such databases and data systems and provides a way for new entrants into the field to be able to XQuery scripts without having to refactor code.
A Brief Guide for Mac Switchers/Try-ers (No Laments, Please!)
By Todd OgasawaraJanuary 7, 2009
Wow, CNET's Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher's lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.
A Closer Look at iPhoto '09
By Derrick StoryJanuary 7, 2009
The Macworld keynote today focused on three basic new products: iLife '09, iWork '09, and an updated MacBook Pro 17". Within the iLife suite resides the new iPhoto. It has some refreshing technologies, such as Faces and Places, and has added a new twist or two to the Adjust panel. Here's a closer look at those features. Adjust Panel Improvements...
iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season
By Andrew SavikasJanuary 7, 2009
Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice...
Four short links: 8 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 6, 2009
Four quickies from databases, telephone history, botnets, and disaster tech. MemCacheDB - a persistent storage engine for fast and reliable key-value based object storage and retrieval, with transactions and replication (via stinky). Joining Cassandra, Prophet, CouchDB, and many others in the "doing something new to make use of all this data" game. For an interesting counterpoint, read Not Drinking Kool...
Food, Technology, and Energy
By chromatic January 6, 2009
What are the true costs of getting fresh strawberries in Oregon in January? I don't know. Can we find out?
Analysis 2009: The Financial Crisis Hits IT Hard
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
The recession that started in January 2008 looks to be four phased. The first phase, The housing collapse, actually started in August 2007. The financial meltdown hit in September 2008, and likely will continue through to March 2009 or...
Analysis 2009: Government Gets Into the Software Business
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...
Analysis 2009: The End of Traditional Publishing
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
For publishing, 2009 is shaping up to be truly ugly. The publishing industry has faced a number of factors that, individually, provided quite a challenge, but collectively they may end up likely significantly altering the industry profoundly over the...
Analysis 2009: Energy Sector Faces Volatile Year
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
Here in Victoria, my corner gas station has a liter of regular unleaded gas for CAN$0.80, about US$3.00 a gallon. Six months ago, a similar liter cost nearly $1.50, more than $6 a gallon when factoring in the dramatic...
Analysis 2009: Carbon Markets Heat Up, but so does the Weather
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
Another area where the rise and fall of oil will have a big impact is going to be on climate change amelioration efforts. Reducing carbon emissions is a considerably more hot button issue politically when the price of gasoline...
Analysis 2009: IT Departments Disappear into the Cloud
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
While other IT sectors may be struggling, one area that will likely be quite hot will be in the cloud computing/hosted services market. This particular market has been the subject of a great deal of hype over the last...
Analysis 2009: Application Services come into their own
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
As cloud computing goes, so do two complementary technologies - application services, and web services. It's easier to split these into two distinct sections, though it should be kept in mind that they are simply different manifestations of an...
Analysis 2009: The Web Services Era Begins in Earnest
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
(Warning, this gets technical). This may seem a rather odd statement - after all, "web services" in the traditional SOA sense have been around for the last decade, give or take a few years. I believe, however, that while...
Analysis 2009: Syndication forms the backbone of the Writable Web
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
The syndication model has long been a major facet of the way that the web works, but for the most part its been a largely single direction notification mechanism - you publish content, this updates a syndication queue, then...
Analysis 2009: XForms and XML-enabled clients gain traction with XQuery databases
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
I'm beginning to despair about XForms, which is perhaps a good sign. XForms is perhaps the oldest of the W3C technologies that has yet to either die completely or really dramatically take off, and for all that it has...
Analysis 2009: Semantics continues to not be RDF, but enrichment, classification and taxonomy
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I...
Internet Explorer Fades, Firefox Stays the Course, Google Chrome Surges
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
Poor IE. Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it seems to have a hard time getting much respect these days. Within Microsoft it has long been the unwanted stepchild - ignored when Microsoft shifted gears towards server-side technologies in...
Some thoughts for a New Era
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
This particular look forward is definitely longer than what I have written in years past, and for those of you who have managed to wade through the admittedly voluminous text I both admire your fortitude. This has been a hard...
Analysis 2009
By Kurt CagleJanuary 6, 2009
The art of prognostication is not that dissimilar to understanding weaving. Few things ever occur out of the blue - they just hadn't emerged out of the background noise just yet, and as such when they do appear, you can...
It's 2009... learn like it!
By Brett McLaughlinJanuary 6, 2009
So here we are, a new year. Unsurprisingly, we're getting lots of questions here at the Labs about what's coming in 2009. What books are in progress? What about Rough Cuts and Safari... what's going on there? And where, oh...
Macworld: Where did the Mac mini go?
By Rich RosenJanuary 6, 2009
Everyone seemed to be anticipating that a new version of the Mac mini would be announced at the Macworld conference today. But then... nothing.
Itunes get liberated
By Brian RedfernJanuary 6, 2009
Its a great day for musicians!
WSJ's End of Wall Street: Don't Order The Tombstone Just Yet
By Robert PassarellaJanuary 6, 2009
It's nice to be back after the holidays. I just watched a series of short videos from the Wall Street Journal's Digital Network. The series is called the "End of Wall Street". It is a short oral history of the past year since the demise of Bear Stearns and the current crisis. It ends with a part called "What Happens...
