The folks over at the Detroit Free Press think the geeks on your gift list might crave a Wi-Fi Detector Shirt, an LED book light, or a portable GPS. And for DIY geek on your list they recommend:

If your giftee is the hands-on type, be sure to consider a subscription to Make magazine, which is loaded with ideas for making your own nifty gadgets. Even if you never lift a screwdriver, it’s still amusing reading — recent issues explained how to build water rockets and remote-controlled blimps. See www.makezine.com (quarterly, $35).

And from the makers of Make, there’s also a cool book for office jockeys everywhere: The “Eccentric Cubicle” by Kaden Harris has directions for everything from a desktop guillotine to a USB-powered bubble blower.

We couldn’t agree more!

Inside Digital Photo TV recently featured a video clip of O’Reilly authors Derrick Story and Eddie Tapp from PDN PhotoPlus 2007. Story and Tapp discuss their books, podcast, and the trade show in general in this 5-minute clip.

Even when Carla Schroder was working on her first book, the Linux Cookbook, she envisioned her latest work, the Linux Networking Cookbook, as a companion volume. They go together, she said, like peanut butter and chocolate.

Here are her top ten tips for being a superior Linux network administrator–great advice regardless of your level of experience. In no particular order, except #1:

1. Study and understand the structure of TCP/IP packets, UDP datagrams, and ICMP messages.

2. Understand the details of how a network connection is established, maintained, and then torn down.

3. Get busy on IPv6. IPv4 is overdue to be supplanted by IPv6.

4. Understand how NAT works, and how to move different protocols through it. Getting through NAT is the root of many networking hassles.

5. Keep things as simple as possible. Don’t let your ubergeek chums pressure you into creating unnecessary complications.

6. Become very familiar with OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and with creating and maintaining a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

7. Wireless is changing and advancing rapidly, and Linux has a lot of nice utilities now for roaming users, security, and wireless deployments.

8. Learn how to troubleshoot and trace networking problems. It’s amazing how much you can discover about your networks and what’s going over your wires. If it’s not encrypted you can see everything, and even encrypted traffic has unencrypted packets headers you can read.

9. Avoid lock-in at all costs. You don’t want to be locked in to any particular vendor, or trapped in closed, proprietary protocols or standards.

10. Linux’s networking stack is very advanced and powerful, and Linux itself is endlessly adaptable for everything from tiny embedded routers, to big complicated Internet gateways with all the bells and whistles. It includes a genuine secure cross-platform VPN, and many different secure remote access
applications. Don’t trust your security to the platform with the proven terrible security record- go with Linux.

Thanks, Carla!

Some folks think it can’t be avoided, like taxes. Others are looking for a cure. We’re talking about the Big D. Death. And Aubrey de Grey, a tall, slender, and heavily bearded scientist from Britain, thinks one day we humans will be looking good and feeling spry for a 1,000 years. As reported in a recent Washington Post story by Joel Garreau, de Grey, the author of “Ending Aging,” has attracted the attention and the dollars of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including Peter Theil. Indeed Theil, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal–has reportedly plunked some $3.5 million on de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation.

De Grey told the Washington Post aging is simply a “repair and maintenance approach to extending the functional life span of a human body.”

“It’s just like maintaining the functional life span of a classic car, or a house. We know — because people do it — that there is no limit to how long you can do that. Once you have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of interventions to get rid of damage and maintain these things, then, they can last indefinitely. The only reason we don’t see that in the human body now is that the panel of interventions we have available to us today is not sufficiently comprehensive.”

By the way de Grey doesn’t own a cell phone, or a television, or a car. Yet he considers his body and brain “very valuable gadgets.” Here he talks at Gadgetoff 2007 about how to avoid the whole frail and elderly thing.

The Southern California Linux Expo’s call for papers ends this Friday, November 30.
Opportunities to speak include SCALE (the expo) or three Friday sessions: Women In Open Source, Open Source Software in Education, and Demonstrating Open Source Solutions in Healthcare. SCALE takes place Saturday and Sunday, February 8-10, 2008 at the Westin Los Angeles Airport.

Astronomy has always been an interest of mine, although after taking a college astronomy course and realizing how much maths/physics/calculus was required for TRUE astronomy, I’ve stuck to simply admiring the the night sky. However, with the release of The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, I just might be convinced to pursue astronomy as a hobby once again.

