O'Reilly News and Commentary

Upward Mobility: Special Effects Wizardry

2013-05-20T11:51:08-08:10

Most developers aren’t great UI designers (although, as with everything, there are exceptions). But there are a few quick tricks that can dress up an app, even if you don’t eat and breathe Photoshop. Let’s look at a simple iPad …

Four short links: 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T05:19:31-08:11

Our Fair Deal — international coalition (EFF, InternetNZ, Demand Progress, Creative Freedom Foundation, many others) raising awareness and petitioning lawmakers to reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights. (via Susan …

Building Windows 8 Apps, Hadoop Developer Track Course, Write/Speak/Code, and More

2013-05-20T04:18:26-08:12

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note. Zero to App in Two Weeks webcast: Kraig Brockschmidt shares lessons learned to help you improve your …

Kate Matsudaira: If You Dont Understand People, You Dont Understand Ops

2013-05-20T04:18:26-08:13

While automation is clearly making everyone’s lives who work in Operations much better, startup founder Kate Matsudaira (@katemats) acknowledges that “No one ever does their work in a vaccum.” You can try as much as possible to Automate All The …

Improving options for unlocking your graph data

2013-05-19T09:37:11-08:14

The popular open source project GraphLab received a major boost early this week when a new company comprised of its founding developers, raised funding to develop analytic tools for graph data sets. GraphLab Inc. will continue to use the open …

Strata Week: Are customized Google maps a neutrality win or the next filter bubble?

2013-05-17T11:35:15-08:15

Google aims for a new level of map customization Google introduced a new version of Google maps at Google I/O this week that learns from each use to customize itself to individual users, adapting based on user clicks and searches. …

Software and the physical world

2013-05-17T09:19:43-08:16

In this episode of the Radar podcast series Jon Bruner and I are joined by Mike Loukides as we muse more on software and the physical world. No coffee shop clatter in the background this time around as we were …

Google I/O, Big Data Adolescence, Visualization, and the Future of Open Source

2013-05-17T04:17:23-08:17

Google I/O: O’Reilly Editor Rachel Roumeliotis reports from the conference floor. Big Data, Cool Kids: Fumbling toward the adolescence of big data tools. Code as Art: Interactive Data Visualization for the Web author Scott Murray on becoming a code artist. …

Three organizations pressing for change in societys approach to computing

2013-05-16T08:20:08-08:18

Taking advantage of a recent trip to Washington, DC, I had the privilege of visiting three non-profit organizations who are leaders in the application of computers to changing society. First, I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Computing …

Four short links: 16 May 2013

2013-05-16T05:20:34-08:19

Australian Filter Scope Creep — The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for …

Hypermedia APIs

2013-05-16T04:18:56-08:20

Mike Amundsen explains why developers should explore hypermedia possibilities as they develop RESTful applications.

Exploring Hypermedia with Mike Amundsen

2013-05-16T04:18:56-08:21

The Web’s flexibility has helped it to survive and thrive, pushing well beyond the browser-based universe where it first showed its promise. While I’ve spent most of my time working with the HTML/CSS/JavaScript side, the HTTP side of the original …

A Matter of Semantics

2013-05-16T02:46:20-08:22

Messages on the Web carry three levels of information: Structure Semantics, Protocol Semantics, and Application Semantics. No matter the implementation style, all three of these are needed for any successful communication between client and server. This threesome (S-P-A) forms the …

Google I/O 2013: Android Studio, Google Play Music: All Access, and New Advances in Search

2013-05-16T23:49:21-08:23

While there was no skydiving this year to show off Google’s new wearable Glass, there were plenty of attendees wearing them proudly including me. This year hardware, however, didn’t take center stage. The focus was on new tools and upgrades …

Six disruptive possibilities from big data

2013-05-15T10:01:57-08:24

My new book, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything, is derived directly from my experience as a performance and platform architect in the old enterprise world and the new, Internet-scale world. I pre-date the Hadoop crew at Yahoo!, but …

Visualization of the Week: Real-time Wikipedia edits

2013-05-15T15:03:40-08:25

Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding …

Sascha Bates on Configuration Management: Its Not about the Tool

2013-05-15T04:50:04-08:26

“Puppet and Chef are completely different, and yet exactly the same,” admits Sascha Bates. In this interview about her talk at the upcoming Velocity Conference, she discusses common pitfalls that people can avoid when getting started with configuration management. And …

Four short links: 15 May 2013

2013-05-15T04:20:20-08:27

Facial Recognition in Google Glass (Mashable) — this makes Glass umpty more attractive to me. It was created in a hackathon for doctors to use with patients, but I need it wired into my eyeballs. How to Price Your Hardware …

Survey on the Future of Open Source, and Lessons from the Past

2013-05-15T03:15:06-08:28

I recently talked to two managers of Black Duck, the first company formed to help organizations deal with the licensing issues involved in adopting open source software. With Tim Yeaton, President and CEO, and Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of …

What Kind of JavaScript Developer Are You?

2013-05-14T11:50:42-08:29

“JavaScript developer” is a description that hides tremendous diversity. While every language has a range of user skill levels, JavaScript has a remarkably fragmented community. People come to JavaScript for different reasons from different places, and this can make communication …

Big data, cool kids

2013-05-14T10:04:09-08:30

The big data world is a confusing place. We’re no longer in a market dominated mostly by relational databases, and the alternatives have multiplied in a baby boom of diversity. These child prodigies of the data scene show great promise …

JavaScript Makes Browsers Behave

2013-05-14T04:20:45-08:31

If you know HTML and CSS, you’re ready to begin learning JavaScript. But you might be surprised, because JavaScript looks quite different from both HTML and CSS. That’s because JavaScript is a language for computation. Unlike HTML, which is for …

Four short links: 14 May 2013

2013-05-14T03:20:02-08:32

Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve …

User-Centered Design

2013-05-13T15:17:15-08:33

Travis Lowdermilk (@tlowdermilk) is a software developer who recently joined Microsoft as UX Designer for Visual Studio. He hosts the Windows Developer Show and advocates for User-Centered Design (UCD). Travis is the author of User-Centered Design: A Developer’s Guide to …

Big data, cool kids

2013-05-13T13:19:55-08:34

Genomics and Privacy at the Crossroads

2013-05-13T09:06:44-08:35

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2013 Genomes,Environmentsand Traits conference in Boston, as a participant of Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project. Several hundreds of us attended the conference, eager to learn what new breakthroughs might …

Upward Mobility: Dump Those iOS Delegates

2013-05-13T06:15:52-08:36

Because so much of iOS programming involves the delegate pattern (the UITableViewDelegate being a prime example), it’s natural that when programmers are developing their own classes that need to be able to asynchronously call back to a client class, they …

Tech Events You Dont Want to Miss

2013-05-13T04:52:31-08:37

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note. Kicking up the Dust with NodeJS and a Bunch of Other JavaScript Goodness: Bill Scott talks about …

Four short links: 13 May 2013

2013-05-13T04:20:19-08:38

Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he …

Make It Simple: Architecting Your JavaScript Applications for Testability

2013-05-13T03:16:50-08:39

Mark Ethan Trostler (@zzoass) writes and tests code for a living, currently at Google. The veteran coder and author of Testable JavaScript recently delivered a comprehensive lesson on writing and maintaining testable code to some 400 folks from around the …