O’Reilly Media

The first American Magazine Vanguard Awards recognizes magazines that are innovating, extending their brands, and finding new exciting ways to connect with their customers. And O'Reilly Media's Make snared an AMVA award because of the creation of Maker Faire, which celebrates DIYers and crafters of every persuasion. "Considering that some of the greatest leaps forward in American technological history have been scrappy homebrews (Apple Computer was a literal garage start-up), it's really kind of exciting to think that, given its explosive growth, the Maker Faire might well help along an invention or two that's truly important," writes Simon Dumenco. Read on to find out more about Maker Faire Austin, which opens Oct. 18.

The credit markets are seizing up, Congress-critters are trying to make the case for spending billions in a "rescue" package, the stock market gyrations are giving people whiplash, banks are popping like sulfur-filled bubbles and companies are suddenly having to make some hard decision about payroll at a time even when they have more than enough work. The end of the world as we know it seems to have come about all at once, and even as people are scrambling to protect themselves, not a few people are wondering just how everything went bad so quickly.

Dr. Gary Rost Bradski and Adrian Kaehler, the creators of OpenCV, have put their knowledge into a new book for O'Reilly. With Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library developers and hobbyists can learn how to build simple or sophisticated vision applications. Over the next few days Gary--a consulting professor at Stanford, senior scientist at Willow Garage, a robotics institute research institute/incubator, and vision team leader for Stanley, the Stanford robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous race across the desert--shares his Top Tips and Tricks for getting the most out of OpenCV. Read on for Tip #7: OpenCV and the Robot Operating System (ROS) (especially if you aim to be a robotic God!)

Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance on China for material goods unreciprocated by a reliance from China on American goods; and this adds up to difficult times...

The Art of Capacity Planning — Web-based companies live or die by the ability to scale their infrastructure to accommodate increasing demand. This book is a hands-on and practical guide to planning for such growth, with many techniques and considerations to help you plan, deploy, and manage web application infrastructure. Written by the manager of data operations for the world-famous photo-sharing site Flickr.com, the author offers advice based on years of valuable experience. Browse the book.

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to...

DBA 2: Administering MySQL — In this course, you will learn how to estimate database capacity needs and install a MySQL server. You will setup database users, grant permissions, and apply advanced security to database objects. Next, you will learn how to create and maintain database indexes. To ensure proper data security, you learn to create backups and how to restore data. You will also learn how to provide data to external systems using exports, and how to include external data using imports. Finally, you learn how to track database performance, and how to troubleshoot problems. Enroll Today and Save 25%!

Are you an IT or security professional who is looking for ways to manage sensitive data on employee iPhones? Are you with a law enforcement or government agency and need to process iPhones for evidence? This highly specialized two-day forensics workshop will teach you how to recover, process, and remove sensitive data stored on the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch. Learn more.

Upcoming workshops will be held in both Washington, DC and Dallas/Ft. Worth.

Is Subversion the right tool? "If you need to archive old versions of files and directories, possibly resurrect them, or examine logs of how they've changed over time, then Subversion is exactly the right tool for you." So write the authors of O'Reilly's Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Ed.--C. Michael Pilato, Ben Collins-Sussman, and Brian Fitzpatrick. And here, these members of the Subversion development team give you their top tips for avoiding the pesky network round-trip, safely moving files and directories with wild abandon, teaching your Subversion client to add certain properties to your files automatically, and more. Check them out.

Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...

Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days?...

The Obama for America iPhone application is probably the coolest campaign tool I have seen... EVER! Whoever thought this thing up is a genius.

DonorsChoose is having their annual Blogger Challenge. O'Reilly's blog network hat is in the Technology Blog category along with Fred Wilson, AllThingsD, BoingBoing and Techcrunch. Let's see whose readers will bring more donations in. Donate here. I personally just donated to help a kindergarten class get WiFi. We've selected other technology-oriented requests for us to assist. Join me in...

The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong. Lane (co-founder of...