I’ve flipped through the book and taken a glance at the myriad of constellation maps included, but haven’t delved too deeply into it. I think I’ll have to take it home this weekend and take a deeper look, having been inspired by all of the wonderful reviews of the book I discovered this morning:

“The authors have managed to do what is often impossible. They’ve married an incredible amount of information with an easy-to-read style that keeps your interest from page to page and makes you want to get back out underneath the stars. I heartily recommend this book to any amateur astronomer! With its engaging prose and over 500 individual objects described in detail, this book will easily keep you busy both at the telescope and in your favorite recliner! ”
– Dean Petters

“The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders is the most complete guide to the night skies of the northern hemisphere I’ve encountered thus far…This book is so well-done that I would recommend it as the best single-volume guide to the hobby of observational astronomy that is available.”
– Max E. Loudenback

“Not only will you get to observe the astronomical wonders, you’ll learn your way around the night sky AND develop the skills to find ANYTHING. An excellent reference for beginners through intermediate astronomers interested in finding all those faint fuzzys.”
– S. Lyon

You can check out more reviews here…I’m off to take a second look at that book!

As User Group liaison for O’Reilly, I come into contact with all types of tech book reviewers and O’Reilly fans. Part of my job is to find readers who are willing to take that next step and review our books, not an easy task since it can quickly become a second or third job.

Recently, I received the following note of thanks from one of our regular reviewers, Frank, that was truly inspirational:

Two quick things. First, if you need reviewers for the following, send them along. You’ll note a new flavor in the request and that’ll be explained in the second thing. :)

Security Power Tools, Linux Network Cookbook, Network Assessment

The second thing is a hearty THANK YOU! I lost my job a couple of weeks ago. They blamed it on the shift in the industry. My perceptions are a little different, but since they’re providing a decent severance package I’m not complaining. What makes it funny is that my wife had the car and was a few hours away, so I couldn’t leave immediately. So I went back to my desk and started handing off projects and coordinating the transition. I also spoke to a couple of friends and let them know; one of them spoke to another friend, who happened to have a contractor position open, and we talked for a bit. The upshot is that I left the building with the possibility of a job offer.

The “THANK YOU” is based on my ability to do well on the interview a few days later. The job involves server security and I was better able to answer questions after having read Chris Shiflett’s book Essential PHP Security which you sent me. :)

So I’m planning on bringing my budding PHP skills to the team and am also looking at learning as much server security as I can. The team is hiring me based on knowing me, which either speaks highly of me or lowly of their discernment. However, I’ve made it clear that I am not (yet) a security wizard. They’re okay with that, as long as I’m learning and working well with the team.

I asked Frank if I could share his email and he happily agreed and added the following story:

I really wasn’t surprised that being an O’Reilly volunteer book reviewer helped me get a new job. Why should I be? O’Reilly books have been helping me progress professionally for over a decade.

Dan Brodnitz, publisher of O’Reilly’s Digital Media titles and blogger (nom du web: Cecil Vortex), loves his iPhone. Indeed, he probably couldn’t function without it. But despite Dan’s technical savvy, he still needed some help learning all about his favorite gadget. So Dan turned to iPhone: The Missing Manual and sent us the important tips and tricks he gleaned.

“I’ve been enjoying my new iPhone and my new iPhone missing manual,” says Dan. “With the iPhone, you do have the hard-to-resist urge to just pick it up and use it. The problem with that approach is that you inevitably end up missing a few of the finer points along the way. The Missing Manual is perfect for filling in those embarrassing gaps in your I(phone).Q.”

“Here are a few tidbits I picked up from the book. Embarrassing that I didn’t know them? Probably. But it would have been much worse had I toughed it out on my own:”

• Every time spell-check kicked in I tried to click that X. Then on page 25 I learned that the idea was to just hit the space bar and let the word fill itself in. This one was a biggie, I’ll tell ya.

Join many major technical user groups and communities for the second New York Technical Community Holiday Party for a chance to connect with colleagues and share experiences with others. Space is limited so register soon for this free event.

Today’s Parade magazine focuses on how to have the smartest house on the block in a special pullout section, “Your Digital Home.” And Gordon Meyer, the author of O’Reilly’s “Smart Home Hacks” offers his DIY suggestions. In a story about digitally enhancing one’s residence–“Home Smart Home”–Meyer is quoted:

There’s a way to set up some pretty advanced systems using the existing wires in your home, says Gordon Meyer, author of “Smart Home Hacks.” It allows you to operate and remotely control things like lights, appliances and motion detectors. You can set up your coffee pot to kick on at a given time, and you can turn any light in the house on or off while lying in bed.

Check out the full story here.

Learn more about “Smart Home Hacks” here.

Here’s one last look at October’s Maker Faire Austin. According to the story’s producer, Sean Cunningham, the first-ever Texas DIY Faire was truly a feast for the senses:

When I was introduced to MAKE and CRAFT magazines, I found myself guffawing with nerdly delight page after page as I learned how to turn my bike into an iPod charger, how to convert bowls from Ikea into three dimensional stereo cabinets, and how to make a ghoulishly wicked skull-shaped cold cut sculpture for a Halloween party. Then … I saw the ad for Maker Faire. I reasoned that if the Faire tickled my geek side as much as the magazine, I was in for a treat. I was not let down.

