O’Reilly Media

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from bits to atoms, 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 songwriters: Digital...

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%!

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 #8: OpenCV behind the scenes.

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.

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...

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.

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...

While Hurricane Ike has long since faded into the ether, its effects on the economy continue to mount. One of the more significant (and unexpected) - Ike knocked several oil refineries and gas distribution centers offline for the last couple of weeks.

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...

Late yesterday, Amazon announced that coming this fall, developers will be able to run Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server instances on its EC2 cloud services. With Microsoft about to announce its own cloud platform this month, Windows-based web developers suddenly have options.

Two tips in Dear Author's recent post "10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers" caught my attention: 1. Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought...

Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message. We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put...

The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also...