Five of the hottest jobs you can get into right now include Disease Mapper, Robot Programmer, Information Engineer, Radiosurgeon, and my favorite–Second Life Lawyer.
O'Reilly FYI
From Ellen Nakashima’s lucid story about the harassment of women online:
“Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed “a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface.” Her site takes a “zero tolerance” policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators “24/7″ to filter the comments, she said.”
Read Ellen Nakashima story here.
O’Reilly author of the soon-to-be-published The Myths of Innovation is blogging from Moscow.
St. Basil’s Cathedral near the Kremlin
Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX are giving Microsoft developers some attractive new options when it comes to creating the rich web experiences users now expect. O’Reilly’s got them covered in its latest releases.
The first is Getting Started With Silverlight by Microsoft MVP and Siverlight-insider Shawn Wildermuth. This 62-page Short Cut introduces you to Silverlight’s key features and shows you how to tap into its functionality to spice up your HTML and ASP.NET pages.
Next, you can take a look at a work in progress with Programming ASP.NET AJAX, Rough Cuts Version by Christian Wenz. No need to wait for the finished book if you’re itching to get started with the technology now. Loaded with code and examples that demonstrate key aspects of the framework, this book is ideal not only for ASP.NET developers who want to take their applications a step further with Ajax, but for any web developers interested in ASP.NET AJAX, no matter what technology they use currently. The Rough Cuts edition provides access to this manuscript as it’s being developed–either online or via PDF. Released previously as Programming Atlas to cover the beta version of the Microsoft framework, this edition is fully up-to-date and expanded for the official 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX.
Check out our other Short Cuts and Rough Cuts–part of O’Reilly’s commitment to delivering vital technology information to people who need it, when they need it.
The Inland Empire .NET User’s Group will be having two months of WPF. Adam Calderon will be speaking on May 8th on Data Binding and WPF and Cal Schrotenboer will be speaking in June on WPF Basics.
San Francisco’s Pandora’s Trunk Visual Vaudeville & Built Burlesque show happens Saturday, April 28, at Mina Dresden Gallery, 312 Valencia @ 14th St. Check out all the details of this crafty & wild eclectic bi-monthly fashion/arts party here.
What’s not to like about “champagne recovery” on a beer budget? W. Curtis Preston covers all you need to know that’s cheap and free when it comes to backing up and recovering data. He knows his stuff. But according to Cameron Laird, UnixReview.com, Preston’s recent book is more than just comprehensive:
“Backup & Recovery (B&R) is marvelous,” writes Cameron. “Many times, when I read professional material, I think, ‘was it worth making a book from this? Is there real substance here?’ For B&R, the answers are ‘yes’: I’m willing to fell trees for these pages.
“I mean that in a very strong sense. B&R is like the works of Edward Tufte or Donald E. Knuth or even, let’s say, Stanley Kubrick or Eric Clapton: you can’t help but see the world in a different way afterward, but one that’s deeply rooted in the truths you already know. B&R is a work of artistry…” His complete review explains why.
Looking for speaking opportunities? Ruby Hoedown 2007 has opened their call for participation. The conference takes place in August.
In Steve Talbott’s widely anticipated and thought-provoking new
book–“Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of
Machines”–The Nature Institute researcher in Ghent, NY delves
into society’s seemingly insatiable lust for and addiction to
technology.
Talbott’s timely exploration of our techno-cravings has won praise from
one of our most acclaimed thinkers, Michael Pollan. The bestselling
author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “The Botany of Desire” calls
“Devices of the Soul” an “urgent and important work.” Adds Pollan,
“Nothing is as rare or sorely needed in our tech-enchanted culture right
now as intelligent criticism of technology, and Steve Talbott is exactly
the critic we’ve been waiting for: trenchant, sophisticated, and
completely original.”
Steve and Phyllis Talbott
Don’t miss the Internet Professionals Society of Alabama’s CS3 presentation in Birmingham, tonight, April 25. Two evangelists from Adobe will be answering all your questions.
And if your near Tampa, make sure you stop by Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 AKA “Scorpio” preview tour tonight at the Tampa Bay ColdFusion User Group.
O’Reilly author of the soon-to-be-released The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun, talks about things we do fast, stuff we pay attention to, and why we should notice what the great thinkers of yesteryear paid attention to at Ignite Seattle. Take a listen and see if you agree.
