O'Reilly News and Commentary

Why We Started the Velocity Conference

2013-06-17T16:20:13-08:10

Back in 2006, Debra Chrapaty, then VP of Operations for Windows Live (later CIO at Zynga, and now CEO of Nirvanix) made a prescient comment to me: “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted …

Getting to Signature Moments with Microinteractions

2013-06-17T06:16:46-08:11

Microinteractions are the small pieces of functionality that are inside or around features. They are brief, single use-case moments. Turning off the ringer on your phone is one example. While no one buys a phone for the ability to turn …

Four short links: 17 June 2013

2013-06-17T04:20:21-08:12

Weekend Reads on Deep Learning (Alex Dong) — an article and two videos unpacking “deep learning” such as multilayer neural networks. The Internet of Actual Things — “I have 10 reliable activations remaining,” your bulb will report via some ridiculous …

Intro to Raspberry Pi, Wharton Web Conference, Agile 2013, and More

2013-06-17T03:16:16-08:13

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised webcast: Jonathan Stark discusses the coming wireless wave and how it …

HBase looks more appealing to data scientists

2013-06-16T09:35:21-08:14

When Hadoop users need to develop apps that are “latency sensitive”, many of them turn to HBase1. Its tight integration with Hadoop makes it a popular data store for real-time applications. When I attended the first HBase conference last year, …

Strata Week: Why we should care about what the NSA may or may not be doing

2013-06-14T09:36:53-08:15

It’s a question of power, not privacy — and what is the NSA really doing? In the wake of the leaked NSA data-collection programs, the Pew Research Center conducted a national survey to measure American’s response. The survey found that …

Networked Things?

2013-06-14T09:20:03-08:16

Well over a decade ago, Bill Joy was mocked for talking about a future that included network-enabled refrigerators. That was both unfair and unproductive, and since then, I’ve been interested in a related game: take the most unlikely household product …

Really Understanding Computation

2013-06-14T06:48:21-08:17

It’s great to see that Tom Stuart’s Understanding Computation has made it out. I’ve been excited about this book ever since we signed it. Understanding Computation started from Tom’s talk Programming with Nothing, which he presented at Ruby Manor in …

Four short links: 14 June 2014

2013-06-14T04:19:31-08:18

How Geeks Opened up the UK Government (Guardian) — excellent video introduction to how the UK is transforming its civil service to digital delivery. Most powerful moment for me was scrolling through various depts’ web sites and seeing consistent visual …

Radar podcast: the Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

2013-06-14T03:19:33-08:19

On this week’s podcast, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas and I talk aboutthings that have been on our minds lately: the NSA’s surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who …

Data Journalists Gather, Transparency, and Data Viz

2013-06-13T10:36:23-08:20

Data journalism is becoming a truly global practice. Data journalists from the UK, China, and the US are sharing data-oriented best practices, insights, and tools. Journalists in Latin America are meeting this week to push for more transparency and access …

Talk Amongst Yourselves

2013-06-13T06:28:18-08:21

At the Fluent conference earlier this month, I asked the audience to talk to the rest of the crowd. It’s very easy to get caught up in which speaker to go see on which topic, but even the best presentations …

The Power of a Private HTTP Archive Instance: Finding a Representative Performance Baseline

2013-06-13T06:28:18-08:22

Be honest, have you ever wanted to play Steve Souders for a day and pull some revealing stats or trends about some web sites of your choice? Or maybe dig around the HTTP archive? You can do that and more …

Four short links: 13 June 2013

2013-06-13T04:20:43-08:23

The Unengageables (Dan Meyer) — They signed their “didactic contract” years and years ago. They signed it. Their math teachers signed it. The agreement says that the teacher comes into class, tells them what they’re going to learn, and shows …

A First Slice of Raspberry Pi

2013-06-13T03:24:46-08:24

Simon Monk @simonmonk2 is a full-time author who focuses his writing talents on open source hardware topics. He is currently writing the Raspberry Pi Cookbook which will be available in early release in July and in final release in the …

Ins and Outs of Running MySQL on AWS

2013-06-12T07:04:48-08:25

In the following interview, PalominoDB owner and CEO Laine Campbell discusses advantages and disadvantages of using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a platform for running MySQL. The solution provides a functional environment for young startups who can’t afford a database …

