Conversations

Dear Readers,

Publishing can sometimes seem like working in a vacuum. Programmers are coming up with new ideas, system administrators are doing clever things with fewer resources, managers are making decisions based on business rules--and we comment on these from afar. Our audience is firmly in the trenches, but we have to take a longer view--just to see where the trenches are!

In a roundabout way, I'm saying that people are vital to our work here, especially on the O'Reilly Network. Who's smart? What's interesting? What's right, and what should we improve? There are a lot of smart people here, but within the O'Reilly community, there are lots more.

We're working on several ways to improve the lines of communication between authors, editors, and readers. Increased Talkbacks in articles and weblogs are one, improved Forums are another. Things are starting to appear.

You're a tremendous community--and we'd like to continue to participate in your conversations.

Until next week,

chromatic

Derrick Story
O'Reilly Network Technical Editor
chromatic@oreilly.com

Featured Articles

Bioinformatics Technology Conference Coverage

Network Impact of the MS SQL Worm
A Bioinformatics Web Service with Mac OS X Brian Gilman demonstrates how to use Objective-C and Mac OS X's Core Web Services to construct an OmniGene Analysis Engine client.

Oracle in a Nutshell: Concise, Complete, and Consistent
Rick Greenwald, coauthor of Oracle in a Nutshell, talks about what went into writing this Oracle opus, including how they determined what information to pull from the 13,000 pages of documentation to "provide users with 80 percent of the useful information in 20 percent of the space."

Using the CodeDOM
One of the promises of .NET is that the language used is secondary to the framework. The classes in the CodeDom namespace really drive this point home. Using CodeDom, we build a tree, or graph, populated with objects from the System.CodeDom namespace, and after the tree is populated, we use the CodeProvider object provided by every .NET language to convert the tree into code in that language. This makes switching languages as simple as switching the CodeProvider used at the end. In this article, Nick Harrison shows you the ins and outs of using the CodeDOM.

FreeSCI: Rebuilding Sierra's Classic Quests
Few publishers were as important to adventure games as the venerable Sierra On-Line. Their King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry series paved the way for other fine installments. Though Sierra has moved on, their games live on through the FreeSCI project. Howard Wen explores how FreeSCI lets you play your favorite old games -- and, just maybe, create new ones.

Introduction to PyObjC
The PyObjC bridge between Python and Objective-C creates a powerful new environment. For Obj-C developers, access to Python provides efficient app development. For Python developers, transparent access to Obj-C allows the developer's scripts to leverage the full power and elegance of Mac OS X. In this article, Bill Bumgarner shows you how to bring these worlds together.

A Closer Look at the Palm Tungsten
Palm's high-end pro PDA has a new processor and uses OS version 5, not to mention it features built-in Bluetooth. But there's more to the Tungsten T than initially meets the eye, and Wei Meng Lee provides you with a closer look.

Securing Systems with chroot
Recently, support was added to the NetBSD Operating System to run the Network Time Protocol Daemon (ntpd) under an unprivileged user ID in a chroot jail. In the first of two articles, Emmanuel Dreyfus explains buffer overflows -- a typical Unix security flaw, then explains a chroot jail and the motivation for running a program in it.

EJB Inheritance, Part 4
This series has demonstrated all sorts of ways to handle inheritance in beans. With web and message services, though, how do you handle inheritance with remotely-invoked beans? The EJB 2.0 specification allows it; Emmanuel Proulx demonstrates how.

XML Forms, Web Services and Apache Cocoon
Server side business logic is often invariant with respect to the client device. Ivelin Ivanov shows how the Cocoon XMLForm framework addresses the concern of separating the purpose from the presentation of a form, maximizing its reusability for a variety of client devices.

O'Reilly Network Top Five Articles Last Week

1. Network Impact of the MS SQL Worm
   Iljitsch van Beijnum, the author of BGP and a network manager, describes how he dealt with the MS SQL worm attack.

2. Introduction to PyObjC
   The PyObjC bridge between Python and Objective-C creates a powerful new environment. For Obj-C developers, access to Python provides efficient app development. For Python developers, transparent access to Obj-C allows the developer's scripts to leverage the full power and elegance of Mac OS X. In this article, Bill Bumgarner shows you how to bring these worlds together.

3. Opening Microsoft File Formats to Java
   Microsoft's file formats were once black arts to developers on non-sanctioned platforms. Thanks to Jakarta POI, however, it's possible to read and write them from Java. Apache's Andrew C. Oliver and Avik Sengupta explain the basics of the project in the first of a series of three articles.

4. Top Ten Digital Photography Tips
   You have a digital camera and have recorded the typical shots of family and friends. Now what? Here are ten tips to make your next batch of digital images so impressive that people will ask: "Hey, what type of camera do you have?" Guess what? It's not the camera.

5. Software Strategies for Emerging Developers
   When considering what type of software you want to bring to the market, which appeals to you: proprietary, shareware, open source, or freeware? Ruffnex, the creator of StreamRipper X, puts some cards on the table for you to consider how to play your hand.

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