Blogs
Web 2.0 Expo CFP Extended One-Day; Now Closes 10/9
By Brady ForrestOctober 8, 2008
Because of the emails, IMs, and phone calls asking about late submissions to Web 2.0 Expo SF we've decided to leave the CFP open an extra day. So if you wish to speak you'll be glad to know that the CFP for Web 2.0 Expo SF will be open until October 9th. We use this Call For Participation to...
eInk...
By Nick BiltonOctober 8, 2008
Guest blogger Nick Bilton is with the New York Times R&D Lab during the day and NYC Resistor at night. Working in the R&D Labs at The New York Times, I'm constantly asked, "How long will paper be around?" or more to the point, "When will paper really die?" It's a valid concern, and a question no one can answer...
The (possible) rise of 4th-party developers and 3rd-party jumpers
By Dominique JamesOctober 8, 2008
By now, almost everyone who has an iPhone and who have downloaded apps from the App Store, will most likely know what 3rd-party software means, and by natural extension, who the 3rd-party software developers are. And everyone also most likely...
Becoming a Sexy Programmer: Clean Forms
By Eric BerryOctober 8, 2008
Learn how easy it is to stylize a form with CSS versus using table tags.
Effect of the Depression on Technology
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 7, 2008
Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance on China for material goods unreciprocated by a reliance from China on American goods; and this adds up to difficult times...
A Star is Born? NY Times syndicates outside blogs but that's not enough
By Joshua-Michéle RossOctober 7, 2008
Recently the New York Times announced that it will be syndicating content from three well-known blogs, Read/Write Web, Giga Om and Venture Beat. The New York Times is using these blogs as an extra-sensory organ; they can dial into what is happening in the tech sector (and particularly the West Coast with this trio) without allocating a lot of internal...
Mobile Advertising: You're Doing It Wrong
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 7, 2008
Don't miss this great post by Chris Heathcote deconstructing Google's first steps into map advertising on the web and mobile map apps. There's still some usability and use-case work to be done, but it's interesting to see their initial take. As many people have predicted, text ads are difficult to make work on the mobile screen; in Chris's words, "On...
Behind the Scenes of the Digital Media Weekly Report
By Derrick StoryOctober 7, 2008
A few weeks ago, my General Manger, Dan Brodnitz, asked me to create a new feature for our Digital Media site. He showed me a sample video of an online editor chatting about recent topics his site was covering. Dan wanted something like that for O'Reilly Digital Media. "But," he said, "I don't want you to spend a lot of...
A Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes
By Jochen WoltersOctober 7, 2008
Whether it's List view, Grid view, or Cover Flow -- finally, with iTunes 8, album cover art is available in whichever view you look at your digital music collection. High time to fill the remaining cover art gaps in your library, if you haven't done so yet. There are numerous software tools available to help you with this task, and this blog post will present three rather different, yet equally noteworthy representatives of that software genre.
Amazon Launches UK POD Service; Partner Unknown
By Mac SlocumOctober 7, 2008
TheBookseller says Amazon is launching a print-on-demand service in the United Kingdom: Amazon.com owns POD publisher BookSurge in the US, but the UK business has not divulged who will be...
[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
By Mac SlocumOctober 7, 2008
20 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including: Sonibyte Astak Turnhere.com Lexcycle Zapptek Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings...
Maker Faire Earns a Coveted American Magazine Vanguard Award
By Sara PeytonOctober 7, 2008
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.
How many mavericks does it take to change a lyspære?
By Rick JelliffeOctober 7, 2008
Thirteen members of the Norwegian standards body's technical committee walked out recently... If we take these 13, and subtract people who either work for competitors of Microsoft or affiliated with the NUUG/FOSS industry/community, we get...1 person (the esteemed Steve Pepper) by my count...
vCloud: VMware adapts to cloud computing
By Andy OramOctober 7, 2008
Virtualization has been the hottest trend in computer administration for the past decade. But what happens to any administrative software provider, including VMware, if large numbers of major companies move to the cloud? The recent vCloud announcement, coinciding with VMWorld conference, shows why VMware manages to keep its top place.