“Few software technologies are more difficult to learn to implement than the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP),” writes Jem Matzan in a new book review in The Jem Report. “Most commonly you’ll know LDAP as Active Directory on Windows or OpenLDAP on just about every other operating system. It was designed to make system administration easier, but unless you know how to install, configure, and successfully implement it, OpenLDAP can’t do a thing for you. Fortunately for those of us who weren’t born omniscient, O’Reilly has a great book on the subject: LDAP System Administration”…
It’s not a new book–LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter was published in 2003. But Jem gives the book a healthy 10/10 rating. All hype aside, sometimes you just need the information that’ll help you get the job done: “I bought this book to learn how to implement OpenLDAP on some OpenBSD and GNU/Linux systems, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the result. LDAP System Administration is the perfect sysadmin’s introduction to LDAP. If you have serious plans to switch over to OpenLDAP on your network, with this book as your companion you can generally expect to have everything finished in one work week or less, depending on the complexity of your situation.”
This June, for the first time ever in the United States, the author of Information Dashboard Design (O’Reilly Media, 2006), Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge, will be making his Visual Business Intelligence courses available to the general public. The 2007 West Coast Visual Business Intelligence Workshop will take place from June 5-7, 2007 at the Fort Mason Conference Center, right on the San Francisco Bay.
To register for the workshop or to learn more about it, visit www.PerceptualEdge.com or call (510) 558-7400.
You may have noticed a new feature that’s appearing throughout the O’Reilly web sites, the ability to “listen” to our articles and blogs. You can hear some examples on this blog or at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/
Click the “Listen” button to the right of the title and a synthetic voice reader will read the article to you.
I’ve been watching this technology for a number of years now, and I’m really excited to finally launch something that works to the degree this does. I’m excited for a number of reasons.
First, because people are so busy and have so many content choices to choose from, this will give us an added advantage. People who normally read our content, a singular task, can now listen to it while doing other things, as they would a radio program. We’ll shortly be implementing a podcast-on-the-fly feature so that readers can choose to listen to our content at their leisure on their iPods and other devices.
Second, this will make our content more accessible. The technology behind this was first created to aid the handicapped.
Third, the technology behind this reads XML, html, and xhtml, and can be easily trained. We can train the voice to read Java or Perl code accurately, or tables. This has been a roadblock with other voice technology I’ve looked at.
Is it perfect yet? No. As you click around and listen you’ll notice imperfections. The reader stumbles over malformed html and certain words and phrases, and it still needs help when reading code. But as I said, the voice is easily trained, and we’re adding a feedback mechanism so readers can help us perfect the service. That will be included in a day or two. It will obviously be better for straight narratives, and less useful for code heavy content, but even that can be dealt with. And a note to editors and copyeditors, the reader makes typos very obvious.
The company behind this is ReadSpeaker, a small company based in Sweden. ReadSpeaker was started in 1999 with the goal of making the Internet accessible to the handicapped. Since succeeding in that realm they’ve expanded to others. I first came across them on the International Herald Tribune website. Their clients are primarily based in Europe and we’re they first US customer.
I’d like to give a big thanks to Jonathan Wellons, Laura Adair, and Julie Delany for implementing this on the O’Reilly Network, oreilly.com, and conferences blog. Gabriel Williams will shortly be rolling out the same service on the Radar.
–Allen
P.S.–We have the choice of both male and female voices, and the correct one will soon apply to the gender of the author.
On Saturday, April 28, the Atlanta Asterisk Users Group will hold a free Asterisk Install Fest and Conference at the new Klaus Advanced Computing Building on the Georgia Tech campus. This event is open to the public and welcomes everyone from beginner to expert levels. Here’s your chance to learn more about Asterisk.
Brad Smith of DevGroup NW passed along the details for WebVisions 2007.
“Join the rock stars of design, user experience and business strategy in beautiful Portland, Oregon. WebVisions 2007 allows you to get a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your web business, company and career. Keynote speakers include Kent Nichols & Douglas Sarine (Ask a Ninja), plus David Pescovitz (co-founder of BoingBoing.net and editor-at-large of MAKE: Magazine).”
