O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference Underway

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O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference Underway

by Tara McGoldrick Walsh
Network Newsletter for 10/29/2003

Dear Reader,

O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference is underway in Santa Clara, California. If you weren't able to make it to the show, you can find all the up-to-the-minute conference coverage, including the latest photos from the show floor, weblogs, the conference wiki, and reports on the various keynotes, here.

One keynote that received a standing ovation was that given by Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the force behind Virginia Tech's newly built G5 Supercomputer. Dr. Varadarajan reveals the details behind what it took to build the Supercomputer. Find out why he says you can expect to see a lot more G5 clusters in the future, in Daniel Steinberg's report: Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher.

Until next time,

Tara A. McGoldrick
Web Editor

Featured Articles

Mac OS X Conference Coverage

Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher
After encountering roadblocks from Dell and IBM, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan went to Apple, and 24 hours later, had a commitment to deliver--within two months--the G5's he'd need to build a Supercomputer. At this week's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, Dr. Varadarajan reveals the details behind what it took to build Virginia Tech's G5 Supercomputer. Find out why he says you can expect to see a lot more G5 clusters in the future.

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The Impact of Site Finder on Web Services
VeriSign's recently Site Finder service, now temporarily suspended, caused many problems for internet users and web applications. Particularly at risk from the Site Finder changes are web services applications. This article examines the difficulties caused by Site Finder, and what users and developers of web services can do about it.

What Is Being Unveiled at the PDC this Year?
This week, Microsoft is holding their periodic developer conference, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Much like most PDCs, this event is a time to unveil their new plans for software across their developer products. Hopefully, this article will help you associate the codenames with the content. In the coming weeks, you will hear, from every media outlet, these codenames being bandied about. Shawn Wildermuth gives you an overview of the codenames and their meanings to you, the working developer.

Enabling BSS Master Mode on Hermes-Based Radios
Rob Flickenger is back with yet another excerpt from his latest book, the recently released Wireless Hacks. This week, Rob shows you what you'll need to do to operate a Hermes-based radio card-- the kind found in the original AirPort AP--as BSS master.

Animation in SDL: OpenGL
SDL, the cross-platform multimedia toolkit, is powerful enough to have brought over 40 commercial games to Linux. While it has its own graphics primitives, it also supports the popular and powerful OpenGL API. In the third of a series of articles, Bob Pendleton introduces OpenGL and demonstrates how to use it in your SDL programs.

Fail-Safe Amazon Images
Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow anyone with some coding skills to create applications using Amazon's data, including its images. But relying on someone else's data on someone else's servers introduces some challenges. Paul Bausch, author of Amazon Hacks, shows you how to properly display Amazon product images in a dependent, distributed application.

Analyze Your Classes
Java reflection allows you to discover your code's abilities, but what about changing the code? Vikram Goyal introduces the Byte Code Engineering Library, which opens up classes for low-level changes from code.

Using Embedded XML Databases to Process Large Documents
What do you do when you want the convenience of DOM programming, but your document size is more suited to using SAX? This handy tip shows that an embedded XML database can be just the ticket for processing such documents.

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Ten Things I Dig About Xcode
Following in the footsteps of "Ten Things I Dig About Panther," James Duncan Davidson further explores one of the facets near and dear to Mac developers--their application development environment. Apple is introducing Xcode, along with Panther, and Davidson takes it for a spin and reports on his initial findings.
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.
Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X
With OS X's Unix foundations came the promise of access to thousands of Unix applications for Mac users. But if those applications are hard to install, configure and use, everyone loses. Mark Roseman describes some of the most common obstacles to deploying Unix software on Mac OS X -- and how to overcome them.
Ten Things I Dig About Panther
Now that the release of Panther is officially announced, it's time to take a close look at its key features. O'Reilly author James Duncan Davidson shows you the aspects of Panther that he really digs.
Developing with Maven
By knowing what developers want in a build tool, Maven hopes to unseat Ant as the favorite build tool of Java developers. Rob Herbst looks at Maven's most compelling features.