Wednesday, May 30, 2007

 

Windows DevCenter Newsletter

The Windows DevCenter Newsletter
---------------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.windowsdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Sponsored by Rackspace Managed Hosting

Rackspace delivers fully managed Windows and Linux hosting
solutions, a Zero-Downtime Network™ and 24x7x365 Fanatical
Support™ starting at $383 per month.

Get our Advanced Monitoring and Reporting Bundle for
$10/Month in May. View promo:

http://www.oreilly.com/go/rkspc_win

==================================================================

Microsoft Surface: Not Coming to a Home Near You

Much of the criticism of the new Microsoft Surface computing table is
misguided, for one simple reason: It's intended to be used in commercial
settings, not at home. For more details, read my blog:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/microsoft_surface_not_coming_t.html

A PC On Every Desktop? The Desktop *Is* The PC

M. David Peterson has his own thoughts about Microsoft Surface. Read what
his blog has to say--and see pics as well:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/a_pc_on_every_desktop_th.html

Freeware/Open Source for Windows Weekly Summary

Todd Ogasawara is back with his weekly roundup of the best of Windows
freebies. Among his winners this week, free antivirus software for Windows
Vista:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/freewareopen_source_for_window_26.html

Using the Cryptography APIs in .NET

The .NET framework contains a number of cryptography services that allow
you to incorporate security services into your .NET applications. In this
article, Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to use some of the common security
APIs to make your .NET applications more secure:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/22/using-the-cryptography-apis-in-net.html

Ignite Boston!

The first Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, May 31, from 6 to 10pm at
Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. From 6-7pm, mingle and
talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater
Boston area. Join a MAKE challenge team and participate in building
bridges (how much weight can your bridge–-made from less than 1K popsicle
sticks-–support?) After that, there will be a special keynote address from
author Scott Berkun ("The Myths of Innovation"; "The Art of Project
Management"). Then, on to guest speakers, who'll catch you up on the cool,
new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. During intermissions,
get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O'Reilly's own
editors. Join us Thursday, May 31, for a fun, energetic evening of
talking, learning, making, and collaborating:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog/

See you next week,

Preston Gralla, Editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
Early Registration Extended--Save $200!

Join us June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, California for the first
O'Reilly TOC Conference, and help shape the future of publishing.

Register now and Save $200.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc/

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Windows DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
---------------------------------------------------------------------


Tuesday, May 29, 2007

 

Haskell, Flex, and semaphores, oh my!

LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
----------------------------------------
The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

=================================================================

A happy Memorial Day Weekend to all of you living in the U.S.! Of course,
you won't be getting this until Tuesday, so it's more of a "I hope you had
a good Memorial Day Weekend," but time is relative, right?

Everyone, be sure to come to Ignite Boston this Thursday. It doesn't
matter if you live in Kyoto, I'm going to expect every one of you to
attend, and I'll be taking names. There Will Be Consequences!

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog/

If you're not in the states, but instead an inhabitant of the Continent,
you might want to check out the upcoming GNOME Users' And Developers'
European Conference.

http://guadec.org/

On to our roundup of the past seven days of fun and frolic on the OFOW.*

We begin with an introduction to functional programming, by way of the
Haskell programming language. If you've only had experience with
imperative programming languages (or if you don't even know what an
imperative programming language is), you owe it to yourself to check out
Adam Turoff's gentle guide.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/21/an-introduction-to-haskell---part-1-why-haskell.html

Flex is Adobe's answer to the platform-independent deployment environment
question. But although the client-side may be handled using Flex, the
backend still needs to be developed in a traditional environment. Jack
Herrington uses a fictional YouTube clone as a way to demonstrate how PHP
can serve as a server-side counterpart to Flex.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/05/24/creating-mytube-with-flex-and-php.html

Finally, you may have learned semaphores years ago, or may have managed to
go your entire career without ever having to use one. But even if you're a
semaphore pro, a good refresher can't hurt. Vikram Shukla has a pretty
comprehensive guide, including a comparison of POSIX and System V style
semaphores.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2007/05/24/semaphores-in-linux.html

Spencer Critchley led off the week in blogs with a pointer to a new book
that provides a lot of missing information for Drupal users:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_missing_drupal_manual_pro.html

Andy Oram looked at how Splunk is mashing up its data to help sysadmins.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/splunks_mashup_of_informations.html

How do you keep geeks in your organization? Nitesh Dhanjani had some
thoughts on the subject:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_string_theory_of_how_to_re.html

chromatic looks at coherence as an oft-overlooked feature of modern
DBMSi:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/one_oftenoverlooked_feature_of.html

Jeremy Jones continued his reporting on the rewriting of the podgrapher
utility.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/rewriting_podgrabber_part_2_1.html

Your humble narrator had some thoughts on Dell's move to offer
Linux-preinstalled systems.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/another_linux_milestone.html

Mr. Jones returned with a pointer to some pithy PyCon podcast (your
tongue-twister of the week)

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/python_podcasts.html

chromatic had two in a row, first mentioning that Microsoft is looking for
an open source guru, and then reviewing the CPAN Pod::POM::Web module.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/microsoft_wants_an_open_source.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/cpan_module_review_podpomweb.html

Over in DevCenter, Carla Schroder shared her experiences and frustrations
with getting Linux to print.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/more_fun_with_printing.html

Juliet Kemp discussed how to automount removable devices under Debian:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/automounting_removable_devices.html

And in the spirit of the three female Indy drivers this week, Caitlyn
Martin completed our all woman DevCenter blogfest with some information on
the Feisty Fawn release of Xubuntu.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/xubuntu_gets_feisty.html

In databaseland, Roland Bouman debunked a common myth about the GROUP_BY
clause:

http://www.oreillynet.com/databases/blog/2007/05/debunking_group_by_myths.html

Brian K. Jones shares his path to sysadminosity over in the SysAdmin
blogs:

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/05/how_did_you_become_an_admin.html

We end this week in the Ruby Blogs, where Daniel Berger laments the lack
of bind parameters in ActiveRecord:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/bind_parameters_now.html

And finally, Gregory Brown starts his Summer of Code reportage with a look
at RubyLand.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/gsoc_announcing_rubyland.html

Over at The Watering Hole, the melee is over, but Pearl is still in hot
water.

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/

Looking forward, always forward, never backward, we've got two articles
upcoming this week. Federico Biancuzzi has another in his series of BSD
interviews, this time looking at Rootkits. And Andrew Hanenkamp, tells us
about a single sign-on solution for Jifty called CAS+. And over in the
Watering Hole, things go from bad to worse for Pearl as she testifies
before Congress.

Until next time, remember that no matter where you go, there you are,
unless you're time-traveling, in which case there you were.

* Still the ONLamp Family of Web Sites...

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com

================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!
Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Linux DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Friday, May 25, 2007

 

Refreshed Unix Tips and Mac Development in the UK

THE MAC DEVCENTER NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.macdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Dear readers,

This week on Mac DevCenter Brian Jepson updates an "oldie but goodie"
article on Unix tips for OS X, Giles Turnbull interviews a group of
independent Mac developers in the UK, and our bloggers provide their
usual insightful and humorous coverage of the latest Mac news and events.

