No. Those pictured below aren’t avatars! They’re real folks from O’Reilly’s online marketing group. And they’re wishing you a spooky Halloween.

And if you need some help right away? Say hello to customer service.

Trick or Treat!

Saddle-up cowboys, cowgirls, ranch hands of all ages. It’s time for another book round-up at JavaRanch.

This week the forum has to do with agile development and the new O’Reilly book - The Art of Agile Development. Authors James Shore & Shane Warden will be hanging around the site today through Friday to answer questions and comments that you may have. On Friday, as tradition states, four people will be chosen at random from the forum and will receive a copy of the book.

So go check out the forum - offer your two cents, ask the question that’s on the edge of your tongue, or simply interact with the authors.

Have you ever been described as “nerdy?” I can’t say I’ve ever been there myself but someone clued me into this YouTube video by Al Yankovich and I thought I’d check it out:

Here are some of the standards Al lists:

• knowing pi to a thousand places
• doing calculus for fun
• fluent in klingon
• collecting X-men comic books
• memorizing the whole script to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
• spending every weekend at the Renaissance Faire

See if you measure up… and while you’re at it - check out the reference to JavaScript: The Definitive Guide that he makes about halfway through the song. Apparently O’Reilly’s nerdy as well… who knew?

Recently O’Reilly Senior Web Producer Julie Delany attended the She’s Geeky conference in Mountain View, California. Following the unconference structure, attendees set the agenda and everyone had a chance to participate. Julie gave a one hour talk on software engineering methodologies.

We asked Julie to answer few questions about her experience attending this all-female conference and here’s what she had to say:

Q: What kinds of topics were discussed at She’s Geeky?

Julie Delany: Discussions included: Google geo APIs, What is Web 3.0?, Shameless self promotion, Embedded Systems: gizmos and gadgets, Are you geeky enough?, Negotiation tech/non tech identities, Mobile and online tech convergence, Software engineering in-the-small , Brainstorming New Technologies, Identity, Security, OpenID, Getting things done with Do-ocracy and GTD, Guerrilla Tactics of a Diversity Evangelist, Selling your tech to the Feds/ Govt. contracting how-to, Product development, and Balance being a woman and a geek.

Q: And what was the most interesting talk you went to?

JD: Identity, Security, OpenID

Q: What issues do women encounter in the tech sphere?

JD: Women entering the industry may worry about the typical geek stereotype–just because you like geeky things doesn’t mean you resemble the characters in “Revenge of the Nerds.” It’s more about breaking down the geek stereotype than the female stereotype.

“Women working in tech often face challenges that make it difficult to communicate authentically within their own working environments because they are the one women among many, or in a small minority within a male-oriented culture. This often means that, to contribute effectively, women sometimes adopt a more typically ‘masculine’ style of collaboration. Or, they end up playing an exaggerated ‘feminine’ role as the nurturer of the group.” (She’s Geeky)

Q: Is it changing for the better?

JD: “Although there is an increase in the proportion of women in different technical fields, they are still a noticeable minority […]” (She’s Geeky)

I’m hopeful it is changing for the better. Women need to continue educating the tech industry as to what they feel is appropriate behavior. This is an ongoing opportunity for women not just in computer fields but in other fields such as aviation. (Did I mention that Julie is a pilot in her free time?)

Q: What are the major opportunities for women in tech?

JD: ‘Women in technology’ conferences are on the rise and great opportunities for women to find same gender compatriots. I hope to see more (un)conferences like this one. She’s Geeky was an (un)conference and was (un)like any conference most participants have attended. The day of talks/sessions reminded me a bit of O’Reilly’s Foo Camp wherein the morning of the full conference day, attendees structured sessions they found interesting.

Q: How did it feel as a speaker presenting to a room of women only?

JD: It was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing my research with geeky women and getting their input. We had a productive discussion.

For more information about She’s Geeky, read Wired’s Blog or the
San Jose Mercury News Article (free registration required).

Recently I traveled to Austin to help with the Austin Maker Faire and had the chance to meet with some local user group leaders. The first group, AgileATX lead by Jeffrey Palermo and Scott Bellware, meets every two weeks on Thursdays at the local Central Market for a group lunch. There is no agenda, just a quick bite and great discussion. The one I attended had over 20 members, many of whom never met before. Apparently this idea is catching on and is one that could be easily replicated anywhere you have a restaurant that is willing.

