O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

Dorkbot London - Josette Reports

Our intrepid reporter, Josette Garcia, ventured deep into East London to bring us this magnificent report:

On June 23rd, I went to my first Dorkbot meeting in London. I must admit that I was a little apprehensive as I am no maker, maybe a little crafter – that’s all. I also have to admit that 25,000 volts don’t impress me as I do not have a clue of the power of electricity.

I got to Limehouse Town Hall with Rain and Jamie from the BBC. The venue is very old and not very well kept but you can feel a good atmosphere coming out of it.

After a few minutes chatting with Alex, the presentation started ...

Iain Sharp from Lushprojects talked about his mechanical recreation of the classic arcade game, Lunar Lander. What I particularly liked about Iain’s talk was his reference to Maker Faire, Newcastle. It was so good to hear such positive comments that I might be willing helping organize a 2010 edition. Time will tell.

Ele Carpenter talked about the HTML patchwork – beautiful colours see http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk/

Douglas Repetto, founder of Dorkbot told us what happened to news reported in different media from the white papers to the national press. He also showed some spectacular pictures that he made.

Mike Harrison (http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/) – showed very impressive mix of high voltage sparkles and sound which you can see on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8125259.stm:

Unfortunately, I had to leave before the end and missed out on Sarah Angliss and many more.

Matt Webb at Reboot - Macroscopes and 100 Hours

I always find Matt Webb's talks inspiring. Matt, as many of you will know, is one of the two eponymous founders of Schultz and Webb design studio, and he wrote Mind Hacks for O'Reilly along with Tom Stafford.

Matt recently spoke at Reboot in Denmark. Within his talk he discussed the notion of a macroscope:

I’d say this focusing is an important component of what, another designer, John Thackara calls a macroscope.

A macroscope? Thackara says,

“A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.”

Scientists have microscopes. Astronomers and peeping toms have telescopes. Designers, in order to see the very big, in order to see culture, which is much bigger than any one of us personally, have macroscopes.

The way I think of a macroscope is as something that shows you where you are, and where you are within something much bigger—simultaneously, so you can comprehend something much vaster than you suddenly in a human way, at a human scale, in the heart.

That was the interesting bit. The inspiring bit came at the end:

So I say our decisions about culture at large, about the question of how to spend our 100 million hours, I say these are rooted in personal ability to wield the tools of production. And as we said, 100 hours practice would get you a really long way.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Via Russell Davies

OpenTech 2009: 4th July 2009 - This Saturday!

Countdown to Open Tech 2009. Open Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference and it is taking place this coming Saturday (4th July 2009) at ULU, Malet Street. This year's theme is one familiar to O'Reilly readers - Working on Stuff that Matters.

When: Saturday 4th July 2009
Where: ULU, Malet Street, London
Cost: £5 on the door
Register to attend and then Join the mailing list.

Josette and I will be there on the O'Reilly stand - drop by and say hello!

YAPC::Europe - Lisbon, 3rd-5th August 2009

The YAPC::Europe conference will take place in Lisbon from the 3rd to the 5th August 2009. A fine array of speakers are scheduled for 4 tracks over the three days, with a sizeable handful of O'Reilly authors on the bill: Dave Cross, brian d foy, Damian Conway and, of course, Larry Wall.

If three days isn't enough for you, there are training courses before and after you can attend.

On the Thursday and Friday after the conference, Damian Conway, brian d foy and Mark Keating are hosting courses on New Features of Perl/Perl Best Practices, Mastering Perl and EPO Workshop, respectively.

And Dave Cross is running a two-day Introduction to Perl course for the two days prior to the conference. Newbies can start the weekend with no understanding of Perl and exit on Sunday evening with enough knowledge to enjoy the rest of the conference.

Indeed, Dave's course isn't the only conference feature to caters for Perl Rookies. Says Dave:

Send a Newbie.
"Another interesting experiment this year is Edmund von der Burg's 'Send-a-Newbie' programme. Edmund was concerned that there are usually very few young people at YAPC, so he decided to do something about it. People can donate money and Edmund (with a committee of trusted advisors) will allocate that money as grants which can be used by young people to pay to get to the conference. See http://www.send-a-newbie.com/ for more details."

What is this?
We want to cover the costs for young Perl programmers to attend the 2009 European conference in Portugal, funded by donations from individuals in the Perl community. Attending YAPC::EU is a great way to get to know others in the Perl community and we don't want anyone to be excluded.