If you're going to be anywhere near Boston next Thursday evening,
you'll definitely want to check out our first Ignite Boston event.
Here's your chance to mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs,
alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. Scott Berkun
(author of "The Myths of Innovation" and "The Art of Project
Management") will give the keynote, followed by other interesting
speakers talking about the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in
technology today. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with
speakers, sponsors, and O'Reilly's own editors. Ignite Boston will be
held on Thursday, May 31, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard
Square, Cambridge, MA.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog

From starting up to shutting down, there are big differences between
Mac OS X and Unix machines. Brian Jepson, coauthor of "Mac OS X for
Unix Geeks" offers 10 tips he gathered while working on the book. If
you're a Unix geek moving to Mac OS X, these tips will help smooth
the way. We noticed that this five year-old article continues to get
a lot of attention, so we recently asked Brian Jepson to update the
sections that have become dated. Here's his update.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/22/macforunix.html

Giles Turnbull interviews a group of UK-based indie developers to ask
them a little about their lives, how they stay in touch with Apple,
and why international exchange rates make such a difference to them.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2007/05/24/indie-mac-development-in-the-uk.html

The Mac DevCenter blogs have covered a wide range of topics this
week. From the latest gadgets to Apple improving support for
developing on OS X in languages other than Objective-C with projects
like BridgeSupport, our crew of expert bloggers are discussing the
issues that matter to Mac developers. Drop by and let us know what you think.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog

Thanks for reading,

Bruce Stewart
Mac DevCenter Editor
bruce@oreilly.com

==================================================================

Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Mac DevCenter newsletter? Please email
us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
---------------------------------------------------------------------


 

ONJava Newsletter

O'REILLY NETWORK'S ONJava.com NEWSLETTER
--------------------------------------------------
The Independent Source for Enterprise Java

==================================================================
Hello again readers,

It has been a busy few weeks for conference attendance--first
JavaOne, then O'Reilly's RailsConf...and next week is the first
Ignite Boston conference. If you are into tech and anywhere near the
area, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Mike Hendrickson has a
blog entry on the conference and its contents:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog/


OnJava has a couple of new articles up since our last newsletter;
first, at JavaOne I had a chance to interview Bob Brewin, Sun's CTO.
We talked about the announcements of JavaFX Script, the new
streamlined "consumer" JVM, and some other neat stuff from JavaOne:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/05/10/an-interview-with-robert-brewin.html


Marcin Maciukiewicz and Daniel Owsianski contributed this article
about using the Lucene Query Parser without using all of Lucene; they
write an adapter to provide sophisticated search capabilities with an
existing database through Hibernate. If you have a legacy database
for which you need better search capability, this article is for you:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/05/24/using-the-lucene-query-parser-without-lucene.html


Over at Java.net, there is an interesting presentation by Geert Bevin
about continuations with RIFE and TerraCotta. Continuations are a
method of simplifying state management in web applications that are
used in frameworks like SeaSide. It is exciting to see their use in
the Java space:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/05/25/j1-2k7-mT03.html


Java.net is also featuring this article by Sangeetha S. and
Subrahmanya S. V. on the use of Annotations in the Java EE 5.0
platform. The use of annotations to represent concepts best
described by declarative programming really simplifies development
for the Java EE platform.

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/05/22/using-annotations-in-java-ee-5.html


Over at BEA's Dev2Dev is this article by Emmanuel Proulx introducing
the SIP API for Java ME. SIP is the standard connection protocol for
mobile carriers; if you want to learn to write connected Java apps
for the huge market of mobile devices, this intro should get you started.

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2007/05/sip-javame.html


Recent O'Reilly Network weblogs of interest to Java developers:

The UI wars just started - yet again! - Shashank Tiwari
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/the_ui_wars_just_started_yet_a.html

Sun: Finally Updating the BugParade, Looking for New Infrastructure - Tim O'Brien
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/sun_finally_updating_the_bugpa.html

JavaFX: Sun isn't sure about the license - Tim O'Brien
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/javafx_sun_isnt_sure_about_the.html

Maven 2 and Checkstyle - Gerald Nunn
http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/gnunn/archive/2007/05/maven_2_and_che.html

BEA's Virtualization Demo at JavaOne - Arvind Jain
http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/arvindjain/archive/2007/05/beas_virtualization_demo_at_ja_1.html

Check out more O'Reilly Network Java weblogs at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/

In the opening, I mentioned that I was just at RailsConf.... So why
would the editor of a Java newsletter be at a conference promoting a
web framework for another language? Rails is one of the most exciting
things I (as a Java developer) have seen in quite some time, and
the possibilities with JRuby make it a legitimate player in our
space. JRuby is going to be a major player in all of our futures.

If you are a Java developer, there are compelling reasons to learn
about Rails--if nothing else, you can rapidly prototype web
applications that you intend to write in the framework of your
choice. From an educational standpoint, it is interesting to see new
ideas and how they are influencing the evolution of Java frameworks.

If you are a Ruby/Rails developer, the ability to deploy your
application on the Java platform gives you features like real
threading support, internationalization and localization, and a huge
amount of library code to draw from. And the ability to deploy Rails
apps as a standard WAR file will open doors that Rails otherwise
couldn't get into.

The future of Java is the platform; give me my tried-and-true Java
syntax, give me another great syntax with Groovy, give me some
domain-specific languages (like Java FX Script for building rich apps), and
give me access to all the great stuff happening in languages like
Ruby and Python, and give me the ability to use it all together so I
can solve a problem with the tool that fits the best.

Many languages, many operating systems, common platform. What an
exciting future that will be.

Please join us again next week.

David Bock
Editor, ONJava.com

==================================================================

*** Java News and Weblogs ***

java.net Weblogs
http://weblogs.java.net

O'Reilly Network Java Weblogs
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/weblog_s?x-subject=3


Other Java News (channel -- LANG: JAVA)
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/index.php


Java Cookbook Recipe of the Day
http://www.onjava.com/onjava/javacook/solution.csp?day=1

Java Events
http://www.onjava.com/onjava/events

==================================================================

*** Other Related O'Reilly Network sites ***

O'Reilly Network
http://www.oreillynet.com

XML.com
http://xml.com

ONLamp.com
http://onlamp.com

O'Reilly Media
http://www.oreilly.com

O'Reilly Java
http://java.oreilly.com

***

ONJava.com Affiliates

Servlets.com
http://www.servlets.com

JDOM.org
http://www.jdom.org

------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the ONJava.com newsletter? Please email us
at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
------------------------------------------------------------------


 

Pirates Who Love Perls

Perl.com update
--------------------------------------
The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

===================================================================
Sponsored by ActiveState Perl Dev Kit

Perl Dev Kit - Easily build and deploy Perl apps

* Create and deploy executables to multiple platforms.
* Painlessly debug Perl scripts.
* Create sophisticated Perl-based filters.

Download your free trial now:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Perl_Dev_Kit/

===================================================================
Hello, readers of the Perl.com newsletter. Wait, don't skip to the next
unread message yet! There's perly goodness here.

Here's what's new this fortnight.

* Perl News

Parrot 0.4.12 escaped. This version has a pun in the title, a literary
quote in the release announcement, and is faster and uses less memory. If
you're not careful, you might have to port your favorite language to
Parrot this summer. (As of a few minutes ago, the development version of
Parrot is even faster still.)

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/24/1812230

OSCON 2007 registration is open:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/58/register.html

Gnat is particular pleased with the schedule:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/whats_new_with_1.html

Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33302
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33346

* Perl at O'Reilly

Perl has a history of copious and useful documentation--not just of core
modules, but of the best CPAN modules as well. Yet even the venerable
perldoc utility is not the only way to read, or browse, documentation.
The Pod::POM::Web module provides a different way to find information
about the modules you have installed. Here's how it works:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/cpan_module_review_podpomweb.html

Perl 5.10 is on its way, especially now that pumpking Rafael Garcia-Suarez
has returned from his honeymoon (congratulations!). Why is this release
important? Besides fixing plenty of bugs and including several
performance improvements, it has a wide list of new features. Adriano
Ferreira discusses good reasons to help get a shiny new Perl out the door:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/soon_a_perl_with_new_switches_1.html

...but Adriano is not content to let Perl 5 get all the attention. Recent
(and recurring) debates over readability and maintainability made their
way to the Perl 6 language mailing list. The focus was, get this, on the
use of semicolons:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/why_insisting_on_semicolons.html

Your editor jumped into the fray as well, only to rephrase his favorite
law of maintainable programming: don't hire monkeys. This time, he
wonders if certain programming languages force people to write bad code:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/does_your_programming_language.html

...and then poked the "I writed a DSL!!" kids with a stick:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_is_it_a_dsl_or_an_api_ten.html

* Other Interesting Tidbits

Jimmy Gutterman asks if you work better when you work for free:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/do_you_work_bet.html

Tim O'Reilly announced a Real World Haskell book:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/real_world_hask.html

Mike Hendrickson analyzed the entire computer book market in Q1 2007, related
to programming languages (buy more Perl books):

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_10.html

Nitesh Dhanjani wondered how to retain smart people in your organization:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_string_theory_of_how_to_re.html

Now back to hacking Parrot to make Perl 6 even better,
-c


chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

===================================================================
Early Registration Extended--Save $200!

Join us June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, California for the first
O'Reilly TOC Conference, and help shape the future of publishing.