I also had the opportunity to meet with Austin On Rails organizer Damon Clinkscales. This lucky group meets at the famous Frog Design in Austin on the second or third Tuesday of every month. Damon’s been a speaker at RailsConf in the past.

Next time you’re in Austin don’t forget to check out the local UG scene. There is one for every interest in this very tech friendly town.

Here’s Rocketboom’s video coverage of Maker Faire. I love the pancakes at the end.

Jim Shore and Shane Warden tell us that although agile development has entered the mainstream, the concept remains poorly defined, leading to a lot of misunderstanding about what agile development is and how it works. We had a chance to chat with them recently about their new book on the subject. Here’s how it went.

Q. Agile development isn’t a new concept. How important do you think it is for today’s software developers?

Jim: I think it’s vital for anybody doing professional software development. Too many people–customers, testers, and developers alike–put up with painful software development processes. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Many of the problems that people take for granted–problems like painful build cycles, extensive defect lists, incomplete and missing requirements, and software designs that resist change–have actually been solved. Rigorous, high quality, productive software development is well within the reach of average software teams.

The founder of our Missing Manual series took Leopard for a spin recently and pronounced Apple’s long awaited new operating system ready for prime time. You can read David Pogue’s review of “the sleek, modern-looking Leopard” and learn more about its Time Machine, Boot Camp, and File Stacks in today’s New York Times here.

And for those planning to stuff a new Mac into a loved one’s stocking over the holidays, be sure to include a copy of Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. Due in stock on December 6, David’s new book offers honest, straightforward instruction on all things Leopard, detailing what’s hot, and what’s not.

In the meantime, if you’re dreaming of movie making, Pogue brings you iMovie ‘08 & iDVD: The Missing Manual. It’s available in a day or two.

When David isn’t writing books or penning tech columns or creating videos or singing original songs, he sometimes turns up at tradeshows. You can see him in the picture below, when he stopped by the O’Reilly booth recently at PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. The interviewer on the right is O’Reilly’s digital media evangelist, Derrick Story.

David Pogue talks to Derrick Story

The Daily Texan has a write up and video of the Austin Maker Faire.

“We wanted to see what happens when you open the doors of Austin and bring people in to show what they have,” said Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE magazine.

And here is a video of the Mentos and Diet Coke display by Epybird.com. The kids are having a great time.

Quite the oxymoron hit me this past week - here’s my conundrum:

My discovery: One of our upcoming releases - Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual is quickly topping “best-sellers” charts across the internet.

My reaction: Yay! That’s good news! Something we definitely want to be hearing about one of our books. But wait… Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual? It hasn’t even been released yet!

My confusion: [fumbling through papers and files] The book’s not due out for another [quick calculations] 44 days! Huh?!?

Yep - pretty cool, pretty cool. Needless to say… we were already excited in anticipation of a great book, and apparently you are too! Check out the book now on the catalog page to pre-order it and read a description of what’s to come.

And keep counting down the days… not only til the release of Mac OS X Leopard as I’m sure you some of you are… but also to the release of the book that will help you navigate all the new jungles of the operating system.

The word “hack” has a completely different meaning to an O’Reilly-ite than it does to a large part of the general population. When we publish books about hacks, we’re not telling you how to access information illegally from a different computer, but how to make your computer (or iPod, or Google, or any number of things) work in different ways than it was originally intended. Hadley Stern defined it for us a couple of years ago in a blog post entitled Reclaiming Hacks:

An O’Reilly hack is someone who is an advanced user who wants to get the most out of technology and life. This spirit is inherent in the inventor, the tweaker, and the technologist, not the criminal.

Following this definition, Preston Gralla recently authored a book entitled Big Book of Windows Hacks. Gralla is highly qualified to write this book, as he proves below:

I’ve been using and writing about Windows since Windows 1.0, and have accumulated a great deal of expertise about the operating system in that time. I’ve figured out hundreds of tips and trick through the years…and find more every day.

