Our office is buzzing with excitement as people pack up and head out to Maker Faire Austin. It's a weekend packed with adventure and surprises -- until you've experienced it you can't describe it -- and even then sometimes it's hard! From crafts to fire to demos and robots, there's something for everyone

You may be surprised! The advent of digital photography has revolutionized the practice of night photography because a digital sensor can record the spectacular colors of the night. These colors are created by light waves in spectrums that are invisible to the naked human eye. For the first time we can truly "see" the world of the night around us. In a live webcast on Friday, Oct. 17, Harold Davis, author of Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, will show why night photography has become increasingly popular among digital photographers...

Dr. Gary Rost Bradski and Adrian Kaehler, the creators of OpenCV, have put their knowledge into a new book for O'Reilly. With Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library developers and hobbyists can learn how to build simple or sophisticated vision applications. Over the last week Gary--a consulting professor at Stanford, senior scientist at Willow Garage, a robotics institute research institute/incubator, and vision team leader for Stanley, the Stanford robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous race across the desert--shared his Top Tips and Tricks for getting the most out of OpenCV. Read on for Gary's last tip, Tip #10: Contributing to OpenCV's Future.

"Nothing I've ever written has ever prompted a reaction like last week's e-column. In six days, over 1,150 of you added comments to the online version at nytimes.com/pogue." So writes David Pogue, in his e-column today. "The column was the...

Starting at Refresh Detroit earlier this month, author Joey Lott is on a cross country tour visiting as many user groups as he can. Stops include AS3 Apex (10/4) in St. Louis, Cleveland Flex User's Group (10/9), Central PA Adobe...

There's been rapid change in the iPhone development world, leaving many would-be iPhone app developers wondering where they stand. In this free, one-hour live webcast, Bill Dudney and Raven Zachary, co-chairs of O'Reilly's upcoming iPhoneLive Conference on November 18 in San Jose, share a preview of the presentations they'll give at the conference. Following this preview, you'll have plenty of time to ask questions about the current state and future of iPhone application development—and how it affects you...

One of the challenges in technical book publishing is finding ways to reach audiences beyond our core computer programming crowd. O'Reilly's publishing partner No Starch Press has recently implemented one such idea. Their newest series of books are Manga Guides, based on Japanese best sellers. These books will cover essential scientific and technical subjects like statistics, physics, molecular biology, calculus, electricity, and relativity in fun and entertaining ways, while still teaching the core principals of each topic.

The first American Magazine Vanguard Awards recognizes magazines that are innovating, extending their brands, and finding new exciting ways to connect with their customers. And O'Reilly Media's Make snared an AMVA award because of the creation of Maker Faire, which celebrates DIYers and crafters of every persuasion. "Considering that some of the greatest leaps forward in American technological history have been scrappy homebrews (Apple Computer was a literal garage start-up), it's really kind of exciting to think that, given its explosive growth, the Maker Faire might well help along an invention or two that's truly important," writes Simon Dumenco. Read on to find out more about Maker Faire Austin, which opens Oct. 18.

Is Subversion the right tool? "If you need to archive old versions of files and directories, possibly resurrect them, or examine logs of how they've changed over time, then Subversion is exactly the right tool for you." So write the authors of O'Reilly's Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Ed.--C. Michael Pilato, Ben Collins-Sussman, and Brian Fitzpatrick. And here, these members of the Subversion development team give you their top tips for avoiding the pesky network round-trip, safely moving files and directories with wild abandon, teaching your Subversion client to add certain properties to your files automatically, and more. Check them out.

The author of Learning Flex 3, Alaric Cole, has been working with Flash technologies since the introduction of ActionScript. But once Flex burst on the scene, he started focusing of Flex development. Recently Alaric put together a list of the top 10 things he thinks everyone should know about Flex. So whether you're considering using Flex for your personal site or business, read on to find out what Alaric thinks you should know.