Yum Plugins - security
By Mike McGrathOctober 7, 2008
I'm the type of admin that gets into a tool and as long as it keeps doing what I use it for, I don't often bother to learn much more about it. Yum is a good example of this. Since...
Numbers for Digital's Rise
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 6, 2008
I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from bits to atoms, so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to songwriters: Digital...
The Confusion Between Content and Containers
By Mac SlocumOctober 6, 2008
The digital realm allows content and containers to exist separately, but their old bond is still tough to break
Share Your Success Story (or Lessons Learned from Failure) at TOC 2009
By Andrew SavikasOctober 6, 2008
One of the ongoing goals for the TOC Conference is to encourage the sharing of success stories and of the lessons learned from failed experiments and initiatives. For 2009, we're...
System Crash on Wall Street
By Kurt CagleOctober 6, 2008
The credit markets are seizing up, Congress-critters are trying to make the case for spending billions in a "rescue" package, the stock market gyrations are giving people whiplash, banks are popping like sulfur-filled bubbles and companies are suddenly having to make some hard decision about payroll at a time even when they have more than enough work. The end of the world as we know it seems to have come about all at once, and even as people are scrambling to protect themselves, not a few people are wondering just how everything went bad so quickly.
New Sony E-Reader Has Touchscreen, No Web Connection
By Mac SlocumOctober 3, 2008
Web connectivity has always been the key difference between the Kindle and Sony's Reader. With Sony's release of its third-generation e-reader, Web connectivity is still the big separator. The PRS-700...
Do Publisher Brands Still Have Relevance?
By Peter BrantleyOctober 3, 2008
Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days?...
Why Was the NDA Only Dropped for Developers Who Have Shipped?
By Dave AielloOctober 3, 2008
It's great that Apple has dropped the NDA for developers who have shipped iPhone software. My question is, why continue to restrict developers who haven't yet shipped their iPhone apps? Let's say that you decided to invest time and effort...
Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 3
By Erica SadunOctober 3, 2008
Over the last two weeks, I've shown you how to create a socket to listen for web requests and how to produce an artificial index.html file that advertises the files you're willing to serve from your iPhone. Today, I'll wrap things up by adding error pages and the actual file server.
A proposal for SDK-compliant copy & paste
By Erica SadunOctober 3, 2008
This morning, I had one of my d'oh moments: finally figuring out exactly how to do inter-app copy and paste without breaking SDK rules. It basically goes like this, in a similar fashion to the Core Location service I wrote about a few months ago:
And I Approve This Application
By Chris JosephesOctober 3, 2008
If I had to describe my political leanings to a stranger, I'd say I'm a middle of the road guy. There may be one or two issues out there where I take a firm stance, but it's nothing earth shattering....
Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview with Lane Becker
By Joshua-Michéle RossOctober 2, 2008
The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong. Lane (co-founder of...
DonorsChoose Giving Campaign Technology & Learning
By Brady ForrestOctober 2, 2008
DonorsChoose is having their annual Blogger Challenge. O'Reilly's blog network hat is in the Technology Blog category along with Fred Wilson, AllThingsD, BoingBoing and Techcrunch. Let's see whose readers will bring more donations in. Donate here. I personally just donated to help a kindergarten class get WiFi. We've selected other technology-oriented requests for us to assist. Join me in...
Business Tips for Creative People
By David BattinoOctober 2, 2008
Lots of beautiful noise in the LinnDrum as well.... Drum machine inventor Roger Linn once told me, "A creative mind is a loud mind. It has lots of thoughts popping up in different directions." For creative people, focusing can be difficult. That's why I was intrigued by Michael W. Dean's recent essay, called simply "Professionalism." It's an outtake from his...
Ebook Advocate David Rothman Recovering from Heart Attack
By Andrew SavikasOctober 2, 2008
Last night word came via Jon Noring that David Rothman of the TeleRead blog suffered a heart attack last week, and is now recovering from quadruple bypass surgery. Our...
Goodbye NDA
By Erica SadunOctober 2, 2008
Goodbye NDA and welcome to the age of open collaboration. Yay.
Be Subversive--10 Subversion Tips to Control Your Code
By Sara PeytonOctober 2, 2008
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 Future of XForms
By Philip FennellOctober 2, 2008
Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...