O'Reilly Week in Review for Jan 5th, 2009
By James TurnerJanuary 6, 2009
This week's podcast has a commentary from editor Kurt Cagle on the potential opportunities that this year could bring, a conversation with Tim O'Reilly about ways the SEC could leverage search technology, the answer to last week's quiz and a...
New Forums Now Open
By Caitrin McCulloughJanuary 6, 2009
Get your questions answered in the forums for the newest Head First titles: Algebra, PHP & MySQL, Rails, and Web Design....
The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All
By Tim O'ReillyJanuary 6, 2009
Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it's worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely. I grew up on the idea that humanity would grow out into space, and that resources were for all practical purposes infinite. It...
Promising Glimpse of Thursday Night's Apple Store Panel
By Colleen WheelerJanuary 6, 2009
The intelligent, engaged crowd at, a fabulous old-school bookstore Book Passage in Corte Madera (Marin County) got a preview Sunday of an upcoming Macworld event. Derrick Story moderated a panel of our digital imaging experts, Lisa Snider-King (Photoshop CS4 Missing Manual), Mikkel Aaland (Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure) and Deke McClelland (Adobe Photoshop One-on-One and Photoshop Channels & Masks One-on-One.) Hot...
Four short links: 7 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 5, 2009
Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling. Mind Bites - Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy. Dr...
Is Tweetie an iTunes App Store Anomaly?
By Dave AielloJanuary 5, 2009
I am really impressed with Tweetie, the multi-account Twitter client iPhone application. I find it bizarre that Loren Brichter (the developer) has created a true, multi-account Twitter client for the iPhone and there's still not a native application for the...
Four short links: 6 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 5, 2009
Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World - article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: "Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines,...
Learning Haskell
By Eric LarsonJanuary 5, 2009
I've started reading Real World Haskell and it is a great way to learn functional programming. Coming from XSLT (a rather functional language) I had a feeling of preparedness. Fortunately, Real World Haskell has revealed a huge gap in my...
iPhone Activities @ Macworld
By Raven ZacharyJanuary 5, 2009
Headed to Macworld? There are number of iPhone-related talks and events taking place at and surrounding Macworld this year. This is liklely not complete list, but I provide some of the items that stand out. This information is collected from...
Letter to the Algorithm
By Timothy M. O'BrienJanuary 5, 2009
Is Digg Sexist? No. Is the community it attracts "sexist"? Likely. This post is a response to the recent criticism, a diagnosis, and a prescription for future collaborative filtering evolution. The problem with the current iteration of collaborative filters is that they don't account for more than one dominant preference cluster.
Conversation is the New King
By Mac SlocumJanuary 5, 2009
Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium: It used to be common wisdom...
Chris Baty on Hobbies, Work, and the Creative Life
By Dan BrodnitzJanuary 5, 2009
This year I took a crack at November's National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). Didn't get as far as I'd like, I'll admit. But even my little trek was a great reminder of the importance of making something every day. One of the many perks of the NaNoWriMo experience are the email exhortations you get from a variety of guest-authors, as well as from Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo's founder and program director. The last one he sent out at the end of the journey, was a lovely essay on hobbies, work, and living the creative life. I asked his permission to repost it and he graciously assented.
Audience Growth vs Digg
By Chris JosephesJanuary 5, 2009
Can Digg increase your overall audience growth? It could, but it's usually a long and painful process.
Why Macworld is moribund — but not dead
By FJ de KermadecJanuary 5, 2009
The current economic climate and the old-world flair of traditional trade shows are often blamed for Macworld's slow, and somewhat humiliating, demise. After its move back to Boston — a thinly masked prelude to the cancellation of its east coast edition —, its original version is now widely suspected to be on its last legs. Certainly, IDG has announced there...
Learning Styles
By Bill DudneyJanuary 4, 2009
I've been thinking about learning styles recently. I'm working on a set of blog posts to demystify the way that iPhone stuff works. And I've been going back and forth between doing them as posts or as video screen casts...
International Conference on Cyber Security 2009
By Nitesh DhanjaniJanuary 4, 2009
I'll be speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York (Jan 5 - 9).
PyMOTW: bz2
By Doug HellmannJanuary 4, 2009
The bz2 module is an interface for the bzip2 library, used to compress data for storage or transmission.
My 2009 Resolution: Learn IPv6
By James TurnerJanuary 4, 2009
In which the author recounts his adventures getting an IPv6 tunnel hooked up to his home network.
O'Reilly Media Events at Macworld SF 09
By Derrick StoryJanuary 3, 2009
We've put together a killer line-up of speakers for this year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Here's an overview of the things you can do with just an Expo pass. And don't forget that great library of O'Reilly books to browse.
Bat Utility Belt #1: Save Your Ears for $20
By David BattinoJanuary 2, 2009
Ya gotta love gadgets. As a tech reviewer, I get to check out quite a few, but in this new blog series, I'll highlight some of the gear I've bought — with my own money — that's performed especially well. Following a utility-belt theme, I'll focus on gadgets under $100. The first item in my list, though perhaps too big...
Defining legal input characters
By Erica SadunJanuary 2, 2009
I sometimes use a little trick to ensure that a UITextInputField only accepts a certain subset of characters. Say for example, you want to ensure that a user enters only letters and spaces. A UITextField delegate can catch each character as its typed and decide whether to add items to the active text field. Here's how.
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