Gralla’s top ten Windows hacks are as follows:

1.) Make Your Own TV Show Mashups with Windows Media Center Want to mash “I Love Lucy” together with “Lost”? How about “American Idol” with the “Ed Sullivan Show”? With this hack, you can create your own TV show mashup, mashing together any shows, by first recording them, and then hacking them together.

2.) A Grab-Bag of Great Vista Interface Hacks Don’t like the way Vista’s nifty new interface works? Not to worry — here are plenty of hacks to show you how to bend it to your will.

3.) Keep Your Google Search History Private Worried that Google knows too much about you — and worried that the information might fall into the wrong hands? Fear not: Here are seven steps you can take to keep your search history to yourself.

With the new iPods out on the market come a whole new list of fun and exciting things to accomplish with your new Shuffle, Nano, Classic, or Touch. Luckily, we aren’t left to our own experimentations - J.D. Biersdorfer and David Pogue’s newest book iPod: The Missing Manual, 6th Edition has all sorts of new tips & tricks for these new contraptions.

J.D. shared a few of her favorites with us the other day, just in case you can’t wait til the book comes out in stores next week.

Quicker naps for your iPod. There’s a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a “Sleep” option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select “Sleep” and press the center button to add it to your iPod’s main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.

Fetching missing album art. Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don’t have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can’t, it pops up a message telling you it didn’t find everything. But here’s the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn’t find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.

Widget substitutes for the Touch. Touch owners may gripe that their iPods lack the stocks and weather widgets of Cousin iPhone. But with the many Web applications programmers have whipped up in the past few months, you can find weather, stocks, and more with just a few extra taps. To get there, point the Touch’s Safari browser to sites like mockdock.com or iphoneappsmanager.com.

Check out the rest of her tips here or pre-order your book from oreilly.com.

Feedback’s been trickling in from one of our newer releases, Designing Web Navigation. We’ve had a few really good reviews from faithful reviewers:

Brett Merkey, Amazon.com–

Designing Web Navigation seems to have it all in one place, including practice discussion at the end of each chapter and further reading recommendations. The amount of information is impressive. There is not a page without a visual aid of some sort. I certainly like having lots of screenshots of real sites with the commentary of the author…This book is chock full of the right material that belongs on your shelf for when you need it, and you will.

Aspi Havewala, Desicritics.org–

This isn’t a book in which the author has thrown in a grab bag of his experiences together and presented them with splashy graphics. Instead, Kalbach breaks out concepts, often presenting conflicting points of view (he mentions Alan Cooper’s call to dispense with navigation entirely) and embellishes it with research from the fields of usability and human factors. This approach makes the book feel academic but it doesn’t take away from the readability of the text at all…Congratulations to O’Reilly and the book’s design team.

Joshua Mieri, Santa Clara User Group–

As an application developer, I found the book extremely useful as it provides a vocabulary which one can use to discuss the User Experience on one’s web site/application. The many examples (screen-shots) of web sites from around the world are extremely helpful as they demonstrate the design concepts discussed in the book.

What about you? Do you have an opinion or recent review posted about Designing Web Navigation? Shoot me an email at maryr@oreilly.com or leave a comment for me here.

Our friends over at JavaRanch are hosting some contests these next few weeks via their forum at the Big Moose Saloon. Starting tomorrow, they will be featuring Head First SQL and having daily discussions with author Lynn Beighley. At the end of the week, four winners will be randomly selected from those who participated in the forum throughout the four days.

In the upcoming weeks, keep an eye out for more contests on JavaRanch:

• October 30th - The Art of Agile Development with authors James Shore and Shane Warden
• December 4th - Head First PMP with authors Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene

For more information about the book promotions, visit JavaRanch’s FAQ page: http://faq.javaranch.com/java/BookPromotions

KUT-FM, Austin’s NPR affiliate, talks to Dale Dougherty and Sherry Huss about this weekend’s Maker Faire.
Listen here.

For more details on Maker Faire Austin, click here.

Python, the elegant and powerful core tool favored by Google, YouTube, and iRobot, grows more pervasive daily. And for those ready to discover what these companies see in Python, Learning Python, Third Edition is the best way to get started. This updated new edition places readers in the capable hands of a pioneer in the Python universe, Mark Lutz.