Register now and Save $200.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc/

===================================================================
Ignite! Boston -- Last Call

On May 31, we are having our first Ignite Boston event in Cambridge, MA.
You can find out more about the event at:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog


If you like, you can sign up to present something new or interesting to
the local area tech community. So far we have 25 cool presentations and more
than 100 RSVPs. If you want to be part of this event, please get your RSVP
in ASAP so we can save room for you!

===================================================================

Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Perl.com newsletter? Please email us at
advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
------------------------------------------------------------------


 

XML.com Newsletter

XML.com Xtra!
---------------------------------
The Email for XML.com Subscribers

=================================================================

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

O'Reilly in Cambridge, MA, is getting behind Ignite Boston, which is
a techie event where people give five-minute pitches about some
innovative or up-and-coming technology. This event includes a talk
about innovation myths by Scott Berkun.

Good stuff if you're in the area. Details:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog

The Weekly Tab Sweep
--------------------

An Introduction to Haskell
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/21/an-introduction-to-haskell---part-1-why-haskell.html

Reducing User Interface Friction
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000866.html

In my day job we're starting a new project with text classification
requirements. The state-of-the-art is the Support Vector Machine
algorithm, and I found two very interesting libraries:

LIBSVM
http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm

SVM Light
http://svmlight.joachims.org

I give the early nod to LIBSVM because of its language bindings,
including Python.

I'm increasingly drawn to explore various SVN alternatives; flavor o'
the week is git:

http://git.or.cz

I'm *not* generally interested in the GTD or personal productivity
stuff. I got through three degrees without being personally organized, so
I figure I'm doing good enough.

Then I founded and started managing a software company; holy crap, now
I'm *so* disorganized! :>

Since I prefer low-tech solutions, I started carrying a date book for
the first time in my life. That's pretty good.

But I need a bit more, so I'm using Org mode in Emacs these days, and
I really love it; I'm not doing the Full GTD Monty, as described here:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html

But I like that it's extensible to that level of nuttiness, if I
have to become that nutty.

As always, thanks for reading! And happy Memorial Day!

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com

=================================================================

*** XML News from the XML Cover Pages by Robin Cover ***

For more information on any of these stories visit:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/coverpage/newspage.html

=================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the XML.com newsletter? Please email us at
advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
-----------------------------------------------------------------


Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

Half of 2007 is almost here and gone

THE O'REILLY NETWORK NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------
The latest from http://oreillynet.com

==================================================================
Early Registration Extended--Save $200!

Join us June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, California for the first
O'Reilly TOC Conference, and help shape the future of publishing.

Register now and Save $200.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc

==================================================================
Greetings readers,

Can you believe how quickly this year is flying by? We are a little
less than 40 days away from being half way through the year. Have you
kept all those resolutions you made in January? Did you teach yourself
something new this year? Hopefully we have some content that can help
you tackle whatever you have planned for the second half of 2007.

Next week we are having our first Ignite Boston event in Cambridge, MA.
You can find out more about the May 31st event at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog/.

If you like, you can sign up to present something new or interesting to
the local area tech community. So far we have 25 cool presentations and more
than 100 RSVPs. If you want to be part of this event, please get your RSVP
in ASAP so we can save room for you.

Another event you should be aware of is our Tools of Change (TOC)
Conference. If you are involved at all with content, media or
publishing of any kind, you should check out our TOC Conference being
held June 18-20 in San Jose, CA. Take a look at the keynotes, speakers
list, and tutorials here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc.

The speakers presenting at this conference are amazing. Be sure you
catch Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) speak about "Free Culture and the
Future of Publishing." If you would like to attend, please reference
this code and receive our special O'Reilly Network Member discount of
40% off: toc07orn

>Articles
In our first recommended article for the week, we have a very
interesting piece on "Cookin' with Ruby on Rails" by Bill Walton. Go
check out how Bill shows you a quick way to build Rails apps with
planning, migrations, and unit tests.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/05/17/cookin-with-ruby-on-rails---may.html

So if you are a programmer and you target the .NET platform with any of
your applications, you need to read Wei-Meng Lee's article "Using the
Cryptography APIs in .NET." It will give you insight into how to use some of
the most common security APIs. Read it and start making your .NET apps more secure today:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/22/using-the-cryptography-apis-in-net.html

In today's development environments, there are more geographically
distributed teams trying to build software together. Geographically distributed development (GDD)
offers a number of rewards as well as challenges. Check out "Tools for
Geographically Distributed Software Development" by Ryan Bagueros and see what technologies
and tools you can use to get significant gains out of GDD, within the context of
the challenges posed by GDD. Check it out here:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/17/tools-for-geographically-distributed-software-development.html

>Blogs
The top blogs for the moment are found here http://www.oreillynet.com/blogs

and include two posts on JavaFX and two posts by chromatic that are thought-provoking.
Go check them out and get into the discussions by offering your thoughts in the comment
sections. If you want to kick the tires of JavaFX, you need to read
Timothy M. O'Brien's post on "JavaFX: First Steps - "Hello OnJava" App."

http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/javafx_first_steps_hello_onjav_1.html

>Stats
The final post in my four part series on the State of the Computer Book
Market was posted and now lives here. It contains links to the other three as well:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_10.html

You may also be interested in seeing what folks are searching for on the
O'Reilly Network. You can find it by subject area here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/feeds/widgets/organic_search_tagcloud/

>Comments
Any comments, ideas or thoughts on features or content you would like to
see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you are expecting it.

Mike Hendrickson
General Manager, The O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.


http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_orn

=====================================================================

*** New Books from O'Reilly Media ***

Access Data Analysis Cookbook
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101220

Learning Ruby
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529864

Practical Packet Analysis (No Starch Press)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781593271497

The Definitive ANTLR Reference (Pragmatic)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0978739256

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the O'Reilly Network newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


 

Windows DevCenter Newsletter

The Windows DevCenter Newsletter
---------------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.windowsdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Sponsored by Rackspace Managed Hosting

Rackspace delivers fully managed Windows and Linux hosting
solutions, a Zero-Downtime Network and 24x7x365 Fanatical
Support starting at $383 per month.

Get our Advanced Monitoring and Reporting Bundle for
$10/Month in May.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/rkspc_win

==================================================================

Using the Cryptography APIs in .NET
The .NET framework contains a number of cryptography services that allow
you to incorporate security services into your .NET applications. In this
article, Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to use some of the common security
APIs to make your .NET applications more secure.
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/22/using-the-cryptography-apis-in-net.html

Ignite Boston!
The first Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, May 31, from 6 to 10pm at
Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. From 6-7pm, mingle and
talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater
Boston area. Join a MAKE challenge team and participate in building
bridges (how much weight can your bridge--made from less than 1,000
popsicle sticks--support?). After that, there will be a special keynote
address from author Scott Berkun ("The Myths of Innovation" and "The Art
of Project Management"). Then onto guest speakers who'll catch you up on
the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. During
intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and
O'Reilly's own editors.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog

Silverlight Will Sell A Lot of Macs
Well-known O'Reilly author Jesse Liberty came back from Mix, and
immediately bought a Mac, installed Windows on it using Parallels, then
formed a new company to do consulting for Silverlight. Get more info in
his blog.
http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/silverlight_will_sell_a_lot_of.html

Mashups for the Rest of Us
Mashup fans: You don't need to know how to write a line of code if you
want to create your own, customized mashup. Check out my blog for
details.
http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/mashups_for_the_rest_of_us.html

Microsoft Developers Ponder the ALT.NET Credo
Is the growing availability of open source, free, and third-party tools,
as well as the passion of their users, finally getting the attention of
.NET developers? Or to ask the question differently, can any .NET
developer these days afford to ignore a solution like Rails or a tool like
NHibernate? For answers to these and more questions, read O'Reilly editor
John Osborn's blog.
http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/microsoft_developers_ponder_th.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, Editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
Early Registration Extended--Save $200!

Join us June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, California for the first
O'Reilly TOC Conference, and help shape the future of publishing.

Register now and Save $200.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Windows DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Monday, May 21, 2007

 

Linux Newsletter

LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
----------------------------------------
The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

=================================================================

True parenthood is standing out in the pouring rain watching your kid play
lacrosse. True geekdom is doing that in the morning, editing ONLamp
articles all day, and writing this thing late Sunday night. To quote a
certain Dr. Smith, "Oh, the pain, the pain..."

