New Titles Published Tuesday 19th August '08

9780596522346:  slide:ology by Nancy Duarte - £21.99
9781933952291:  Automotive SPICE in Practice by Markus Mueller, Klaus Hoermann, Lars Dittmann, Joerg Zimmer - £34.50
9781934356180:  Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby by Ian Dees - £21.99

David Heinemeier Hansson - Ruby on Rails, Startups, Culture

O'Reilly Media have a channel on YouTube featuring interviews with key technologists. Here's David Heinemeier Hansson in Wicker Park in Chicago:

links for 2008-08-19

  • "We’ve put the Executive Summary of the consultation document online. Please use our interactive consultation tool to tell us what you think of the Government’s options for combating illicit filesharing. The Government’s “preferred” option is to have codes of practice designed by ISPs and rightsholders in collaboration with OfCom, which oblige ISPs to take action against subscribers to their network believed to infringing copyright over p2p. This includes taking action against “repeat infringers”, although the document is short on detail about what such action might entail."
  • "It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the cancellation of Barcamp Oxford on September 20-21. Here's why: i) the primary sponsor, who we were in the final stages of negotiation with (and who were ready to pay for 90% of everything), have ceased trading and brought the administrators in. Having talked with the administrators, there is no money. For anything. Evidently the company in question were VC-funded and blew too much money without keeping track. ii) the secondary sponsor, who were initially willing to be a primary sponsor until they had marketing cutbacks, have had further marketing cutbacks and are now unable to assist with the current economic climate."
  • "After several months of wrangling, ECMA technical committee (TC) 39 - responsible for JavaScript standardization - has agreed to abandon plans for an ambitious new standard dubbed ECMAScript (ES) 4 and concentrate on evolving the current standard ES 3.1 under the new name ES Harmony. The move is seen by some as a blow to Adobe, which had based ActionScript - the language that underpins its Flash platform - on ES4."

Wendy Devolder - The Origins of Skillsmatter

Wendy Devolder of Skillsmatter talks us through the circumstances that lead her to create Skillsmatter:


Wendy Devolder - Skillsmatter from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

links for 2008-08-18

  • "Slide show presentations are taking the world or, at least the box office, by storm. Al Gore's global warming presentation, featured in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, is probably the most successful ever produced. Since its release, the movie has strengthened the world-wide movement to prevent global warming, won two academy awards and helped Gore win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The movie is also an example of how effective a slide show presentation can be. Presentations are a powerful way to get your message across both verbally and visually. To help us learn how to make our slide show presentations as powerful as Al Gore's, we've asked for advice from Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, the company behind the slide show featured in An Inconvenient Truth, and author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. This is what she had to say about delivering a successful presentation."

Hadoop UK - August 19th 2008

Hadooplogo Date: August 19 2008
Venue: Skills Matter, London,
Time: 10:00 onwards

10.00 -> 10.45: Doug Cutting (Project founder, Yahoo!) - Hadoop overview
10.45 -> 11.30: Tom White (Lexemetech) - Hadoop on Amazon S3/EC2
11.30 -> 12.15: Steve Loughran and Julio Guijarro (HP) - Smartfrog and
Hadoop
12.15 -> 13.15: Lunch
13.15 -> 14.00: Martin Dittus and Johan Oskarsson (Last.fm) - Hadoop
usage at Last.fm
14.00 -> 15.00: Lightning talks
15.00 -> 16.00: Panel discussion
16.00 -> 17.00: Beer!
17.00 -> xx.xx: Wandering to a nearby pub

links for 2008-08-15

  • Reprap
    RepRap makes its first complete working replicated copy               
                
  • "T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google's Android software, according to people briefed on the company's plans. The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.
    The high-end phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple's iPhone and other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions."
    (tags: t-mobile android google mobile)      

BarCamp Leeds - August 16th/17th 2008

Barcampleeds08 It's BarCamp Leeds this weekend!

We're Back!
       
It's nine months since Leeds' first BarCamp back in November...but rather than wait a whole year, we wanted to catch the Summer Sun, so come join us at Old Broadcasting House again, this time for two days of geekery and (hopefully) great weather on the 16th and 17th of August 2008!

links for 2008-08-12 [delicious.com]

  • "Anyway, to cut a long story short, the good news for those looking for video quality improvements in BBC iPlayer is that, starting this week, we're going to be encoding our content in H.264 format at 800Kbps. Additionally, our media player now supports hardware acceleration in full-screen mode, giving a greatly improved image at lower CPU usage than before."
  • Erik Huggers: "The time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions." via BBC Backstage Mailing List

Upcoming European Conferences this Fall

Kris Buytaert writes:

The next couple of weeks, months, promise to be really busy if you are interested in European Open Source conferences ...