Bestselling O’Reilly author Scott Berkun knows a thing or two about innovation. And in his latest, soon-to-be-released new book-The Myths of Innovation-Scott aims to set the record straight about a certain falling apple, a red delicious perhaps, and one major scientist, Sir Isaac Newton.
Get the inside scoop along with seeing and hearing Scott talk about his new book in a video clip posted on Amazon here. (Scroll down the page and click on Scott’s picture.)
And what you discover about the aforementioned apple may surprise you.
On Saturday, Scott takes off for Moscow. “With the Russian edition of The Art of Project Management coming out this month, IT-Online , one of Russia’s leading technology consulting firms, invited me to give a one day seminar in Moscow,” emails Scott. “It’s a huge opportunity to share what I know and learn about how things are done there.”
If you speak Russian you can read all about it here.
Michael J. Ross reviews MySQL Stored Procedure Programming on Slashdot. He gives it a 9 out of 10 and says:
“Overall, MySQL Stored Procedure Programming is adeptly written, neatly organized, and exhaustive in its coverage of the topics. It is and likely will remain the premier printed resource for Web and database developers who want to learn how to create and optimize stored procedures, functions, and triggers within MySQL.”
I want to announce the launch of Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink feature on oreilly.com. Who is CCC, and what is RightsLink?
The CCC was established by the Library of Congress to facilitate the legitimate clearance of copyrighted content, and publishers sign up for their services. The CCC has a website, copyright.com, where anyone interested in reusing publisher’s content can clear and pay to reuse material. It’s a 20th century process, however, where someone has to have our content in-hand, know that the CCC exists and that they have a website, and that copyright can be cleared. RightsLink is different because it’s implemented on our site. For example, go to any one of the following book’s online Table of Contents page
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/csstmm/toc.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527310/toc.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/toc.html
and you’ll see that, along with the ability to purchase a book in print or pdf (if that’s available), or view it on Safari, a customer can now purchase the rights to reuse chapters, recipes, hacks, and images. A typical customer for this will be corporations, teachers, magazines, and websites that want to reuse our content on their intranets, newsletters, print and online publications, and course packs.
Completion of this project also gets us much closer to fulfilling several additional projects. It’s the next step in what I call our content ubiquity strategy, whereby we make our content available at the point at which someone is making an information acquisition decision, and in the format the customer wants. It also takes us closer to a full book viewer on oreilly.com and towards full content search. We’re now also much closer to selling books by the chapter in pdf format. Additionally, this will greatly help our ranking in search engines. Up until now search engines were only able to spider the metadata on our catalog pages, such as title and author name. Now they’ll be able to spider the table of contents and all the text available in the preview of each chapter and section.
Many people helped with this project. Laura B. backed it from the crazy idea stage. CJ and Laurie P. helped with the early pricing models. Pascal Honscher helped define and drive the implementation, and came up with a number of innovative processes that surprised the CCC folks. Charles Greer, Ben Bangert, Jeff Boyd harnessed the power of the MarkLogic database to generate the dynamic TOC pages. John Haren, Eric Parker, Laura Adair, Julie Delany, and Mace Bergmann were instrumental in making this work programatically. Ryan Grimm and Andrew Bruno, both now O’Reilly graduates, were responsible for building the database that makes this possible.
–Allen
Scott Gray, the Director and Trish Gray, the Senior Development Manager of the O’Reilly Institute of Technology talk with Chuck Joiner on MacVoices about their online training methods with the University of Illinois’s technology programs and O’Reilly’s reputation.
PittMFUG interviewed Colin Moock about his upcoming book Essential ActionScript 3. Listen to the Podcast here.
New Life for Old Electronics! This Earth Day, April 22, makers will find new uses for abandoned electronics when Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) and Make magazine kick off a three-part Earth Day extravaganza. On Earth Day, ACCRC and Make will be collecting any household electronics–including old projects, failed inventions, and half finished prototypes.
Once all of the electronics have been collected, a team of makers will work for 24 hours, April 28-29, to create new, amusing and quirky items. ACCRC will provide internet, sleeping quarters, food, and plenty of toys to aid makers in the quest for creating the ultimate new gadget.
The reused items will then be displayed at this year’s Maker Faire, May 19-20, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, showcasing how a little innovation can make the old, new again.
ACCRC is located at 1501 East Shore Highway in Berkeley. Click here for the Map.
Click here for recycling details.