But we spare no expense here at the Linux Newsletter. Vestal Virgins
hand-pick the bits from our lavish bit-fields to make up the characters
that go into our articles and blogs. So here without further adieu, the
week that was.

Ryan Bagueros has spent a lot of time managing software projects with team
members scattered around the world. He distilled the wisdom he's gathered
into a dandy article titled "Tools for Geographically Distributed Software
Development."

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/17/tools-for-geographically-distributed-software-development.html

Bill Walton, meanwhile, began a new series that builds off his previous
"Rolling with Rails" efforts. Time to dig out your pots and pans and do
some "Cookin' with Ruby on Rails. " The first subject on the menu,
migrations.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/05/17/cookin-with-ruby-on-rails---may.html

Week three of "The Watering Hole" came out. You'll laugh, you'll cry,
you'll see last week's newsletter under the comic! Jokes with animals, new
every Thursday!

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog

chromatic stared us off blogwise with a salute to NoScript, one of his
favorite FireFox plugins.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/thank_you_noscript.html

Adriano Ferreira gave an excerpt of an interesting thread in the Perl
world right now. Just why *do* lines end with semicolons?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/why_insisting_on_semicolons.html

Is any programming language truly immune from bad coding practices? Well,
chromatic sez there's no such beast.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/does_your_programming_language.html

Mike Hendrickson announces the upcoming Ignite! Boston. I'll be there,
giving a hopefully inflammatory talk titled "Less is More--Why the World
Doesn't Need Your Idea." Come throw tomatoes.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/ignite_boston.html

chromatic, who evidently never sleeps, announces the latest release of
Parrot.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/parrot_0412_of_the_caribbean_r.html

He also provided a handy checklist to determine if you've got a DSL or an
API on your hands.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_is_it_a_dsl_or_an_api_ten.html

Rounding out the ONLamp blogs, Jeremy Jones discusses how he rewrote the
Python-based podgrabber package.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/rewriting_podgrabber_part_1.html

Anton Chuvakin is mad, mad I say. He claims that anyone who has ever
bought software must be.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/05/are_you_mad_are_we_all.html

Over in Rubyland, Gregory Brown announced the 1.0 release of Rupurt, his
pride and joy.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/post_1.html

Curt Hibbs gives a pointer to a YouTube video that gives the Apple/PC ads
a Ruby/Java spin.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/hilarious_adspoof_from_railsen.html

Finally, Mr. Brown returned at week's end to announce that the Google
Summer of Code will be reported on our own Ruby blog. Can't wait to see
what gets cooked up!

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/oreilly_ruby_will_cover_the_go.html

Also, there's an event you should be aware of: the O'Reilly Tools of Change
(TOC) Conference. If you are involved at all with content, media or publishing of some kind, you should check out the TOC Conference being held June 18-20 in San Jose, CA. Take a look at the keynotes, speakers list, and tutorials here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc.

The speakers presenting at this conference are amazing. Be sure you
catch Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) speak about "Free Culture and the Future of Publishing." If you would like to attend, please reference this code and receive a special O'Reilly Network Member discount of 40% off: toc07orn

Upcoming this week (Lord willing and the dam don't burst), an in-depth
examination of Semaphores from Vikram Shulka, an introduction to the
Haskell programming language from Adam Turoff, and a look at integrating
Adobe's Flex with PHP from Jack Herrington. Plus, a new comic and blogs a
plenty. Right here at the OFOW*.

*ONLamp Family of Web Sites

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com

================================================================

Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!
Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Linux DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


 

XML object parsers and more

XML.com Xtra!
---------------------------------
The Email for XML.com Subscribers

=================================================================

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

This week's issue features the second part of our series on XML parser
performance, which is focused on XML object parsers.

XML Parser Benchmarks: Part 2

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/16/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-2.html

Also, there's an event you should be aware of: O'Reilly's Tools of Change
(TOC) Conference. If you are involved at all with content, media or
publishing of some kind, you should check out the TOC Conference being
held June 18-20 in San Jose, CA. Take a look at the keynotes, speakers
list, and tutorials here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc. The speakers
presenting at this conference are amazing. Be sure you
catch Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) speak about "Free Culture and the
Future of Publishing." If you would like to attend, please reference this
code and receive a special O'Reilly Network Member discount of 40% off:
toc07orn

The Weekly Tab Sweep
--------------------

I initially thought that I wanted an iPhone, since my primary need for
a new cellphone is one that will sync *easily* with my Mac mini and
Powerbook. But now I'm not so sure...maybe I want one of these
instead:

http://www.helio.com/page?p=devices_heat#devices_ocean

I stole some good ideas from this recently:

http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element

FWIW, I think the Wufoo interface may be the best one I've ever seen
in a web app.

If you work in any technical field, this will come in handy:

Field Guide to the Loner: The Real Insiders

http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20070320-000001.html

I'm something of a Linda and TupleSpaces devotee; hence PyLinda
(http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~aw/pylinda) is probably worth a look.

As always, thanks for reading!

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com

=================================================================

*** XML News from the XML Cover Pages by Robin Cover ***

For more information on any of these stories visit:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/coverpage/newspage.html

***

=================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the XML.com newsletter? Please email us at
advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Wednesday, May 16, 2007

 

Windows DevCenter Newsletter

The Windows DevCenter Newsletter
---------------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.windowsdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_wdc

==================================================================

Managing Printing in Your .NET Application
The .NET Framework makes it easy to support printing. In this article,
Wei-Meng Lee shows you the basics of printing in .NET 2.0, including how
to configure page setup, print multiple pages, preview a document before
it is printed, as well as let users select a printer to which to print.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/15/managing-printing-in-your-net-application.html

Microsoft's Mistake with Windows Home Server
I've been using the beta of Microsoft's Windows Home Server, and I'm a
fan. But Microsoft is making one big mistake with it: it won't sell the
software to people like you and me. See my blog for details.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/microsofts_mistake_with_window.html

Freeware/Open Source for Windows Weekly Summary
Todd Ogasawara has this week's roundup of freeware for Windows. On tap: an
open source utility for reading Mac OS X drives, a set of well-designed
icons, and more.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/freewareopen_source_for_window_24.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, editor
WindowsDevCenter.com

=====================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces, " by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly) to 10 randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Windows DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
pgralla@oreilly.com


Tuesday, May 15, 2007

 

Joost, JavaFX, and Tools of Change

THE O'REILLY NETWORK NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------
The latest from http://oreillynet.com

==================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell? If so, please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly) to 10 randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

==================================================================

Greetings readers,

I would like to begin by inviting all New Englanders (or anyone in the
area) to our first Ignite Boston event in Cambridge, MA on May 31st.
You can find out more about the event at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ignite/blog/


You can also sign up to present something new or interesting to your
local contemporaries.

Another event you should be aware of is our Tools of Change (TOC) Conference.
If you are at all involved with content, media, or publishing of some kind,
you should check out the TOC Conference, which is being held June 18-20 in San Jose, CA.
Take a look at the keynotes, speakers list, and tutorials:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc/


The speakers presenting at this conference are amazing. Be sure you
catch Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, speak about "Free Culture and the
Future of Publishing." If you would like to attend, please reference
this code and receive our special O'Reilly Network Member discount of
40% off: toc07orn

>Articles
In our first recommended article we have another Perl 6 piece. Hmm...
the increase of Perl 6 articles in the last couple of months must mean
that that we are getting closer to the Perl 6 release. Grab the prototype
implementation of Perl 6 (called Pugs), read Jonathan Scott Duff's article
on "Everyday Perl 6," and dig into Perl 6 now. The article provides an introduction to the changes in Perl 6 and shows how these changes are good and useful:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/05/10/everyday-perl-6.html

In our second article, OnJava Editor David Bock interviews Sun's CTO
Robert Brewin, who is strategically involved in, if not outright
responsible for, some of the major announcements from Sun, including the
open sourcing of the JDK, embracing scripting languages like Ruby,
and most recently JavaFX Script and the JavaFX Mobile platform.
In "An Interview with Robert Brewin," Dave asks some thought-provoking questions
that elicit interesting and insightful answers from Brewin. Check out the interview here:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/05/10/an-interview-with-robert-brewin.html

>Blogs
On the blog front, I finally decided to find out what Erica Sadun's
"Joost

Invites" was all about. So I got an invite and installed Joost. I think
it's a very cool TV application running on your Mac or PC. If you look
at our current top 10 blogs, you'll find three Ruby posts,
two about Joost, and two Java FX blogs.