First up is FrOSCon - a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne. The conference revolves around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, developers will be offered a large Free Software / Open Source space, allowing them to organize their own meetings or even their own lineup of events.

Then it's time for DrupalCon Szeged - with Keynotes from Rasmus and Dries, this event in Hungary  promises to be yet another interesting Drupal Conference. DrupalCon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss and advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. By tradition, Drupalcon is in North America in the first half of the year and in Europe in the second.

If you are interested in monitoring systems then you'll surely be interested in the NetWays Nagios Conference taking place in Nuremberg  on 11th and 12th September, with Ethan Galstad, the creator of Nagios himself, giving a keynote.

Up next is the OpenExpo in Zurich with speakers like Harald Welte, Bruce Perens, Tristant Nitot, and others. The place to be is the Eulachhallen in Winterthur on 24th and 25th September.

The week later the crowd heads to Copenhagen for the Open Source Days. This is a 2-day community-driven open source conference. It's your opportunity to meet, share, experience and learn from open source gurus as well as the common geek. It's a great chance to gain inspiration, but also to reflect and evaluate how open source might improve your business and technical side of your life.

The OpenSource Days conference runs on October 3rd and 4th at the IT University of Copenhagen.

One week later LinuxConf.eu heads back to Germany in the form of the 15th LinuxKongress from 7th to 10th October at the University of Hamburg.

No schedule yet there, but as LinuxKongress is still one of the 3 most important Linux Conferences worldwide, it promises to be interesting.

The end of October means it's time for T-DOSE again. T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. This year's event will be held on 25 thand 26th October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

We are almost at the end of our list with the NLUUG  Autumn Conference which will be held November 6th 2008 in De Reehorst in Ede, the Netherlands. With the market for mobile applications being predicted to be several times as large as the market for traditional computer this year's topic is Mobility.

Concurrently held on the 6th and 7th the Embedded Linux Conference Europe  will be held in the same location, organized by the CE Linux Forum.

Last on our list is the UKUUG's Linux 2008 Conference held on Friday 7th (tutorials), Saturday 8th & Sunday 9th November Conference at the The Manchester Conference Centre.

Gordon Guthrie on Erlang

The magnificent Gordon Guthrie, who wrote Erlang - A CEO's View for GMT, was good enough to speak to me at Erlang eXchange about his company Hypernumber's adoption of Erlang. As Gordon says, "Erlang chose us, we didn't choose Erlang."


Gordon Guthrie - Hypernumbers and Erlang from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

links for 2008-08-10 [delicious.com]

links for 2008-08-08 [delicious.com]

New Titles Published Tuesday 5th August '08

9780596518943: CRAFT: 08   Edited by Tina Barseghian - £8.99
9780596510497: Statistics in a Nutshell   by Sarah Boslaugh, Paul A. Watters - £21.99
9780596518455: Learning ASP.NET 3.5, 2e   by Jesse Liberty, Dan Hurwitz, Brian MacDonald - £27.99
9780596527563: Programming Net. 3.0   by Jesse Liberty, Alex Horovitz  - £27.9

Photos - Open Coffee Leeds, 5th August 2008

Photos from the tail-end of Open Coffee Leeds, once I'd remembered to get my camera out, such was the pleasant time I was having nattering with the attendant delegates. Thanks to Imran Ali for showing me around Old Broadcasting House, the former home of BBC Leeds, which Leeds Met have converted into a fine facility for the benefit of their students and the Leeds Tech and start-up community:

oreillygmt's Leeds Open Coffee August 2008 photoset oreillygmt's Leeds Open Coffee August 2008 photoset
www.flickr.com

links for 2008-08-07 [delicious.com]

Newly Published Titles - 1st August 2008

9780596519186: FBML Essentials by Jesse Stay - Prices: £18.50 / $29.99
9780596518257: Take Your Best Shot by Tim Grey - Prices: £21.99/ $34.99

Akademy 2008: KDE's Free Software Desktop Summit

Akademy2008_logoAkademy 2008 is the annual meeting of the KDE community. This year's event is the KDE's Free Software Desktop Summit which takes place at the De Nayer Institute in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium between the 9th - 15th August 2008.

