chromatic

Biography

chromatic is the Managing Editor for O'Reilly online, serving up news and information on www.oreilly.com.

He is the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, a co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, the lead author of Perl Hacks, and a co-author of The Art of Agile Development.

chromatic has contributed to several projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, Pugs, and, these days, Parrot. Someday, he'd like to claim some responsibility for improving the quality of all software.

Keep track of his thoughts on @chromatic.

Books

Perl Hacks by chromatic , Damian Conway , Curtis Poe May 2006 $29.99 USD (Read Reviews)	Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook by Ian Langworth , chromatic July 2005 $29.95 USD
Extreme Programming Pocket Guide by chromatic July 2003 $9.95 USD (Read Reviews)	Running Weblogs with Slash by chromatic , Brian Aker , David Krieger January 2002 $34.95 USD

Articles

You need to enable JavaScript to view more than 15 articles by this author. Does Enterprise Development Have to Be Painful? (Part Two)
Publish Date: May. 7, 2008After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this second of three articles, chromatic uses SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment to build a bare-bones application from the data model to the UI. Does Enterprise Development Have to Be Painful?
Publish Date: Feb. 28, 2008After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this first of three articles, chromatic explores the ecosystem around SAP NetWeaver CE and tackles the first challenge -- installation. Switching Back to Desktop Linux
Publish Date: Jun. 1, 2006Almost everyone at O'Reilly owns an iBook or PowerBook and almost everyone runs Mac OS X. It's not everyone's ideal operating system, however. Recently, free software editor chromatic explained to Mac editor Derrick Story why he switched back to desktop Linux. Here's what he wants in a usable Unix desktop. ONLamp 2005 Survey Results
Publish Date: Dec. 2, 2005We recently ran a survey on ONLamp.com to find out more about our readers. Here are some of the interesting tidbits of information we learned. Tell Us What You Think: The ONLamp Survey
Publish Date: Oct. 11, 2005We're asking ONLamp readers to participate in our annual online survey. We've sweetened the pot with a chance to win books and MAKE magazine subscriptions. Here's how it works. Smartphones
Publish Date: Jul. 8, 2005Just when you think you've made sense of all of the new phones, calling plans, and options, along comes a new batch of hardware. If you're slogging along with old technology and expired calling plans, you're in the same boat as a few of the O'Reilly folks on the Editors List. Here's a recent conversation about smartphones. Password Management
Publish Date: May. 20, 2005A recent thread on the Editors List started with surprise that our work made it to the New York Times attached to a juicy bit of celebrity gossip; then, as usual, it morphed into a discussion of practical uses of technology. Here's an idea for making your personal secrets more secret and less personal. Error Checking
Publish Date: Mar. 14, 2005Should error checking be included in printed books that cover code? Is it worth adding an extra 10% of text in order to ensure that programmers will not forget to check for error conditions? And ultimately, who's responsibility is it to check for errors? These questions bear a multitude of implications. In a recent discussion on the Editor's List, four editors contemplated the pros and cons of including error checking in print texts. Dear Scott/Dear Max
Publish Date: Dec. 17, 2004If there's one constant in the publishing world, it's the give-and-take relationship between editors and authors. A recent thread on the Editors List discussed this relationship among famous authors and editors as captured in their own words. The State of Java
Publish Date: Oct. 19, 2004Is the Java revolution over? Has the big business-friendly approach turned Java into the new COBOL? Is the momentum behind .NET and Mono stealing away the cool factor that Java once enjoyed? Are those even bad things? In a recent discussion on the Editors List, several editors--programmers themselves--debated these questions. Linux and Patent Risks
Publish Date: Aug. 6, 2004OSRM recently commissioned a study that found the Linux kernel potentially infringes on 283 patents. Though some people find cause for alarm, others see this knowledge as a good thing. Here's more information on the study and its findings. OSCON 2004: The SCO Moot Court
Publish Date: Jul. 28, 2004SCO's lawsuits over Linux copyrights and Unix contracts are still ongoing. Monday night featured a mock court, where lawyers presented the arguments of SCO and IBM to the attendees. Here's a rundown. The Pragmatic Programmers Interview
Publish Date: Jun. 24, 2004The Pragmatic Programmers, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, recently launched their own line of books on pragmatic software development. Since O'Reilly helps to distribute their books, we convinced them to do an interview about self-publishing, the state of the software industry, and how to become better developers. The Making of BSD Hacks
Publish Date: Jun. 3, 2004Dru Lavigne, the author of BSD Hacks, and chromatic wanted to use open source tools to write and edit the book, so they turned to PseudoPOD and Subversion. chromatic writes about how they used these tools to collaborate, write, edit, and produce the book in record time. Paul Graham on Hacking
Publish Date: May. 27, 2004Paul Graham is a hacker, a painter, and an essayist known as much for his thoughtful writings on spam, hacking, and Lisp as for creating the Arc programming language. In this interview with the O'Reilly Network, Paul discusses hacking, creativity, computer science education, and language design. Paul's collection of essays has just been released in a new book from O'Reilly, Hackers & Painters.