So, for a blog that isn't product-oriented, but has real content, you've
got to check out James Turner's piece on "Looks like Microsoft is ramping
up for Son of SCO." This is a great read if you can parse through the
numerous bleep characters (*) James uses to keep his post PG-13. Read it, enjoy it!

You can find all the top blogs here: http://www.oreillynet.com/blogs/

>Stats
So, the four-part series I am publishing on the O'Reilly Radar is almost
complete. I have one more release coming this week on programming
languages. I have been in technical publishing/training for more than
20 years now and one thing that is clear to me is that when you ask
developers which programming language is the best, most useful, or
easiest to learn you'll get almost as many different answers as the
number people you ask. Stay tuned for the new post this week as I cut
to the facts, not the emotion or zeal found with discussing programming
languages. The first three "State of the Computer Book Market" posts can
be found here:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_6.html
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_7.html
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_8.html


>Comments
Any comments, ideas, or thoughts on features or content you would like to

see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you are expecting it.


Mike Hendrickson
General Manager, the O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.


http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_orn

=====================================================================

*** New Books from the O'Reilly Store ***
The Myths of Innovation
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527051

Closeup Shooting (Rocky Nook)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1933952091

RESTful Web Services
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260


*** New Short Cuts from the O'Reilly Store ***

RJS Templates (update)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rjsrails

Rails on Windows

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/railsonwindows

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the O'Reilly Network newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Monday, May 14, 2007

 

Migrating PHP to Ajax, Rails ActiveRecord, and distributing Linux as SaaS

LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
----------------------------------------
The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

=================================================================
Sponsored by Vyatta Inc.

Vyatta: Open-Source Router, Firewall, and VPN

Vyatta software and appliances are the first to combine the features,
performance and reliability of enterprise-class networking with the
cost-savings, and flexibility of open source solutions. Vyatta empowers
ISPs, Enterprise and SMBs to replace overpriced proprietary router,
firewall and VPN equipment with commercially supported open source
products that deliver twice the performance for half the price.

Free Webinar and Vyatta Community Edition 2 Software:
http://www.vyatta.com/landing/index_orn1.php


=================================================================

My apologizes for the lack of a witty opening banter paragraph this week,
but I just spent half an hour composing a Microsoft rant (see below), so
my creative juices are spent, you'll just have to content yourself with
the informative and provocative content that cross the threshold of the
OFOW[1] this week.

Starting, as always, with articles, you had your pick of interesting
topics to choose from. You could learn about "Migrating Web-Based PHP
Applications to Ajax" from Bill Lubanovic:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/05/10/migrating-web-based-php-applications-to-ajax.html

Gregory Brown finished his two-parter on the Rails ActiveRecord
persistence framework. Look for more Rails articles from Gregory in the
near future.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/05/10/understanding-activerecord-a-gentle-introduction-to-the-heart-of-rails-pt-ii.html

Completing our trilogy of geekdom, George Belotsky had a thought and
discussion provoking essay asking if Linux distributions need to reflect
more of the industry trend toward Software as a Service.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/10/rethinking-the-linux-distribution.html

We also had the second weekly installment of ONLamp's very own webcomic,
The Watering Hole. This week, you'll get to meet some of the other
denizens of the O'Reilly back lot.

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/2007/05/whats_in_a_name_1.html

Blog, blog, blogs, blogs... So many that I'll be brief in my summaries
this week.

Nitesh Dhanjani on a pleasant dealing with Apple's Security contact:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/pleasant_experience_with_apple.html

chromatic gives a bit shout out to Linuxfest NW:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/thank_you_linuxfest_northwest.html

Andy Oram discusses the germination of a Chinese hacker community:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/creating_the_chinese_free_soft.html

The Perl Foundation has grants to give out, Curtis Poe gives a pointer to
the application.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/call_for_proposals.html

He also discusses the shortage of good Perl programmers:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_perl_job_market_blues.html

BRAND NEW blogger Adriano Ferreira has a profile of the Textile markup
language:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/praising_textile_1.html

Andy Oram returns to talk about the influence of the OLPC project on
desktop Linux:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/global_desktop_ancillary_gifts.html

Adriano made the most of his first week blogging, with a summary of
upcoming Perl 5 changes.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/soon_a_perl_with_new_switches_1.html

Jeremy Jones talks about the Python Cheese Shop. It's a bit runny,
though...

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/python_package_index_the_chees.html

Jonathan Wellons offers a streamlined way to use Google:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_optimal_google_search_is_t
.html

Your Humble Editor finished out the week lambasting Microsoft for its
patent FUD maneuver.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/looks_like_microsoft_is_rampin.html

Over at LinuxDevCenter, chromatic discusses what interoperability really
means:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/two_thoughts_on_interoperabili.html

And Juliet Kemp suggests that backing up your root partition might be a
good idea.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/backups_a_note.html

Giuseppe Maxia talks about ways to hack the MySQL log tables, over in the
Databases blog:

http://www.oreillynet.com/databases/blog/2007/05/hacking_mysql_table_logs.html

And finishing out This Week in Blogs, Gregory Brown wonders if Ruby is a
viable language to use to teach programming in schools:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/ruby_academically_viable.html

THIS WEEK: Another installment of the Watering Hole, Ryan Bagueros will
give us an article sharing his experiences running geographically
distributed software development, and Bill Walton starts a new series,
"Cookin' with Ruby on Rails."

Do you have a better format you'd like to suggest for this newsletter? We
can't use HTML/Flash/Morse code, but if you think you know a way to make
it more readable, please feel free to send it along to me. Notes telling
me the current format sucks without a constructive alternative will incur
the wrath of the Gods...

[1] ONLamp Family of Web sites

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com

================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreillyschool.com/?CMP=nlc-ostlaunch&ATT=lnx

================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!
Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Linux DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Friday, May 11, 2007

 

Building Custom iQuiz Data and Using AppleScript with Python

THE MAC DEVCENTER NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.macdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Dear readers,

This week Mac DevCenter has new articles on customizing Apple's iQuiz
game for the iPod and using AppleScript with Python. Erica Sadun
walks us through creating custom data sets for iQuiz so you can
easily build your own iQuiz games. Noah Gift shows us how to use
AppleScript and appscript with Python to combine the power of Python
scripting with the high-level OS X features of AppleScript. And our
bloggers mix things up with coverage of the latest Mac news and events.


iQuiz is a brand new, flashy iPod game from Apple that allows users
to create custom games and run them using the iQuiz interface. In
this tutorial, Erica Sadun shows how to create custom iQuiz files and
provides sample code and files.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2007/04/30/building-custom-iquiz-data.html


Noah Gift introduces the major concepts behind using AppleScript with
Python and provides some fun working examples in this hands-on article.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2007/05/08/using-python-and-applescript-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-mac.html


The Mac DevCenter blogs have covered a wide range of topics this
week. From Joost to CamelBones to how to learn Ruby, our crew of
expert bloggers is discussing the issues that matter to Mac
developers. Drop by and let us know what you think.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog

Thanks for reading,

Bruce Stewart
Mac DevCenter Editor
bruce@oreilly.com

==================================================================

Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Mac DevCenter newsletter? Please email
us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
---------------------------------------------------------------------


 

XML parser performance and more

XML.com Xtra!
---------------------------------
The Email for XML.com Subscribers

=================================================================
Have you read Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=================================================================

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

Back in the day, XML parser performance was a hot topic. Before that,
I can recall how important parser implementation effort was. The first
sales pitch I can remember hearing about XML, well before it was made
a standard, was that someone other than James Clark should be able to
implement an XML parser. In fact, the claim was more that a competent
CS undergraduate student could implement one.

Today it's not so much that that's wrong as that it's just...odd.

But we do still have to care--for some kinds of application--about
XML parser performance, and since that scene changes more often than
we cover it, it's about time for an update.

This week we start a two-part series on XML parser performance. Check
it out.