On top of that, O'Reilly's very own Josette Garcia will be attending the conference, which is enough to make any event complete.

Brucon - a new Security conference in Brussels

The Splendid Kris Buytaert writes:

BruCON is the first annual security and hacker(*) conference providing two days of an interesting atmosphere for open discussions of critical infosec issues, privacy, information technology and its cultural/technical implications on society.

Organized in Brussels on 18th and 19th September 2009, BruCON offers a high quality line-up of speakers, such as CloudSec guru Christoffer Hoff  and encryption expert Vincent Rymen with different talks about security challenges and interesting workshops. It's affordable, accessible and entertaining.

BruCON is a conference by and for the security and hacker (*) community. The 2-day conference wil be preceeded by a 2-day Security Training on topics such as Pen Testing, Web 2.0 hacking and Social Engineering for IT Security professionals.

Early bird registration is valid till July 1st with prices starting from €50 for students.

_{(*)Hackers are "persons who delight in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." People who engage in illegal activities like unauthorized entry into computer systems are called crackers and don't have anything to do with hacking. BruCON doesn't promote any illegal activities or behavior. Many hackers today are employed by the security industry and test security software and systems to improve the security of our networks and applications. In addition, for the younger generations.}

OpenSQLCamp, European Edition

The Mighty Kris Buytaert writes:

OpenSQL Camp is a fresh, free, unconference conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first edition of OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, in November 2008, it was a huge success.

Lenz posted the invitation to OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition which will take part in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany. St. Augustin is located close to Bonn and Cologne.

Attendees of this conference are mostly open source developers and end users/open source enthusiasts. The FrOSCon organizers agreed to provide us with a "Developer Room" for both days, which allows us to organize our own subconference about Open Source Databases. The goal of this event is to spread the word about the vibrant communities and large ecosystems around Open Source Databases and to educate the attendees about what alternatives exist to commercial databases.

Popular Open Source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL will probably be well presented, but the other lesser known platforms will also be around and there are still slots available for talks!

Request Tracker (RT) Tutorial - London, Tues 11th August 2009

O'Reilly UK and UKUUG have another fine tutorial scheduled for your delectation. In London, on Tuesday 11th August 2009 between 9.00 and 17.00, we give you Request Tracker:

Request Tracker (RT) is an enterprise-grade ticketing system. It is designed to help your organization track what needs to get done and what still needs doing. From basic customer service to advanced back-office workflows, RT is flexible enough to keep your processes smooth and effective.

Your Tutor: Jesse Vincent, the author of RT, co-author of RT Essentials:

Jesse Vincent is the author of RT and the founder of Best Practical Solutions, LLC, a company dedicated to open source tools to help people and organizations keep track of what needs doing, when it gets done, and who does it. Before founding Best Practical, Vincent worked as the systems lead for a now-defunct dotcom and as a software designer at Microsoft.

Book now: online or booking PDF.

More event details at ukuug.org/events/rt/.

Interview with Francesco Cesarini, co-author of Erlang Programming

The great Francesco Cesarini, co-author with Simon Thompson of Erlang Programming talked to me at QCon about what makes his book different:

And here's Francesco advocating for Erlang Factory, which will take place in London from the 25th June 2009, with Erlang University starting on the 22nd June 2009:

Erlang Programming - Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson

Erlang Programming is an in-depth introduction to Erlang, a programming language ideal for any situation where concurrency, fault tolerance, and fast response is essential. Erlang is gaining widespread adoption with the advent of multi-core processors and their new scalable approach to concurrency. With this guide you'll learn how to write complex concurrent programs in Erlang, regardless of your programming background or experience.

Written by leaders of the international Erlang community -- and based on their training material -- Erlang Programming focuses on the language's syntax and semantics, and explains pattern matching, proper lists, recursion, debugging, networking, and concurrency.

This book helps you:

* Understand the strengths of Erlang and why its designers included specific features
* Learn the concepts behind concurrency and Erlang's way of handling it
* Write efficient Erlang programs while keeping code neat and readable
* Discover how Erlang fills the requirements for distributed systems
* Add simple graphical user interfaces with little effort
* Learn Erlang's tracing mechanisms for debugging concurrent and distributed systems
* Use the built-in Mnesia database and other table storage features

Erlang Programming provides exercises at the end of each chapter and simple examples throughout the book.

Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson will be signing their new book Erlang Programming at the Erlang Factory. Buy on the day and get 35% discount off the cover price.

Geek Atlas - Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, Ca, USA

This week, John Graham-Cumming has presented a series of short videos discussing some of the fantastic places in his book, The Geek Atlas. Today is John's final video, this time talking about the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, US, where a large section of the Humane Genome was first sequenced:

Previous presentations:
Arago Medallions, Paris, France
Horn Antenna, Holmdel, NJ, USA
Down House, Downes, Kent, UK
Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK
Experimental Breeder Reactor No1, Idaho, USA

Check out: The Geek Atlas website.

Thanks, John!

Geek Atlas - Arago Medallions, Paris, France

In this penultimate presentation of this video series built around The Geek Atlas, the author John Graham-Cumming discusses The Arago Medallions, which mark the meridian that runs through Paris:

Previous presentations:
Horn Antenna, Holmdel, NJ, USA
Down House, Downes, Kent, UK
Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK
Experimental Breeder Reactor No1, Idaho, USA

Check out: The Geek Atlas website.

Geek Atlas - Horn Antenna, Holmdel, NJ, USA

The third video in The Geek Atlas series finds author John Graham-Cumming talking about the Horn Antenna, Holmdel, New Jersey in the States, where a chance discovery served to confirm The Big Bang:

Previous presentations:
Down House, Downes, Kent, UK
Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK
Experimental Breeder Reactor No1, Idaho, USA

Check out: The Geek Atlas website.

Erlang Factory, London 22nd – 26th June 2009

Francesco Cesarini writes:

Less than one month left to The Erlang Factory in London. We have over 35 confirmed speakers to the conference (June 25th - June 26th) from four continents speaking in six different tracks! Highlights including Joe Armstrong and Bjarne Dacker who were involved in the birth of Erlang, Kenneth Lundin, the current head of the Erlang/OTP Development Team at Ericsson, Simon Peyton-Jones, maintainer of the Glasgow Haskell compiler and Mark Imbriaco from 37signals (Just to mention but a few!). To learn more about the speakers, their talks and the tracks, go to:
http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2009/talks

More than a conference?
The Erlang Factory 2009 in London is not only the greatest Erlang conference but also the opportunity to attend  3-day Express courses in Erlang and Erlang-related technologies (OTP, CouchDB and Quick Check). The Erlang Factory will start with the Erlang University (June 22nd - June 24th), where you can attend  focused training in Erlang at less than half the price of a normal 5-day course!  There are still places left on the Erlang University Courses but these are limited so visit our website and don't miss out

http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2009/university

Visit our website and register there as soon as soon as possible. Without YOU the Erlang Factory 2009 won't be the same!

Geek Atlas - Down House, Downes, Kent, UK

The second video in our glorious series of short presentations by The Geek Atlas author John Graham-Cumming covers Down House, Downes, Kent, UK, where Charles Darwin lived for 40 years:

Previous presentations:
Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK
Experimental Breeder Reactor No1, Idaho, USA

TOP SECRET ULTRA - BLETCHLEY PARK

BLETCHLEY PARK IN THE GEEK ATLAS
O'Reilly will donate 50p to the Bletchley Park Trust Fund for every copy of The Geek Atlas sold in the UK.

Kelsey Griffin, Director of Museum Operations for Bletchley Park Trust, writes:

Bletchley Park, once Britain’s best kept secret, is now a vibrant heritage site with exhibitions, events and educational activities and open daily to visitors. The Park’s breathtaking WW2 codebreaking successes helped shorten the war by around two years, saving countless lives.

The true Bletchley Park Story is more incredible than fiction. A desperate race against time, pitting Britain’s best brains against Hitler and his chief commanders. The WW2 codebreakers’ audacious mission was to crack the German Enigma machine and decode other seemingly unbreakable messages. Against them? Odds of 158 million, million, million. Their reward? ‘Ultra’ Intelligence that saved Allied convoys carrying essential supplies from U Boat wolfpacks on the prowl. So effective was Bletchley Park that the decoded messages sometimes reached the Allies before the enemy.