Recently we talked to Mark about his new book.

Why did you decide to update “Learning Python?”

Mark: I wanted to update the book for all the changes that have occurred
over the last 4 years, in both Python itself, and in the topics I
present in Python training sessions. There have also been some
structural changes, and the book’s scope now has a sharper focus.

On the language front, this edition has been thoroughly updated
to reflect both Python 2.5 and Python 3.0. It incorporates all
changes to the language since the 2nd edition, which was largely
based on Python 2.2 (with some coverage of 2.3 features). Though
this new edition is based on Python 2.5, discussions of anticipated
changes in the upcoming 3.0 release have been incorporated
throughout to help readers migrate in the future. For example, a
large section in the Preface summarizes 3.0’s expected changes.

Besides the language changes, this edition includes new introductory
chapters on built-in types and statement syntax, a new full chapter
on dynamic typing, and many new use case examples. Some topics,
including list comprehensions, were moved to the places where they
have proved simplest to digest in training classes.

Bestselling author Barbara Brundage–whose day job is playing the harp–didn’t plan on becoming an authority on Elements, one of the world’s most popular photo-editing programs. Yet her newest publication–Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual–clearly secures Barbara’s position as the premier Elements’ expert.

And if you can’t wait to get started with your new copy of Elements 6, check out Barbara’s top ten tips:

Barbara’s Tips

1. Always back up your photos as soon as you get them out of your camera. You can use the Organizer’s backup or disc-burning feature (File->Backup Catalog to CD, DVD or Hard Drive) for this, or you can use your computer’s built-in disc-burning utility. For really important photos (wedding and baby pix, for example), it’s not a bad idea to burn a disc and keep that someplace else, like your safe deposit box or with a friend or relative. Then, no matter what happens, you won’t have to worry about losing your photos.

2. Never, ever work on your original photo. If you use the Organizer, good news: Elements already has your back. It creates version sets, which allow you to save different states of your image as you edit. You can create as many different versions of a photo as you like and go back to any one of them at any time. And if you’re working with RAW files you can’t alter your original (only the conversion settings). If you don’t use the Organizer, make a copy of the picture (File->Duplicate) and work on that. This way you can always start over again if you get a better idea later on.

3. Sharing photos with the Organizer. There are all kinds of fun, creative ways to share your photos in Elements 6, and the Organizer makes it super easy to explore them all. Try a slideshow with music and commentary, or upload your photos to EasyShare or one of the other online services to create mugs, bags, and other cool gift items with your photos on them.

Read all ten tips!

Exciting news for Makers in Austin, Texas: October 20-21, 2007 has been declared “Maker’s Weekend” by Austin’s Mayor Will Wynn.

And the weekend is rightfully named, as MAKE will be invading the Travis County Expo Center and taking over with their catapults, explosions, life-sized mouse traps, and more.

As Mayor Wynn said in a recent press release,

Austin is such a creative, vibrant town, and Maker Faire fits right in to our vibe and spirit…America has such a thirst right now for creative self-expression. We also have an incredible need for out-of-the-box innovation. Maker Faire embodies the best of both of these worlds, and in a way that’s smart and fun. Therefore, we couldn’t be happier to welcome Maker Faire to Austin and to declare Oct. 20-21, ‘Maker’s Weekend.

There are many special attractions taking place over these two days. A few of these attractions include

Michael J. Ross reviews High Performance Web Sites on Slashdot.

He gives it a 9/10 and says:

“Every Internet user’s impressions of a Web site is greatly affected by how quickly that site’s pages are presented to the user, relative to their expectations–regardless of whether they have a broadband or narrowband connection. Web developers often assume that most page-loading performance problems originate on the back-end, and thus the developers have little control over performance on the front-end, i.e., directly in the visitor’s browser. But Steve Souders, head of site performance at Yahoo, argues otherwise in his book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers.”

Day of .NET in Ann Arbor is a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by Great Lakes Area .NET User Group , Ann Arbor .NET Developer Group, Northwest Ohio .NET User Group, Greater Lansing User Group .NET, and West Michigan .NET Users Group.

This event is being offered at no cost to anyone interested in .NET development, and will take place on October 20, 2007 at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, MI.