XML Parser Benchmarks: Part 1

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/09/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-1.html

XML.com Weblogs
---------------

Rick Jelliffe, Design Tips for Interchanging Forms
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/04/design_tips_for_interchanging.html

Keith Fahlgren, DocBook Elements in the Wild
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/05/docbook_elements_in_the_wild.html

and a follow-up:

DocBook in the Wild: A Look at Newer Content
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/05/docbook_elements_in_the_wild_a.html

The Weekly Tab Sweep
--------------------

Not much this week since the power company decided to deprive us of
electricity overnight--in the middle of the big city!

Insanely cool:
http://hacketyhack.net

Perhaps even cooler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime

The Lazy Web^H^H^H Newsletter Request
-------------------------------------

So, faithful reader, my wife and I are having our first child in late
September. We want a camcorder, preferably HD and Mac-friendly.

What should we buy? Replies to kendall@xml.com greatly
appreciated. I'll summarize the answers in a future newsletter.

As always, thanks for reading!

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com

=================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_xml

=================================================================

*** XML News from the XML Cover Pages by Robin Cover ***

For more information on any of these stories visit:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/coverpage/newspage.html

=================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the XML.com newsletter? Please email us at
advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


 

Practical Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers

Perl.com update
--------------------------------------
The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

===================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces, " by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

===================================================================

Greetings, Perl.com newsletter subscribers.
With your free subscription, you get a free newsletter sent straight to
your inbox every two weeks, give or take, to keep you in touch with various
segments of the Perl community that make it into the newsletter.

Fun, isn't it?

(Also, apologies to the hard-working, friendly, kind, and intelligent Tim Maher
for the title.)

Here you go.

* Perl News

The theme for YAPC::Europe is "Social Perl". If you have something to say about
this, submit your proposals now! Hackathon proposals are due on Sunday May 13.
Papers are due before the end of the month:

http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007/cfh.html
http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007/cfp.html

The Perl QA wiki (perl-qa@perl.org) has moved, thanks to Andy Armstrong and his
anti-spam measures:

http://perl-qa.hexten.net

Bob Free (who you should remember from the most recent Perl Lightning Articles) has announced
a new site for Perl and OpenGL developers. Don't worry; you don't have to solve matrix
transformations in your sleep (or even know what that means) to participate and use Perl to make pretty 3D graphics:

http://www.opengl.org/news/comments/graphcomp_launches_pogl_perl_opengl_developer_site_today/

If you're in the London area, there's a free Perl Training session led by veteran Perl guru Dave Cross on June 2, 2007. Unfortunately, it's full. Fortunately, more demand will make it more likely that this will happen again!

http://london.pm.org/teach-in

The Nordic Perl Workshop has gathered material for its talks:

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/npw2007/wiki?node=Talks

Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33245
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33246

* Perl at O'Reilly

The previous link indicates that the work of various Perl 6 implementations
has started to converge, from various little Perl 6-like languages living in
various states in the Pugs tree to the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot.
With that in mind, Jonathan Scott Duff started to explore the practical
aspects of Perl 6 that you can use right now through the Pugs implementation.
Here's how everyday Perl 5 concepts translate into clearer and more powerful Perl 6 code:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/05/10/everyday-perl-6.html

The BBC sponsored the free Perl training mentioned earlier. Here are the words from Dave Cross himself:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/free_perl_training_in_london.html

Why did the Beeb do this? Like many other companies in London, they're having trouble
hiring high quality Perl hackers. Curtis Poe, an American goth in London, analyzed the
situation and why the problem came about:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_perl_job_market_blues.html

Your editor found a face-slapper in one of our books:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/whoops.html

... then revealed that some people in the Python world wanted Perl 6 Roles in
Python 3000:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/traitsroles_in_python_3000.html

James Turner launched a comic strip featuring, among other animals,
A Very Familiar Camel:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/welcome_to_the_watering_hole_t.html

That wraps it up for this week. Remember, though--you can use everything in Scott Duff's Perl 6 article right now!

Now back to hacking Parrot to make Perl 6 even better,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

===================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_prl

===================================================================

Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Perl.com newsletter? Please email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
------------------------------------------------------------------


Thursday, May 10, 2007

 

Our take on MIX 07 and more

The Windows DevCenter Newsletter
---------------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.windowsdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Get the Rackspace Essential Server starting at $383 in April.

Rackspace delivers Fully Managed Windows and
Linux hosting solutions, a Zero-Downtime Network
and 24x7x365 Fanatical Support.

Learn more about this promotion:
http://www.oreilly.com/go/rackspace

==================================================================

MIX 07: Wrapping Up and Returning to Earth

O'Reilly editor John Osborn spent an intense 72 hours at MIX 07, and has a
lot to tell you about the event. Check out his blog for the highlights and
to see what the future holds for you--especially when it comes to
Silverlight.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/mix_07_wrapping_up_and_returni_1.html

Windows Live Hotmail: Still Not as Good as Gmail

Microsoft's revamped Web-based mail service is an improvement over
previous incarnations. But as I explain in my blog, Gmail is still far
superior.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/windows_live_hotmail_still_not.html

Windows Mobile Weekly Roundup

Todd Ogasawara is back with the weekly news about Windows Mobile. Up this
week: how to use a great Windows Mobile Pocket PC feature called Word
Completion, as well as plenty of other tips and news.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/windows_mobile_weekly_roundup_35.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
Have you read Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Windows DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


Wednesday, May 09, 2007

 

Teeny Tiny Solar Robots & Maker Faire!

MAKE Newsletter
Teeny Tiny Solar Robots & Maker Faire!

May 9, 2007

In this issue: Create Teeny Tiny Solar Robots plus Maker Faire Is Almost Here!



Couple things this week, friends, and first up is our latest video. Learn how to make little, teeny, tiny robots called beambots that are powered by the sun! We also make a beambot from a kit. Kits are always a good way to break into a genre of making. We have a sponsor (Microchip), so if you're inclined, check them out -- it helps MAKE make things!

Next up, Maker Faire is almost here -- crazy! Check out our Maker Faire section AND the Maker Faire site for all the latest and greatest.

We'd like to thank our sponsors, media sponsors, and exhibitors. Here are just some of the folks you'll see at Maker Faire in addition to over 200 makers and a lot of surprises!

Sponsors:
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Adobe, Carlo Rossi, Chronicle Books, Lion Brand Yarn Company, ShopBot, Sun Microsystems, Inc., TechShop, Texterity


Media Sponsors:
Boing Boing, Cool Hunting, EE Times, IEEE Spectrum, Laughing Squid, O’Reilly Media, ReadyMade, Robot Magazine, San Jose Tech Museum, Swap Thing, TODO, Toolmonger, Twitter

Exhibitors:
Epilog Laser, Future Technology Device International, Ltd., Hardtent RV Rental, HSC Electronic Supply, iFixit, Instructables, iRobot, Joby, LEGO, Lulu.com, OpenMoko, PictureItPostage.com, ProtoPulsion Inc., RadioShack, Revell Incorporated, Simplified Building Concepts, Solarbotics Ltd., Sony Electronics, Surplus Center, Wired/ GeekDad

The next time you hear from us will be from Maker Faire, wooo!

Cheers,
pt

Phillip Torrone
Senior Editor
MAKE Magazine

Join Us at Maker Faire 2007!

The maker's paradise this year will be Maker Faire 2007, a two-day family-friendly event celebrating engineering, arts, science, and crafts. On May 19-20, 2007, thousands of crafters and makers will converge at the San Mateo Fairgrounds in the San Francisco Bay Area. Featuring hundreds of makers, tons of workshops, and more cool inventions than you can imagine, this event is sure to leave you buzzing with inspiration for months to come. Advanced tickets sales end at midnight PST on Thursday, May 10th.

Get your tickets today!