ACCRC is a 13-year old award winning electronics recycler. Their primary focus is computers and the charitable placement of F/OSS computers in the hands of those who do not have access. A secondary focus is on finding a re-use for everything else that comes in and they get a lot of stuff. ACCRC will be creating Silicon Death Valley at this year’s Maker Faire.
Slashdot posted a review of Java Generics and Collections today. It got a 9/10.
Andrew Cooke ends his review with:
“The only people who shouldn’t read this are people new to Java. You need to go elsewhere first. This is not a book for complete beginners. This is a great book in the classic–practical, concise and intelligent–O’Reilly mould.”
Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management named Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make, to 2007 Folio: 40. The annual compilation names 40 outstanding visionaries and influencers in the magazine industry—people “who who have demonstrated tangible proof of actionable ideas.” Praising Dale and the Make team, Folio writes,
We couldn’t have said it better. Read Folio’s profile on Dale here. Congratulations to Dale and everyone at Make.
Carol Cali, a photography teacher at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, a private college preparatory school, sent along this photo. We donated the photography books to her school at the end of PMA 07 International Convention and Trade Show in March. Carol (and her students) were thrilled by O’Reilly’s donation.
“I teach B&W Photography with a wet lab, digital photography using Photoshop on PC computers, and yearbook photography which is also working with digital camera,” says Carol.
“The students loved the iPod books,” Carol adds. “As far as the digital workflow books, they are right up our alley and part of what we have been learning. I have also been teaching them about shooting with Raw formats and there is a great book on Raw and Bridge. We also have the book on retouching, which several of the students couldn’t wait to start using and are already telling me what to do. Also one of the books is about shooting panoramas which all of the students are now in the process of shooting. Over all, the books will definitely improve the student’s awareness and inspire them to work more creatively.”
The creator of the Missing Manual series, bestselling author of Windows Vista: The Missing Manual, and the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times, David Pogue once hoped to compose and conduct Broadway shows. David says he worked as conductor, synthesizer programmer, arranger, or assistant on several Broadway shows (Carrie, Welcome to the Club, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Anything Goes at Lincoln Center) and a few Off-Broadway ones (Pajama Game, Godspell, and Flora, the Red Menace, which he also orchestrated).
But did you know David is still belting out his original tunes? Here he sings “I Got You Tube,” a parody set to the music of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” Performed at the Illinois Computing Educators conference in St. Charles, Illinois, on March 1.
The Press Democrat puts the spotlight on the new O’Reilly School of Technology in a story featuring founders Trish and Scott Gray. Read more here.
Jeff Kan Lee / PD
See and hear San Francisco photographer and O’Reilly author Mikkel Aaland talk to David Letterman in 1982 about taking portraits of folks visiting county fairs. These portraits were made in a portable studio that was hauled from fair to fair in California and Arizona between 1976 and 1980. The studio was complete with darkroom and a shooting stage and it took a crew of three to run it: a shooter (Mikkel), a front person to handle customers, and a darkroom person to develop and print the 4×5 inch negative. The entire process, when going smoothly, took about fifteen minutes.
If you’re interested in Linux and close to Bellingham, Washington, make sure you stop by Linuxfest Northwest 2007 on April 28-29. Admission and parking are free at Bellingham Technical College. There’ll be speakers from Red Hat, Google, Novell, OLPC project, MySQL, Sofware Freedom Law Center, Linden Labs (Second Life), and many others.
According to Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene the most useful thing readers will be able to do after reading Head First PMP is pass the PMP exam, but the most important thing is that they’ll become better project managers in the process. Read on to find out why they think the Head First approach is perfect for a PMP exam preparation book.
I recently traveled to Boston for Photoshop World and had the chance to meet up with Brian DeLacey of the Greater Boston Ruby and Rails Group. Since this was my first time in Boston, Brian gave me a whirlwind tour of the area that included No Name Seafood, Fenway Park, and Harvard University’s libraries (thanks to Brian’s wife Lynn for the special tour).
Brian is currently interested in Ruby and Graphics and recently gave a talk on “Screen Scraping with Hpricot” to the Boston Ruby Group.
If you are interested in more video presentations from the Boston Ruby Group check out Luke Stark on “Behavior Driven Development” and Jeremy Durham, on “Deploying Rails Applications.”
Thanks Brian–you were the perfect host and I look forward to future visits.