Edible Austin Magazine owner/publisher Marla Camp plans to showcase local food and farmers at the special “Food Maker Pavilion and Demonstration Area” at Maker Faire Austin. Learn how to create a breadbox-sized garden, build a solar oven, make cheese, or paint pumpkins and take home recipes for what to do with your pumpkin after Halloween. Listen to Marla’s interview here.

Maker Faire, the ultimate festival for inventors, tinkerers, makers, crafters, and do-it-yourself-ers of every stripe, runs from Oct. 20 & 21 at Travis County Fairgrounds in Austin. Go to www.makerfaire.com for all the details.

If you’re feeling charitable, you may want to check out this “laptop with a mission.” In today’s New York Times, David Pogue raves about the One Laptop Per Child program. Sure it costs a little more than $100, but Pogue says it’s a “kid magnet” and worth every penny:

The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.

O.L.P.C. slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

Watch Pogue’s video review of the XO laptop here:

From now until the end of December, if you’re looking for Eddie Tapp you may want to meet up with him on the road. Tomorrow the author of Photoshop Workflow Setups and Practical Color Management takes his popular training sessions to San Francisco. Check here for Eddie’s schedule.

With Silicon Valley turning 50 recently, the San Francisco Chronicle asked the CEO’s of some of today’s leading tech companies–including Paul Otellini, Intel Corp, Eric Schmidt, Google Inc., and Tim O’Reilly–to talk about their hopes and fears for the future of Silicon Valley.

From Tim:

I hope Silicon Valley gets its housing price imbalance out of whack so there is affordable housing for the service workers on whom the region depends. It’s a bit of a hothouse flower at the moment and fragile in the real world.

I hope the valley catches the next wave of innovation, which won’t just be silicon-based, and not just in the valley. I fear that it won’t because the future always surprises us. While many Silicon Valley venture capitalists have moved on to new areas, silicon (and software) is in their blood, and it’s hard for them to switch tracks, especially while there is still so much going on in the world of computers.

Read the entire story.

“Water in the desert” is how blogger Rick Jelliffe described one of our newest releases — Fonts & Encodings — a book written by author Yannis Haralambous and recently translated from French (Haralambous’s native language) into English.

Jelliffe expounds on his review of the book:

I cannot think of a technical book that I have enjoyed more in the last decade than Yannis Haralambous’ new Fonts & Encodings from O’Reilly…It is somewhat surprising to me to find a technical book where I think it would be more productive to have the book in my library rather than try to locate the information on the WWW. The local technical bookstores nowadays have computer sections that are full of product manuals and certification courses: finding a book that even has a sense of history and enjoyment of the subject matter is water in the desert.

Find the rest of his great review here.

James Reinders, the author of a new book–Intel Threading Building Blocks, Outfitting C++ for Multi-Core Processor Parallelism, from O’Reilly Media (July 2007)–talks to Redmond Developers’ Michael Desmond about “compilers and parallelism, and what dev managers must change in the age of multi-core processors.”

Q:You’ve been deeply involved in compiler development. How exactly did you end up working in the guts of the machine?

Reinders: I have a deep interest in exactly how things work, and in particular how computers work. So I’m very interested in the bit-level — the transistor-level, if you will — logic of the computer. I want to know how to do it. I’m very fascinated with how to take best advantage of it at a very low level.

Compilers are a fascinating place to work, because you’re trying to take what you believe to be a language that’s abstract, and you try to keep the programmer working on the task of programming, and translate that into something that’s efficient for the machine to operate on. It keeps me engaged with the latest ideas in development and how to design the microprocessor.

But it also lets me step back and look at the programmer productivity issues and what we can do to have features in the compiler at a high level that can translate into efficient machine stuff, and are efficient interfaces for the programmers as well.

Boy, that has evolved a lot over time. When I started with Intel, Fortran 77 and C were the languages I worked on. Now it’s Fortran 90 and Fortran 2003 and C++, and obviously there are a lot of other variations and languages that have popped up, especially the managed runtimes like Java and C#, and of course Perl and Python — although I was using Perl the first year when I joined Intel and I still use Perl a lot.

Read the interview.