From the MAKE Blog

Create Teeny Tiny Solar Robots - Make: Video Podcast

mp4|mov|hd-appletv|3gp|3g2|itunes
This weekend, make little teeny tiny robots called beambots that are powered by the sun! In the podcast, I made the solar-roller, and the instructions for that are right in the PDF! I also made a beambot from a kit. Kits are always a good way to break into a genre of making. Both solarbotics.com and pagermotors.com have some nice kits for you to get started, including the one that I bought. If you get into it, make sure to pick up JunkBots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels, a book worth reading if you get into making little teeny tiny robots! One of the great things about these little bots is that you can make them from scavenged materials. Use parts from broken electronics and bring them back to life as little robots! This week we're excited to welcome Microchip as a sponsor of the weekend video podcast. You can check out the clickable ad at end of today's video and companion PDF. Help support MAKE and visit our sponsor Microchip! Here's the link at the end of the video - Link Here's the link at the end of the PDF - Link Get the podcast and PDF downloaded automatically in iTunes. - Link

Read more and comment



Solar Robot Instructions - Make: PDFcast

Weekend Projects Shot12
To make your solar beambots this weekend, you can download this weeks PDFcast complete with an article from the magazine! Gareth Branwyn wrote this how-to article on how to make two solar roller beambots. Download it, print it out, and get to making your bots! PDF Link

Read more and comment





Tuesday, May 08, 2007

 

Reminders, Puffy, and Java FX

THE O'REILLY NETWORK NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------
The latest from http://oreillynet.com

==================================================================
Sponsored by ActiveState Perl Dev Kit

Perl Dev Kit - Easily build and deploy Perl apps

* Create and deploy executables to multiple platforms.
* Painlessly debug Perl scripts.
* Create sophisticated Perl-based filters.

Download your free trial now:
http://www.activestate.com/or/pdk


==================================================================
Articles

Each spring as the foliage and blossoms return, we have a visual indicator
that reminds us that summer is just around the corner. But who or what reminds you
about what you might have forgotten to administer with your computers?

In our first article, Tom Adelstein discusses a few things that
System Administrators seem to forget. Tom puts together a list of what
he and his colleagues have decided are the "Top 7 Things System
Administrators Forget to Do." Check out what you may be forgetting:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2007/05/03/the-top-7-things-sysadmins-forget-to-do.html

Our second article takes the form of an interview with several
developers in "OpenBSD 4.1: Puffy Strikes Again" by Federico Biancuzzi.
You probably know that OpenBSD 4.1 has just been released. But do
you know about all the new features for networking, active porting
efforts (landisk and UltraSPARC III), work on SMP, and the improvements
in spam fighting? Check it out here:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2007/05/03/openbsd-41-puffy-strikes-again.html


New Feature

In keeping with our "reminders" theme, you should set one to visit our
OnLamp Watering Hole, as our new comic strip will change weekly at:

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/


Blogs

The blog with the most traffic this week is "Ruby and Women," by Gregory
Brown in Opinion. I think it is pretty self-explanatory. You can find
it here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/ruby_and_women.html?ref=most_discussed

Another one not to miss is "The World of Junk Patents Implodes," by Rick
Jelliffe in Opinion. Rick is on to something here, and you should find
out what it is. Check it out here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/05/the_world_of_junk_patents_impl.html?ref=most_discussed

In case you haven't heard of anther RIA scripting language/extension,
check out the blog on Java FX. You can find it here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/java_fx.html


Stats

The first of a three-part (plus an additional post) on the State of the
Computer Book market was posted on Monday. You can find it on our Radar
site at:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_6.html


Comments

Any comments, ideas, or thoughts on features or content you would like to
see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you request it.


Mike Hendrickson
General Manager, The O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.


http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_orn

=====================================================================

*** New Books from the O'Reilly Store ***

Office 2007: The Missing Manual
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514228

Devices of the Soul
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526801

Managing the Test People (Rocky Nook)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781933952123


*** New Short Cuts from the O'Reilly Store ***

The FreeBSD 6.2 Crash Course
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/freebsd

Sony Alpha a DSLR A100
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529253


=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the O'Reilly Network newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
---------------------------------------------------------------------


Monday, May 07, 2007

 

The debut of our new comic, an OpenBSD interview, and more

----------------------------------------
LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

=================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly) to 10 randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=================================================================

Good morrow, gentles. Prithee, doest thou require news of the day, of that
most wonderful of operating systems which doth bear the sign of the
flightless Antarctic bird? Wouldst thou know what hath transpired for yon
these seven days, of the written comments of our most insightful bloggers?
Then hearken, for this be your weekly Linux Newsletter.

First off, news so big I can't leave it 'til the end of the newsletter.
You've heard about it, you've gotten sick of me promising it would be
coming Any Time Now. And now, it is here, a day you will want to remember
so that you can tell your grandchildren about it. Yes, ring the church
bells and let the doves fly, the comic strip has launched!

Ok, maybe it's not world peace, but it is a new weekly webcomic that we
hope will at least mildly entertain you (this, I'm told, is called
lowering expectations...) Check out the first episode of "The Watering
Hole," titled "The Savannas of Sebastopol." If you don't find it
enjoyable, simple returned the unused portion for a full refund. New
strips every Thursday!

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/

Meanwhile, despite this earth-shaking news, life proceeded apace on the
ONLamp Family of Web sites (OFOW). Two new articles this week, the first
of which is Federico Biancuzzi's latest pre-released OpenBSD interview, a
series he's well know for. This time around, it's the 4.1 release
approaching, and Frederico made sure to ask all the right questions of all
the right developers.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2007/05/03/openbsd-41-puffy-strikes-again.html

Zachary Kessin took a more reflective attitude, at least as far as PHP
goes. His article, "Code As Data: Reflection in PHP," shows how you can
use the relatively new reflection functionality in PHP to, among other
things, produce automated unit tests.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/04/26/code-as-data-reflection-in-php.html

In blog-land, O'Reilly editor Andy Oram is looking for some people who
have prepared and filed actual patent applications.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/patent_applicationswhat_are_th.html

chromatic suggested that it's time to break the perceived connection
between math and computer science, a position I've held for a long time.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/i_just_want_to_program_dont_ma.html

Short but sweet, Jonathan Wellons ponders a trend he's seen, geeks working
out. Is the skinny, pasty-faced developer a thing of the past?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/pumping_iron_is_the_new_rails.html

Dave Cross reports that free Perl training will be available in London on
June 2nd.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/free_perl_training_in_london.html

chromatic returns to talk about the idea of replacing abstract base
classes in Python with traits and roles.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/traitsroles_in_python_3000.html

Over in DevCenter, Caitlyn Martin mentions rx320, a package for Linux that
lets you tune a shortwave radio.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/a_pc_shortwave_radio_and_linux.html

Juliet Kemp offers some pointers on what can go wrong with Linux sound,
and how to fix it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/sound_problems.html

chromatic, the man of a thousand blogs, questions the wisdom of porting
Microsoft's Silverlight to Linux.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/05/appeasement_is_a_type_of_strat.html

Finally, Brian K. Jones takes some time to consider why books targeted at
system administrators may be on the way out. His idea? Sysadmins are
becoming coders.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/04/sys_admins_books_and_trending.html

In the coming week, we have the following articles coming up. Gregory
Brown will complete his two-part tour of the Rails persistence layer,
"Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails."
George Belotsky will be "Rethinking the Linux Distribution," and Bill
Lubanovic will show us how to doll up an application in "A Web Makeover
with jQuery."

Until then, enjoy the spring while it lasts, and did I mention we have a
new comic strip?