Looking for that special book for the digital lifestyler or DIY-er on your holiday list? Well, check out this handy, geeky guide of new books that is sure to bring delighted smiles to the iPhone lovers, digital photogs, backyard astronomers, and Lego maniacs on your gift list. All these publications from O’Reilly Media answer questions, explore new
techniques, demystify digital gear, and inspire creativity.

Hey, Mr. Pogue-man, do you have an iPhone tune for me?
“iPhone: The Missing Manual” by David Pogue
O’Reilly, $19.99
Satisfy the cravings of every iPhoner on your list with this highly
readable resource by the gadget grand master himself, David Pogue. David,
New York Times tech columnist and Missing Manual series creator, shows you
everything you need to know to get the most out of your new Apple iPhone.
Full of humor, tips, tricks, and surprises.
Learn more.

Just like the crimson colored poinsettias popping up in grocery stores, the annual Best Of lists have begun to bloom. Amazon.com recently posted their Editors’ Picks for 2007. And we’re proud to announce that O’Reilly made the list in several categories this season.

In the Best Of Computer category the editors chose two of O’Reilly’s most intensely thoughtful titles. The provocative Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines by Steve Talbott claimed the ninth position. And Andy Oram’s beautiful Beautiful Code is the editors tenth selection.

And Amazon’s editors cast their votes in not one but two business categories: Business and Business Narrative. The Myths of Innovation won the fourth spot in Business Narrative. The Art of Project Management claimed the fourth spot in Business.

No gathering of Oracle masterminds would be complete without PL/SQL expert Steven Feuerstein. You’ll find him at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week. If you missed his talks on breaking your addiction to SQL or test-driven development in the world of Oracle PL/SQL, there’s still a chance that you can catch him at the Quest Software booth, #1414 Moscone South.

But if San Francisco’s not on your agenda this week, all is not lost. Steven covers these topics and more new book, Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices, Second Edition. Here are some insights he shared with us on the topic:

Making Things Talk is the perfect Christmas present for a geek…at least according to Geekanoids. They recently posted a video-blog reviewing the book and had some great things to say about it.

Check out the review here:

Author Juval Lowy (Programming WCF Services) presents “Demonstrating WCF–Beyond the Endpoints” in this live video meeting with the St. Louis C# User Group tonight at 6pm CST.

Author Jesse Liberty (Learning ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX) talks about Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 at TechEd in Europe.

For the last year, O’Reilly Digital Media Publisher Dan Brodnitz (nom du web: Cecil Vortex) has chatted with songwriters, poets, novelists, and painters as well as a screenwriter, a web designer, a standup comic, a toy inventor, a columnist, a cartoonist, a comic book writer, a choreographer, and a clown, all as part of a series of interviews he’s producing called “Conversations about Creativity.”

The goal of the project is to create a library of interviews with a wide variety of artists, all focused on the way they approach the creative process and the practical habits and techniques they rely on to tap their muse and get creative work done.

Some of the people who’ve participated include Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), Ze Frank, Jonathan Coulton, Kim Addonizio, Van Dyke Parks, John August, Jon Carroll, and Dan Piraro. The latest interview, just posted, is a two-part conversation with musician Dan Wilson (Trip Shakespeare, Semisonic), who shared the 2007 Grammy for Song of the Year with the Dixie Chicks (”Not Ready to Make Nice.”)

photo credit: James Minchin

You can find this ongoing series up at www.about-creativity.com.

O’Reilly’s publishing partner Pragmatic Programming recently featured author Michael Nygard on their website. Two different podcasts touch on aspects of his book Release It!, published earlier this year.

In Release It!, Nygard shows how to design and architect applications for the harsh realities they will face. You’ll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.

His first podcast focuses on how to use stability and capacity design patterns to avoid expensive, public disasters, and his second addresses how to approach configuration and deployment the right way. The second podcast also features a short reading from his book.

Check out the podcasts here:
Michael Nygard Interview: Are you sure you thought of everything?
Michael Nygard Interview, Part Two: And then it crashed…

Visit our catalog page for more information about the book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0978739213/

aka… the book that explains the ins-and-outs of astronomy to those of us who aren’t huge science buffs (like me!)

This new book from Make, Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, covers everything from Deep-Space Object (DSO) observations to what equipment is necessary for observing to an indepth and fully illustrated guide to constellations, nebulas, clusters, and galaxies.