Document Design Matters
By Erik WildeOctober 2, 2008
The classical approach to the data aspect of system design distinguishes conceptual, logical, and physical models. Models of each type or level are governed by metamodels that specify the kinds of concepts and constraints that can be used by each model; in most cases metamodels are accompanied by languages for describing models.
Getting Web 2.0 right: The hard stuff vs. the harder stuff
By Joshua-Michéle RossOctober 1, 2008
I had a powerful conversation recently in Europe with one of the top executives of a major industrial company. They have 100K+ employees in over 50 countries. When he joined five years ago their business was struggling and in need of major transformation; their stock was at two dollars a share, they had ethics issues and product quality problems -...
Tele Atlas Customers Get Tomtom Data; Let the Crowdsourcing Begin
By Brady ForrestOctober 1, 2008
Tele Atlas is going to start selling Tomtom speed profile data. This is the first sign of the acquisition having an impact on customers and potentially the geo-data market. The speed profile data is quite impressive, as described in a press release: The speed profiles database is derived from almost half a trillion speed measurements that TomTom customers in...
OSCON moves to San Jose
By Allison RandalOctober 1, 2008
The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also...
Apple Drops iPhone NDA
By Brady ForrestOctober 1, 2008
Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message. We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put...
My iPhone feels Orange
By FJ de KermadecOctober 1, 2008
When in France, do as Orange does. For the past few weeks, iPhone 3G users in France have suffered intermittent voicemail glitches, often in the form of erroneous outgoing messages. As time goes on, it appears the light at the end of the tunnel is, as my computer would have said a few years ago, the headlamp of a fast...
OpenOffice.org 3 Release Candidate 3: No X11 Needed
By Todd OgasawaraOctober 1, 2008
OpenOffice.org 3 Release Candidate 3 is available. So, I revisited OOo to see how it looks today (I commented on its Beta release back in May).
Balancing the Benefits and Costs of XML for Book Production
By Andrew SavikasOctober 1, 2008
O'Reilly engineer and XML guru Keith Fahlgren kicked off a lively conversation on an internal mailing list this week by asking whether (and how much) we're "eating our own dogfood"...
Getting Some Perspective on Cloud Computing
By Mac SlocumOctober 1, 2008
Wholesale dismissal of the cloud is just as detrimental as wholesale commitment.
TOC Recommended Reading
By Mac SlocumOctober 1, 2008
The Live Web (Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog) The Web isn't just real estate. It's a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and...
Apple Drops iPhone SDK NDA
By Oliver BreidenbachOctober 1, 2008
Victory!?...
iPhoneLive - made better without the NDA
By Bill DudneyOctober 1, 2008
While the program at iPhoneLive was already really exciting with all the great speakers and content we had lined up. Now the the NDA has been lifted all the speakers are going to be able to share more detail...
Down Goes The NDA
By Paul KafasisOctober 1, 2008
Back in July, I had a post titled &*%#ing NDA wherein I discussed the problems of the NDA surrounding development for the iPhone. To wit, an NDA surrounding the iPhone SDK makes it difficult for developers to communicate, share code,...
How much do you love your technology?
By Kathryn BarrettOctober 1, 2008
Enough to wear it on your body? Leif Madsen, one of the authors of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony sports the animal from the cover of his book on the back of his leg. Now, that's commitment! Read more.
Gary Bradski's Top Ten Tips for Getting the Most Out of OpenCV--1 of 10
By Sara PeytonOctober 1, 2008
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 next few days 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--shares his Top Ten Tips and Tricks for getting the most out of OpenCV. Read more.
Alaric Cole's Top 10 Things We Should Know about Flex
By Sara PeytonOctober 1, 2008
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.
Metaphorical Web and XRX
By Kurt CagleOctober 1, 2008
Contrary to popular opinion, anger is not in fact all that good for a writer - you write, but what you write usually falls into the kind of political diatribes favored by more radical members of fringe parties.
ECWin2k8?
By M. David PetersonOctober 1, 2008
In a surprise announcement just a few moments ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services lead technical evangelist announced they would now be supporting Windows on EC2. This is a /HUGE/ deal, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft is rumored to be preparing a competitor to EC2, something they will supposedly be announcing at the PDC in November.
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