O’Reilly Media

I take minutes in two conference calls every week. Every call starts at the same time -- I look up the number in my calendar, dial the phone, then launch a Vim instance. I've written a few Vim macros to... Read more.

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of... Read more.

An Editorial. Doom and gloom seems to be the order of the day. The stock markets seem to be making daily 4% to 5% drops, followed up by the very occasional 5-6% surges (perhaps the epitome of random walks happening... Read more.

Photoshop expert Deke McClelland offers some straight talk about trimming excess poundage from your images using Photoshop's near magical Liquify command. In this new dekePod episode—The Instant Liquid Diet—Deke shows you how to nip and tuck, avoid stretch marks, and make your trim edges nice and smooth. Watch the video.

Big Data is a major theme on the O'Reilly Radar, so we're delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases and distributed systems. Joe has written a whitepaper with more detail on this topic. There is a debate brewing among data systems cognoscenti as to the best way... Read more.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that they're going to stop selling their consumer security product OneCare, and instead they're going to give away for free an AV product based on the same technology. I've had several people ask me questions... Read more.

Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services is considered to be the most definitive treatment of Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) available. In it, Juval provides both the guidance and insight needed to master the skills for building maintainable, extensible, and reusable WCF-based applications. Juval's talent as a teacher—that for tackling vast subjects and making them easy to learn—comes through especially well in this appendix from his book: An Introduction to Service-Orientation. These days, there's no avoiding the phrase "service-oriented," but few people can explain what it means and why it's so important. Juval gets to the heart of the matter in this excerpt.

Sean McGrath wrote a great article on the struggle for Open Source to manage complexity. It's a great insight because much of programming is managing complexity. This requirement has fostered "high level" languages and continues to be powerful concept that... Read more.

Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase in U.S. visits from September to October and is thus about to experience the sort of explosive growth that will propel it into mainstream consciousness. That could well be... Read more.

Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. Learn more.

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors... Read more.

Once upon a time, website programming was a fairly arduous proposition. You could spend months putting together the various back end processing pages in ASP or PHP or Perl, writing included files that, if you were thoughtful about it, may contain some reuse, but overall writing such code by hand almost invariably meant that the code was not only very targeted to one particular use but was an absolute nightmare to maintain. Read more.

Two new books from O'Reilly's Companion Series offer a complete photography class, tailored specifically for folks using Canon's new Digital Rebel cameras. Both--The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion and The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion--are by producer and videographer Ben Long. In each of his handy pocket guides, Ben not only provides a detailed one-stop camera manual but he also walks you through all the basic photography theories that apply to any camera. And here Ben provides tips, warnings, and reminders from the books for using the XS cameras (which are applicable to most DSLRs). Read on to learn more. Read more.

Twitter—the messaging service that lets you send instant, short updates to people around the world—is fast becoming a mainstream communication tool. In her Twitter for Business webcast, Sarah Milstein (a Twitter user from day one) shows how to use Twitter and other micro-messaging services at work. She covers the the benefits and challenges of this exciting new medium, along with best practices and potential pitfalls you can avoid. Sarah is the author of the O'Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time.