The book is already gaining interest in astronomy user groups, science DIY gurus, and stargazers in general. Make’s webmaster Terrie Miller posted about the book on her blog Citizen Science Projects:

It reminds me in many ways of the beloved Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, but this is a fresh, modern guide to the most interesting observable objects outside of our solar system. The authors consolidated several sky object lists into a grand collection of almost 400 objects, each one including a detailed description, finding directions, a finder chart, and a photograph. It’s a marvelous synthesis of information and data, and it includes very useful introductory chapters on observing practices and equipment…

…One thing I especially like about this book is that it’s quite useful for binocular observers. It’s a good resource for citizen scientists who are, for instance, interested in variable star research but lack the ability or inclination to buy a telescope.

Check out the rest of her blogpost here: http://citizensci.com/?p=75

For more information, check out our press release about the book or visit the catalog page.

“For me, there’s a lot to love about Mac OS X Leopard,” says Chuck Toporek, author of O’Reilly’s newest release, Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide.

“The two big features that I can’t live without now are Time Machine and Spaces. With Time Machine, there’s no reason not to back up the Macs in my home office. It’s automatic, and best of all it’s transparent after you get through the initial backup.”

As for Spaces, “it is–without a doubt–the best feature in Leopard! I do all of my writing on a MacBook, so there’s not much screen there to work with. But with Spaces, I can have up to 16 virtual screens to work with, and I can configure it to have applications open in a specific Space. For example, I have Word in Space 1, Firefox in Space 2, iChat and AdiumX running in Space 3, Terminal in Space 4, and so on,” adds Toporek.

Learn more about this handy, up-to-the-nanosecond guide here.

Yesterday, digital media leader and O’Reilly author Dan Gillmor was announced as the founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreuneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Gillmor is well-known in the digital media revolution, having worked in the area of grass-roots journalism as well as print journalism, writing various columns and blogs that are widely read. As founder of Grassroots Media, Inc., Gillmor has been heavily involved in the development of Bayosphere.com, a site “of, by and for the Bay Area.” Gillmor also authored O’Reilly’s We the Media in 2006, a book hugely popular among bloggers and journalists alike.

Gillmor is excited about this new opportunity as well as the opening of the Knight Center for many reasons. As he explains,

Journalism education is still adapting to the new, media-saturated world the students live in. I’m determined that this new center will be one of the ways we help move the field ahead. The principles of journalism remain, but some of the techniques and business practices will need to evolve quickly if we’re to have excellent journalism in this new world.

Currently the director of the Center for Citizen Media, Gillmor will start the new year as the director of the Knight Center and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Read more about the new Knight Center here.

Bre shows off a High Speed Photography Hack in this video on the new PBS show WIRED Science.

For more classic MAKE projects check out their new book The Best of MAKE.

BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy discusses the distinctions between the two booming social networks:

Into the wee hours of the morning on Oct. 18, News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace treated Silicon Valley’s elite to a very L.A.-style party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thumping deejay beats, swirling lights, barely clad blonde models, and an open bar greeted Bay Area bloggers, geeks, venture capitalists, and the wunderkinder running successful Web 2.0 startups.

The message was clear: MySpace is on the move northward. Beverly Hills-based MySpace, the world’s biggest social network, is opening a Silicon Valley office and plans to hire hundreds of Valley engineers, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe had said earlier at a conference. What’s more, Murdoch and DeWolfe said they’ll make it easier for software developers everywhere to create applications for MySpace, a move made to much acclaim by rival Facebook in May.

Those were among the few nuggets of news emanating from O’Reilly Media’s annual Web 2.0 Summit, which also featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said as little as possible about reports he’s lining up financing that could value his company at upwards of $10 billion (BusinessWeek.com, 10/17/07).

Read the entire story here.

Although quite a tome, a recent release from O’Reilly has garnered quite a bit of praise: Fonts & Encodings seems to cover everything about fonts there is to know! According to Dan McKinnon, a faithful Amazon reviewer, this book covers every topic possible.

Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous is about as complete a book as you will find on any computer topic, bar none. Rarely are expectations exceeded when it comes to anything in life, but this book goes way way way beyond what any other fonts/encodings book has done in the past. Packing 1000+ pages of content into this text, the author discusses all the relevant topics as hand, from history to font creation and specification to math involved in creating these typefaces we use every day… truly to infinity and beyond!

If you are a developer or user of fonts and want to learn more about the history of how difficult and non-trivial even the most basic characters were to get on your browser window, this book is for you. If you need this pertinent information and are in the business of creating fonts yourself, this book is for you. If you are just interested in the topic of one of the most basic computer technologies, this book is (you guessed it) for you!

With 14 chapters and 6 appendices, this book truly puts the U in Unicode and is a must read for anyone that wants to learn more about this exciting topic! *****Highly Recommended

Check out other reviews of this great book on our catalog page: www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102425