Blog

Does Hacking Closed Hardware Hinder Open Hardware?

October 08 2008

I'm profoundly uncomfortable purchasing devices which, by default, do not provide the freedoms I desire. I'm starting to believe it works against my desire for open, unencumbered hardware. read more

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux

September 25 2008

Arjan van de Ven is a Linux kernel hacker and the author of PowerTOP and LatencyTOP. His goal is to fix problems in the Linux desktop to save power, respond more smoothly, and to run faster. This interview explains how. read more

Avoiding Downstream Eddies in Free Software

September 23 2008

Recent discussions about who contributes to the Linux ecosystem have singled out certain companies as freeriders. That almost makes, but misses a greater point: it's their responsibility to contribute to the health of upstream projects. read more

The Present and Future of Ruby and Rails

September 22 2008

Chad Fowler and Rich Kilmer discuss where Ruby and Rails have gone in the past year, whether RESTful composition obviates the need for ORM, what's interesting in the upcoming world of Ruby and Rails, and how Maglev, Rubinius, and other new Ruby implementations contribute to the world of dynamic languages. read more

No EULA for Mozilla Firefox

September 17 2008

Mitchell Baker of Mozilla reports that they have revised their decision to include a EULA-like notification in the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. The debate over Mozilla's decision reveals two important debates in the free software world. read more

A Beginner's Introduction to Perl Web Programming

September 05 2008

Previous articles in this series showed how to use Perl for text processing and general purpose programming. Now it's time to demonstrate how to use Perl on the web. read more

Scott Berkun on Chrome

September 03 2008

Google Chrome has interesting implications for the web and technology, but how does it work as a browser? Scott Berkun's initial review of the browser as only a browser is the most interesting. read more

David Flanagan on JavaScript 2

August 22 2008

Is JavaScript and HTML the new BASIC? What does the average programmer need from JavaScript 2? Is the web the new client-server model of computing? JavaScript guru David Flanagan addresses these questions and more in this interview. read more

OpenGL 3.0 May be Too Big to Fail and Too Slow to Improve

August 17 2008

Some projects are too big, too complex, or too well-entrenched to have credible competition. They often stagnate. Is OpenGL 3.0 falling into the same trap? read more

Luke Kanies Wants to Modernize System Administration

August 17 2008

Luke Kanies, author of the Puppet configuration management tool, discusses how to fix what's wrong with system administration and why shell scripts and ssh are the wrong tools to keep your systems up to date. read more

Does Enterprise Development Have to be Painful, part three

August 14 2008

chromatic explores how to build, bundle, and deploy an application with SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment and evaluates the whole process for creating and deploying applications in the enterprise. read more

Where are the New Client-Side Development Environments?

August 06 2008

The old client-server application versus client-only application debate is back on the Web, thanks to Ajax and RIA technologies. It's missing a long-forgotten third contender, however -- one which had significant drawbacks and very significant advantages. read more

The Free Software Patent Question Microsoft's Sam Ramji Should Answer

July 30 2008

Microsoft's Sam Ramji promised to answer the tough questions about his company's open source efforts. Here's the big one: will Microsoft fix its open source patent license? read more

How Steve Jobs Plans to Eat Firefox (and why I'm not getting an iPhone)

July 29 2008

When Steve Jobs implied he wants Safari to take over as the world's dominant browser, I thought he meant on the desktop. I was wrong; it took an iPhone app to make me realize free software needs to move into new ecosystems to help users take control of their computing… read more

Open Source in the Enterprise is Inevitable

July 23 2008

The question about open source in the enterprise is no longer "if", but "how". Bernard Golden is the author of a new O'Reilly research report about adoption statistics and usage of open source in professional development and business -- who are hiring more open source people than ever. read more

Biography

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