One phenomenal achievement was the total secrecy in which, at the peak of the war, 8,500 people worked in three shifts around the clock. Another was the innovative and cutting-edge technology they designed to do the job. Bletchley Park was at the heart of the world’s biggest secret communications network and was the birthplace of the first electronic digital computers. A huge codebreaking operation, the like of which had never been seen before, birthplace of GCHQ, today’s Government Communications Headquarters, Bletchley Park was Churchill’s Secret Passion and he called its codebreakers his 'geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled'.

At the end of the war the thousands of remarkable people responsible for the intellectual codebreaking weapon that shortened the war so dramatically went about their normal daily lives not breathing a word about Bletchley Park for thirty years. Never receiving, nor expecting to receive, recognition for their astonishing achievements which had the most profound outcome on WW2, the twentieth century, the free world and the information age. 

In 1991, the site was almost empty and plans were afoot to demolish the buildings to make way for a housing and supermarket development. The secrecy that had been so critical to Bletchley Park's success during the war was now counting against it. For secrecy meant ignorance, starving the Park of investment and resulting in its slow decline. By the time the public become aware of the Park's wartime and technological significance, it was almost too late. Almost, but not quite.

In 1992, the Bletchley Park Trust was formed by some passionate individuals with the aim of preserving Bletchley Park as a permanent tribute to the unsung intellectual warriors such as Turing, Welchman and Knox. Since then the Trust has faced, against unfavourable odds, a desperate race against time reflecting the challenges of its codebreaking forebears - to save Bletchley Park for the nation. Without ongoing public funding, the Trust has worked tirelessly to secure the land and preserve the iconic codebreaking huts and related buildings on a sprawling and ageing site.

In November 2008, English Heritage announced that it would invest £330,000 for the Trust’s biggest single problem, immediate critical repairs to the decaying Mansion roof. At the same time English Heritage offered a further £100,000 per year over the next three years, subject to match-funding, for the backlog of essential, urgent maintenance and repairs. In the last few weeks, Milton Keynes Council has offered this match-funding. The Trust is currently working on a major bid for Heritage Lottery Funding and is hopeful for the success of this bid to transform Bletchley Park into the world-class heritage and educational centre it deserves to be to match the significant impact it had on the way we all live today. The Trust has a solid business plan which demonstrates that once the restoration and regeneration work is complete the museum will be completely self-supporting. Public interest in the Park has never been higher with over 80,000 visitors in 2008.

Yet the fight is not over. Whilst capital project work is ongoing and estimated to take another two to three years, it is the day-to-day operational costs associated with running a large, rundown and seriously neglected site that the Trust struggles to meet. In May of this year, Bletchley Park Trust suffered further disappointment when the government rejected an appeal for aid.

Should you wish to make a donation, follow the link on the homepage at: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk

Geek Atlas - Royal Institution of Great Britain, London

To mark the UK publication of The Geek Atlas, the author John Graham-Cumming presents a week of videos about places within the book.

First up is The Royal Institution of Great Britain, based on Albemarle St in London, which houses the Faraday Museum.

See also:
John Graham-Cumming presents Experimental Breeder Reactor No1, Idaho, USA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsZGP9RS1Ls

Maker Faire Africa - Ghana, August 2009

Non-feed readers of GMT will recently have seen the badge for Maker Faire Africa in the top right hand corner.

Maker Faire Africa will take place in Accra, Ghana between the 14th and 16th August 2009 at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. It is being organised by Emeka (Timbuktu Chronicles), Mark (Ned.com), Amy Smith (MIT IDDS), Lars (MIT), Nii (Nubian Cheetah), Erik (AfriGadget), and Juliana (Afromusing): "O’Reilly, along with the guys at Maker Faire, have given us their blessing to use the name."

The aim of a Maker Faire-like event is to create a space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified, propagated, etc. Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

Maker Faire Africa will engage on-the-ground breakthrough organizations like Ashesi University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to sharpen focus on locally-generated, bottom-up prototypes of technologies that solve immediate challenges to development. Specifically, Maker Faire Africa will take an approach that will achieve three principal aims:

• Brighten the light on local examples of the “fabrication” ethos
• Provide mechanisms to incubate these innovators and their products to a point where they can be taken to market
• Connect refined plans to disseminate innovations with venture finance

The aim is to identify, spur and support local innovation. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing. The long-term interest here is to cultivate an endogenous manufacturing base that supplies innovative products in response to market needs.