(via Kris Buytaert)

Russell Davies on Interesting

The magnificent Russell Davies talking about Interesting:


Russell Davies - Interesting from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

SHiFT'08 - 15 to 17 October 2008, Lisbon

SHiFT - Social and Human Ideas For TechnologyBruno Pedro writes:

The SHiFT conference is happening again this year in Lisbon, Portugal. This year's theme will be Transient Technologies:

SHiFT is back this year in Lisbon (Portugal) with a full day of workshops on the 15 and two awesome conference days on the 16 and 17 October. We booked a great venue and we lined up a fabulous speakers lineup. Register now until August 15 and save.

SHiFT has always been about emerging technologies, whether they’re the latest internet trend or the latest social or engineering development. This year's edition is devoted to Transient Tecnologies, in the sense that technology is breaking up with it's digital bouderies and it's becoming a vital part of a lot of the things we do and interact with in our daily lifes.

This year's edition will try to cover the role and impact of technology in such different fields as: Education, History, Genetics, Economics, Acessibility, Transportation, Mobile Technologies, User Experience, Energy and Architecture, Art and Open Technologies.

Early bird registrations are open until 15 August. If you're interested, take a look at the whole program, or propose a session.

New Titles Published Tuesday 29th July '08

9780596519780:  The Productive Programmer  by Neal Ford - £24.99
9780596515089:  Website Optimization by Andrew B. King - £24.99
9780596517960:  Intellectual Property and Open Source  by Van Lindberg - £21.99
9780596529833:  Learning the vi and Vim Editors 7e by Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hannah & Linda Lamb - £21.99
9780596515898:  JavaScript : The Missing Manual  by David Sawyer McFarland - £24.99
9781933952338:  Canon EOS 40D  by Artur Landt - £18.50

Leeds Web Festival - August/September 2009

That irrepressible barker for all things magnificent, Imran Ali, writes:

What we're unofficially calling the 'Leeds Web Festival' is taking place throughout August and September:

August

September

links for 2008-07-30

YAPC::Europe 2008 - Copenhagen, 13th/15th August 2008

Yapc_logo_2008 Josette Garcia writes:

YAPC::Europe 2008 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 13-15 August 2008.

The venue will be the modern buildings of the Copenhagen Business School, right in the heart of the Frederiksberg area of Copenhagen.

The theme of the conference will be "Beautiful Perl".

Among the beautiful perlmongers you will meet Dave Cross Perl Template Toolkit and brian de foy Mastering Perl.

"YAPC" stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference" and is a series of low-cost, grassroot conferences organized by local Perl user groups.

See you there!

links for 2008-07-29

LUGRadio Is Dead. Long Live LUGRadio Live!

Josette Garcia writes:

A little late but I needed to recover from a very emotional weekend when we had to say goodbye to LugRadio. But after a few pints at the Hog’s Head on Friday night, the team decided that the decision was ridiculous and that the show (the conference) should continue. So see you next year “for another weekend of hangovers, bad bodily odour and terrible hair styles “as described by one of the organizers:

Oreilly_stand_lug_radio

Minibar July 2008 - Photos

Photos from Minibar July 2008. I got there to find my camera battery was flat - fortunately the camera on my phone has the 'blur' feature that characterises all my photos, so I could use that:

oreillygmt's Minibar July 2008 photoset oreillygmt's Minibar July 2008 photoset
www.flickr.com

links for 2008-07-28

Copyright Extension - Open Rights Group

Richard King of the Open Rights Group talked to me at LUG Radio Live about the EU's proposal to extend the copyright of recorded music from 50 years to 95:


Open Rights Group - Copyright Extension from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

From the Sound Copyright website:

Copyright is a bargain. In exchange for their investment in creating and distributing sound recordings to the public, copyright holders are granted a limited monopoly during which are allowed to control the use of those recordings. This includes the right to pursue anyone who uses their recordings without permission. But when this time is up, these works join Goethe, Hugo and Shakespeare in the proper place for all human culture – the public domain. In practice, because of repeated term extensions and the relatively short time in which sound recording techniques have been available, there are no public domain sound recordings.

Sign here if you oppose these changes:

links for 2008-07-26


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