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com

================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_lnx

================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!
Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Linux DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


 

ONJava Newsletter

O'REILLY NETWORK'S ONJava.com NEWSLETTER
--------------------------------------------------
The Independent Source for Enterprise Java

==================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces," by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future
editions, and to provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

==================================================================
Welcome OnJava Readers,

JavaOne is upon us! Expect to see some great updates from the show at the
O'Reilly blogs. You can check them out on the lefthand side of the page at:

http://www.onjava.com

Articles of interest to Java developers:

Timothy O'Brien sat down with Tim Bray last week for this interview. Tim
and Tim discuss Atom (the syndication format and publishing protocol),
JRuby, and Sun:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/05/03/interview-with-tim-bray-atom-jruby-and-the-ecumenical-sun.html

At JavaOne this year, there will certainly be a buzz at the Java.net
community booth; there are more than 20 mini-talks scheduled by community
members. In this podcast, Chris Adamson has compiled some of the best
talks from last year. Talks from this year will also be available as a
podcast feed:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/05/03/pre-j1-2k7-2006best.html

In this podcast, Daniel Steinberg reports on the Sun Tech Days in Brazil,
and interviews Bruno and Lucas, project owners of the Marge Project.
Marge is a Java Bluetooth Framework that helps you create
Bluetooth-enabled applications:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/05/01/mobileandembedded-podcast2.html

In this article at BEA's dev-2-dev, Andy Piper, Eric Hsiao, Rod Johnson,
and Chris Wall discuss Spring 2.0.1 and BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 Integration:

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2007/04/spring-2-weblogic-server-9-integration.html

Recent O'Reilly Network weblogs of interest to Java developers:

Shashank Tiwari - Beyond the beginner's books - Adobe Flex & Java
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/beyond_the_beginners_books_ado.html

Tim O'Brien - Acegi OpenID, Wicket Roadmap
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/04/blogroll_acegi_openid_wicket_r.html

Dejan Bosanac - Scripting and asynchronous messaging
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/scripting_and_asynchronous_mes.html

Krishna Srinivasan - EJB 3.0 and WebServices
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/05/ejb_30_and_webservices.html

Tim O'Brien - Stack It: ohloh.net
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/04/stack_it_ohlohnet.html

Check out more O'Reilly Network Java weblogs at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog

I'm excited to be going to JavaOne this year. If you're interested in
writing an article for O'Reilly, come by our booth and hunt me down. I'll
be hanging around looking to talk about your interesting projects.


David Bock, Editor
ONJava.com

Please join us again soon. We'll have a "JavaOne Edition" of the
OnJava newsletter later this week with news from the show.

==================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_jav


==================================================================

*** Java News and Weblogs ***

java.net Weblogs
http://weblogs.java.net

O'Reilly Network Java Weblogs
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/weblog_s?x-subject=3

Other Java News (channel -- LANG: JAVA)
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/index.php

Java Cookbook Recipe of the Day
http://www.onjava.com/onjava/javacook/solution.csp?day=1

Java Events
http://www.onjava.com/onjava/events

==================================================================

*** Other Related O'Reilly Network sites ***

O'Reilly Network
http://www.oreillynet.com

XML.com
http://xml.com

ONLamp.com
http://onlamp.com

O'Reilly Media
http://www.oreilly.com

O'Reilly Java
http://java.oreilly.com

***

ONJava.com Affiliates

Servlets.com
http://www.servlets.com

JDOM.org
http://www.jdom.org

------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the ONJava.com newsletter? Please email us
at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability information.
Thank you!
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
------------------------------------------------------------------


Wednesday, May 02, 2007

 

CSS, DNS, and RSS

THE O'REILLY NETWORK NEWSLETTER
-------------------------------------
The latest from http://oreillynet.com

==================================================================
Have you read Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell? If so, please
take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand how the
patterns are being put to work, how to improve any future editions, and
provoke discussion at her presentation at theUsability Professionals'
Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly) to 10 randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

==================================================================
Greeting readers,

This week we have some blogs that you've got to read. In case you missed
it last week, James Turner's piece on "The Virtues of Monoculture" is a
good read with lots of comments. Check it out--it's our most visited and
commented on article for the second week.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html


Articles

In our first recommended article, "Why Do ASP.NET Programmers Need to
Learn CSS?" by Dan Hurwitz and Jesse Liberty, the authors discuss how most
ASP programmers have historically generated the elements of a web page but
not layout, design or display elements. By learning a bit of CSS,
developers can put themselves ahead of the rest of the pack and deliver
better looking web apps. Find out what they think here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/01/why-doaspnet-programmers-need-to-learn-css.html

In our second recommended article, Ron Aitchison talks about a crucial
piece of software that handles receiving every email, accessing a web
page, making a VoIP call, or completing many other web/Internet tasks--the
DNS. In his article, "Five Basic Mistakes Not to Make in DNS," you'll
start thinking about the things you can do to make sure your DNS is in
good shape and not causing problems for the rest of the Internet, which,
by the way, also includes you. Check it out here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2007/04/26/5-basic-mistakes-not-to-make-in-dns.html


Blogs

On the blog front, we have "Repartitioning on the fly, and disk space
for /" by Juliet Kemp, which discusses partitioning strategies for
partitioning and space requirements. Check out what she has to say here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/repartitioning_on_the_fly_and.html

The next blog is really two blogs in one. Preston Gralla blogged on
"Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop" and followed it up with
"More Reasons Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop." Check out why
he thinks that there are too many Linux distributions and other factors
that make it difficult or impossible for Linux to overtake Windows. Start
here and you will get a link to the other blog as well:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/more_reasons_why_linux_will_ne_3.html

Other

James Turner is starting a new feature (actually a couple more are on the
way too) with "The ONLamp Ombudsman Wants YOU." Let him know what you want here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_onlamp_ombudsman_wants_you.html

Stats

We have created a tag cloud to show some organic search terms, which means
it is driven by keywords people type into search engines like Google. So,
while these terms reflect what we have to offer as much as they reflect
what people a looking for, they still provide some insight into what
people are looking for online. Here's the link:
http://www.oreillynet.com/feeds/widgets/organic_search_tagcloud/

Oh, yeah. The title of this newsletter is CSS, DNS, and RSS but I've only
talked about the first two. Did you know that all of our content is
available in RSS? I read all the blogs in my Thunderbird and never have to
leave the comfort of my email client. To subscribe, you can use the bottom
of the left nav bar on the main O'Reilly Network page and click there, or
click this: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/31. I suggest going to the
nav bar first, as you may want a different kind of feed.

Comments

Any comments, ideas or thoughts on features or content you would like to
see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you are expecting it.

Mike Hendrickson
General Manager, The O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors with
educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_orn

=====================================================================

*** New Books from O'Reilly Media ***

Programming Firefox
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102432

40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques with Photoshop (YoungJin)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/8931433700


*** New Short Cuts from O'Reilly Media ***

Getting Started with Silverlight

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510688

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the O'Reilly Network newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000


 

Windows DevCenter Newsletter

The Windows DevCenter Newsletter
---------------------------------------------------
The latest from http://www.windowsdevcenter.com

==================================================================
Free Web Development Kit from Microsoft

Receive a free Web Development kit, and
use your existing skills in Microsoft
Visual Basic® 6.0, Classic ASP, and
Microsoft Visual Studio®.NET 2003 to
become more versatile. Find out more:

http://www.oreilly.com/go/msasp4

==================================================================

Why Do ASP.NET Programmers Need to Learn CSS?

ASP.NET has not been great at controlling the layout of elements on a web
page. Dan Hurwitz and Jesse Liberty show you how to gain precise control
over presentation with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). They argue that
programmers who embrace CSS as their own, rather than thinking of it as an
esoteric skill of designers, place themselves ahead of the pack.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/05/01/why-doaspnet-programmers-need-to-learn-css.html

Is Vista More Secure than Mac OS X?

Smug Mac lovers who point to Windows vulnerabilities now have something to
worry about: A top security researcher claims that Windows Vista is more
secure than Mac OS X. Check out my blog for details:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/is_vista_more_secure_than_mac_1.html

MIX 07: Two O'Reilly Publications for the Show

Just in time for MIX 07, we've released two new online publications that
should appeal to attendees and those who plan to listen in on MIX sessions
over the Web.

"Getting Started with Silverlight" is written by Microsoft MVP and
Silverlight insider Shawn Wildermuth and provides a succinct introduction
to one of the technologies that will be in the spotlight all week at MIX:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510688/?CMP=ilc-home1&ATT=9780596510688/

We also figure that this is a good time to unveil the Rough Cuts Edition
of "Programming ASP.NET AJAX" by ASP.NET MVP and JavaScript guru Christian Wenz:

http://safari.oreilly.com/9780596514242

Windows Vista Doesn't Run Any of My Software! Oh, Really?

Todd Ogasawara wants to know which of your programs won't work with Vista:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/05/windows_vista_doesnt_run_any_o.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, Editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces," by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work and how to improve any future
editions, and to provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=====================================================================
Visit our Sponsored Developer Resource Pages and learn about cool
stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

Inside Lightroom: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lightroom

------------------------------------------------------------------
Interested in sponsoring the Windows DevCenter newsletter? Please
email us at advertising@oreilly.com for rate and availability
information. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your newsletter subscription options, please visit
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home

For assistance, email help@oreillynet.com

O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(707) 827-7000
---------------------------------------------------------------------


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?