The organisers need to raise $25,000 to make this event happen - you can contribute via a Paypal widget on the Maker Faire Africa homepage.

What does the future hold for MySQL?

An Interview with Michael 'Monty' Widenius

Josette Garcia writes:

I met Michael “Monty” Widenius, founder of MySQL and co-author of MySQL Reference Manual (O’Reilly), during eLiberatica conference last month. As MySQL, Sun and Oracle are very much in the news at the moment, I thought you might want me to share with you some of the talks I had with Monty.

 

Q.  When and why did you start MySQL or how did MySQL come about?

A. Netbas, the origin of the MySQL projected was started in 1981 after a discussion with Allan Larsson that there where not any good general database programs around. I said I had some ideas of how this should work and sent Allan a working prototype a week later. (Note that this was on a computer with 28K of ram!)

We used Netbas over years (changing names a couple of times: the last name was Unireg) to develop applications like book-keeping, warehouse systems etc. Over time we started to use it to store and aggregate data for large data warehousing applications. In 1995 we needed methods to generate web pages with information from the database. I removed the GUI interface from the application and report functions and instead added an SQL interface and MySQL was born.

David Axmark then convinced the other MySQL founders, Allan Larsson and me that we should release MySQL to the masses under a free and dual licenses product.

eLiberatica

Josette Garcia writes:

eLiberatica, organized by Lucian Savluc and Agora, is over.

As usual I met some great people:
. Georg Greve, President - Free Software Foundation, Europe - FSFE works to create general understanding and support for software freedom in politics, law and society-at-large.
. Danese Cooper told a few "True Stories from Open Source". In the taxi to the airport she also told me of the importance of "R"- more on this later, probably toward the end of the year.
. Teo Constantin Teodorescu gave a very funny and deep talk "National Unique Queue Register can fight against Corruption".
. Monty Michael Widenius - "Open Source licensing and software quality" and David Axmark - "Clouds on the Horizon? Get Ready for Drizzle", the two men behind MySQL.

Other exhibitors included:
. Fedora
. Romanian Free Software
. Mozilla
. RadGs Software
. Byblos

What did I learn?
. From a very student-oriented conference, this year the business people made over 50% of the number of delegates, even though the conference was held at the Universitatea Politehnica. Is Open Source at long last finding notoriety/credit among the business community?
. Once Again, ladies were well represented at this conference - approx 20-25%. It seems that education is different here and that girls are not automatically pushed to humanities studies and boys to science. One day we might see this happen in Western Europe.
. Unfortunately, I feel that the credit crunch hit Romania pretty badly and that money is very tight and jobs not secure. It is always a pity that a nation which has been fighting to recover from a very bad political and economical past, has to continue struggling due to events occurring outside its boundaries.

The Geek Atlas

Geek Atlas is promising to be a magnificent book, a travelogue of '128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive'. The author, John Graham-Cumming, wrote it because he wanted to read it - he looked around for something that met the Geek Atlas' description, but nothing out there came close to bringing together all the fascinating places around the world which encapsulate the thrill of technological discovery.

We have a series of five videos lined up for the week that the Geek Atlas is published, (which at time of writing is week commencing 8th June in the UK). Each day, John will discuss a different location from his book. In the meantime, here's a taster, Experimental Breeder Reactor No 1, Idaho, USA, filmed in the Faraday Exhibition at the Royal Institution, Albemarle St, London:

Learning Flash CS4 Professional - Rich Shupe

9780596159764: Learning Flash CS4 Professional by Rich Shupe - £34.50

Learning Flash CS4 Professional offers beginners and intermediate Flash developers a unique introduction to the latest version of Adobe's powerful multimedia application. This easy-to-read book is loaded with full-color examples and hands-on tasks to help you master Flash CS4's new motion editor, integrated 3D system, and character control with the new inverse kinematics animation system. No previous Flash experience is necessary.

This book will help you:

• Understand Flash fundamentals with clear, concise information you can use right away
• Learn key concepts and techniques in every chapter, with annotated screenshots and illustrations
• Develop an ongoing project that utilizes material from every chapter
• Practice new skills and test your understanding with constructive exercises
• Learn how to package your work for distribution on the Web and through AIR desktop applications
• Download sample files and discuss additional Flash features on the companion blog

As part of the Adobe Developer Library, this is the most authoritative guide to Flash CS4 available.