PowerShell Command Line Introduction

2013-06-12T03:48:12-08:26

Here’s a slick PowerShell 3.0 one-liner. If you want to pull down an RSS feed from a blog, displaying only the title and publication date try: Invoke-RestMethod "http://www.dougfinke.com/blog/index.php/feed/" | Select title, pubdate It’s that simple. No looping, no checking end …

Four short links: 12 June 2013

2013-06-12T03:19:53-08:27

geogit — opengeo project exploring the use of distributed management of spatial data. [...] adapts [git's] core concepts to handle versioning of geospatial data. Shapefiles, PostGIS or SpatiaLite data stored in a change-tracking repository, with all the fun gut features …

Visualization of the Week: NYC Citi Bike use, in real time

2013-06-11T09:38:29-08:28

New York City’s new bike-share program, Citi Bike, has been underway for a couple of weeks now. Its level of success is still up for debate, but the stats are impressive: as of June 10, there had been 173,516 trips …

Four short links: 11 June 2013

2013-06-11T05:19:10-08:29

For Example — amazing discussion of 3D visualization techniques, full of examples using the D3.js library and bl.ocks.org example gist system. Gorgeous and informative. Anti-Gravity 3D Printer — uses strands to sculpt on any surface. (via Slashdot) How 3D Printing …

Easily Invoke Common Protocols with Twisted

2013-06-11T04:48:50-08:30

Twisted is a framework for writing, testing, and deploying event-driven clients and servers in Python. In my previous Twisted blog post, we explored an architectural overview of Twisted and examples of simple TCP, UDP, SSL, and HTTP echo servers. While …

SPTechCon, iPhone Bootcamp, OSCON, and More

2013-06-10T15:13:37-08:31

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note. HTML5 Application Development Class: This two-day training class offers a small class size and individual attention for …

Ways to put the patient first when collecting health data

2013-06-10T15:01:25-08:32

The timing was superb for last week’s Health Privacy Summit, held on June 5 and 6 in Washington, DC. First, it immediately followed the 2000-strong Health Data Forum (Health Datapalooza), where concern for patients rights came up repeatedly. Secondly, scandals …

Upward Mobility: Android for iOS Developers, Part 1

2013-06-10T12:16:27-08:33

Like many hardcore iOS developers, I’ve eschewed learning “the other platform” because I was happy in Apple-land. In addition, the few forays I’ve made into Android development seem to show that it was a more complex and difficult platform to …

Test-driven Infrastructure with Chef

2013-06-10T07:13:51-08:34

If you’re a System Administrator, you’re likely all too familiar with the 2:35am PagerDuty alert. “When you roll out testing on your infrastructure,” says Seth Vargo, “the number of alerts drastically decreases because you can build tests right into your …

Four short links: 10 June 2013

2013-06-10T05:19:40-08:35

Anatomy of Two Memes — comparing the spread of Gangnam Style to Harlem Shake. Memes are like currencies: you need to balance accessibility (or ‘money supply’) and inflation. Gangnam Style became globally accessible through top-down mainstream sources (High Popularity), but …

Application Resilience in a Service-oriented Architecture

2013-06-10T04:15:30-08:36

byBen Christensen, Software Engineer on Netflix API Platform team Failure Isolation and Operations with Hystrix Web-scale applications such as Netflix serve millions of customers using thousands of servers across multiple data centers. Unmitigated system failures can impact the user experience, …

5 Surprises for PHP Developers Coming to JavaScript

2013-06-10T04:15:30-08:37

PHP programmers often see the familiar C-like syntax of JavaScript and think it’s all flowers and roses. And while trivialities like loops and conditions are pretty much equivalent in both languages, things get very weird very quickly. Let’s take a …

Its getting easier to build Big Data applications

2013-06-09T09:35:04-08:38

Hadoop’s low-cost, scale-out architecture has made it a new platform for data storage. With a storage system in place, the Hadoop community is slowly building a collection of open source, analytic engines. Beginning with batch processing (MapReduce, Pig, Hive), Cloudera …

Strata Week: Wireless body area networks bring humans into the Internet of Things

2013-06-07T13:03:09-08:39

Collaborative sensor networks of humans, and your body may be the next two-factor authenticator There has been much coverage recently of the Internet of Things, connecting everything from washers and dryers to thermostats to cars to the Internet. Wearable sensors …