Beautiful Security - Andy Oram, John Viega

9780596527488: Beautiful Security by Andy Oram, John Viega - £30.99

In this thought-provoking anthology, today's security experts describe bold and extraordinary methods used to secure computer systems in the face of ever-increasing threats. Beautiful Security features a collection of essays and insightful analyses by leaders such as Ben Edelman, Grant Geyer, John McManus, and a dozen others who have found unusual solutions for writing secure code, designing secure applications, addressing modern challenges such as wireless security and Internet vulnerabilities, and much more.

Among the book's wide-ranging topics, you'll learn how new and more aggressive security measures work -- and where they will lead us. Topics include:

• Rewiring the expectations and assumptions of organizations regarding security
• Security as a design requirement
• Evolution and new projects in Web of Trust
• Legal sanctions to enforce security precautions
• An encryption/hash system for protecting user data
• The criminal economy for stolen information
• Detecting attacks through context

XMPP: The Definitive Guide - Peter Saint-Andre, Kevin Smith, Remko Troncon

9780596521264: XMPP: The Definitive Guide by Peter Saint-Andre, Kevin Smith, Remko Tronçon - £30.99

This practical book provides everything you need to know about the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This open technology for real-time communication is used in many diverse applications such as instant messaging, Voice over IP, real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more.

XMPP: The Definitive Guide walks you through the thought processes and design decisions involved in building a complete XMPP-enabled application, and adding real-time interfaces to existing applications. You'll not only learn simple yet powerful XMPP tools, but you'll also discover, through real-world developer stories, how common XMPP "building blocks" can help solve particular classes of problems.

With this book, you will:

• Learn the basics of XMPP technologies, including architectural issues, addressing, and communication primitives
• Understand the terminology of XMPP and learn about the wealth of XMPP servers, clients, and code libraries
• Become familiar with the XMPP concepts and services you need to solve common problems
• Construct a complete business application or real-time service with XMPP

links for 2009-05-21

• Italian Book Review :: Programmazione.it :: Security Power Tools
  ISBN: 9780596009632 Autori: AA.VV. Editore: O'Reilly Lingua: Inglese Anno: 2007 Pagine: 823 Allegati: Nessuno Cosa accade quando una task force di ricercatori, ingegneri e analisti di Juniper Networks viene chiamata da O'Reilly per la stesura di un trattato sugli aspetti principali della sicurezza informatica? Il risultato è un libro molto voluminoso, ben curato e abbastanza variegato, seppur con una evidente intelaiatura comune tra i paragrafi curati dai diversi autori.

  Security Power Tools è in effetti un vademecum poco portatile - dipende dalle dimensioni delle vostre tasche - il cui fine è quello di coprire, per quanto possibile, il vastissimo panorama dell'IT security, dagli strumenti alle tecniche di intrusione, dai diversi sistemi operativi all'hardening, dai framework di exploiting completamente automatizzati al reverse engineering di un'applicazione.

  
  
  (tags: Security)
  
  

iWork '09: The Missing Manual - Josh Clark

9780596157586: iWork '09: The Missing Manual by Josh Clark - £30.99

With iWork '09, Apple's productivity applications have come of age. Unfortunately, their user guides are stuck in infancy. That's where iWork '09: The Missing Manual comes in. This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous.

Friendly and entertaining, iWork '09: The Missing Manual gives you crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, its advantages over similar programs -- and its limitations. You'll see these programs through an objective lens that shows you which features work well and which don't. With this book, you will:

• Produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations
• Take advantage of Mac OS X's advanced typography and graphics capabilities
• Learn how to use the collection of themes and templates included with iWork
• Get undocumented tips, tricks, and secrets for each program
• Integrate with other iLife programs to use photos, audio, and video clips

iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual - David Pogue, Jude Biersdorfer

9780596801441: iPhoto '09 : The Missing Manual by David Pogue, J.D. Biersdorfer - £26.99

With iPhoto '09, Apple's popular photo organizer and editing program is better than ever. Unfortunately, intuitive as it may be, iPhoto still has the power to confuse anyone who uses it. That's why more people rely on our Missing Manual than any other iPhoto resource. Author and New York Times tech columnist David Pogue provides clear and objective guidance on every iPhoto feature, including new tools such as face recognition, place recognition based on GPS data, themed slideshows, online sharing, enhanced editing, and travel maps. You'll find step-by-step instructions, along with many undocumented tips and tricks.

With iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual, you will:

• Get a course in picture-taking and digital cameras -- how to buy and use a digital camera, how to compose brilliant photos in various situations
• Import, organize, and file your photos -- and learn how to search and edit them
• Create slideshows, photo books, calendars, and greeting cards, and either make or order prints
• Share photos on websites or by email, and turn photos into screensavers or desktop pictures
• Learn to manage your Photo Libraries, use plug-ins, and get photos to and from camera phones

links for 2009-05-19

• Italian Book Review :: Programmazione.it :: slide:ology - Nancy Duarte
  ISBN: 9780596522346 Autori: Nancy Duarte Editore: O'Reilly Media, Inc Lingua: Inglese Anno: 2008 Pagine: 294 Allegati: Nessuno "Fortunatamente, una serie di esperti ha rivolto il proprio lavoro al cambiamento di queste presunzioni; Nancy Duarte è una di queste: la sua Duarte Design annovera clienti di tutti i tipi tra i Fortune 500, come Adobe, HP e Google, senza dimenticare l'ex vicepresidente Al Gore, le cui presentazioni da premio Oscar sono state preparare in collaborazione con la suddetta agenzia." Judged a very original book, with no con.
  (tags: italian Book review Programmazione.it slide:ology Nancy Duarte O'Reilly oreillygmt)

The Twitter Book - Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein

9780596802813: The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein - £14.99

To reach 400,000+ Twitter followers, you need to know what you are talking about. That's a huge number of people to decide individually that receiving information from you in 140-character bursts will be a good way to pick up knowledge. That's how many people are following Tim O'Reilly on Twitter. Sarah Milstein has 8000 followers. That might be 1/50th of Tim's audience, but it's still a lot of people. Sarah and Tim have learned about Twitter the hard way, by adopting it early and by using it daily to swap opinion and exchange information. Between them, they have embraced the medium of the Tweet, have spoken about Twitter in newspapers and lecture theatres and have advocated for it as a new way to communicate. And now they have come together to write a book about it, which will explain all:

This practical guide will teach you everything you need to know to quickly become a Twitter power user, including strategies and tactics for using Twitter's 140-character messages as a serious--and effective--way to boost your business. Co-written by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein, widely followed and highly respected Twitterers, the practical information in The Twitter Book is presented in a fun, full-color format that's packed with helpful examples and clear explanations.

The Twitter Book - A Sneak Preview

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Couch DB - Interview With Chris Anderson and Noah Slater

Over on GMT Extra, we have an interview with Chris Anderson and Noah Slater, two of the creators of Couch DB and the authors of the future O'Reilly publication Couch DB: The Definitive Guide, which is out now as a Rough Cut. My good colleague Josette Garcia asks the questions:

What is CouchDB?

Here's the official blurb from http://couchdb.apache.org Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a map reduce view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

Why create yet another database?
The status quo for data storage (SQL based RDBMSs) was designed 25 years ago before anyone had dreamed of the Web. CouchDB is designed with the Web in mind. This means it is well suited for giant data sets and evolving data models, while providing a RESTful HTTP API that most web developers will find familiar

(More here)

Publication details:
Couch DB: Definitive Guide - Rough Cut Version
By J. Chris Anderson, Noah Slater, Jan Lehnardt
Rough Cuts Release: November 2008
Print Book Release: September 2009
ISBN 10: 0-596-15816-5 | ISBN 13: 9780596158163

Programming Ruby 1.9 - Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt

9781934356081: Programming Ruby 1.9 by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler & Andy Hunt - Prices: £38.50

Ruby is a fully object-oriented language, much like the classic object-oriented language, Smalltalk. Like Smalltalk, it is dynamically typed (as opposed to Java or C++), but unlike Smalltalk, Ruby features the same conveniences found in modern scripting languages, making Ruby a favorite tool of intelligent, forward-thinking programmers and the basis for the Rails web framework.

This is the reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including all the new and changed methods introduced by Ruby 1.9). It also includes all the new and changed syntax and semantics introduced since Ruby 1.8. Learn about the new parameter passing rules, local variable scoping in blocks, fibers, multinationalization, and the new block declaration syntax, among other exciting new features.