O’Reilly Media

This week we present portions of two conversations from the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing. Tim O'Reilly talks to Brian Behlendorf about lessons from Apache and CollabNet. Danese Cooper then puts Microsoft's Bill Hilf in the hot seat to talk about Open Source at the software giant. (DTF 08-21-2006: 33 minutes 40 seconds)

George Jardine, pro shooter and Adobe Lightroom Evangelist, was part of the Lightroom Adventure team that traveled to Iceland during the summer of 2006. In this interview by fellow Adventurer Derrick Story, George talks about working with other world class photographers on location and the development of Adobe Lightroom... and how the two forces came together in Iceland.

Select a song or artist you like and Pandora plays similar songs through your web browser. Linux audio expert Brad Fuller reveals how Pandora's combination of open source wizardry, Flash artistry, and human ears serves millions of listeners fresh music--for free.

Munging text is familiar to agile language programmers. It's very straightforward, right? Text comes in, text changes, and text goes out. Yet in a multi-OS world with networks, internationalization, and character sets, is text really that simple? Xavier Noria delves into how computers handle text to explain the newline problem and how to work with it in agile languages.

Callisto, a bundle of optional plugins for Eclipse, now comes with a profiling tool called the Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP). TPTP includes testing, tracing, performance monitoring, profiling, and static-code analysis tools. John Ferguson Smart offers this guided tour of how to use TPTP to speed up your apps.

After welcoming the audience of developers at WWDC, Steve Jobs let the audience know that others would help him on stage. This, in and of itself, was unusual. There are often supporting roles in the WWDC and MacWorld keynotes, but only one featured artist. Not only did Jobs share the stage with Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall, but he allowed them to make many of the morning's announcements. In a way they represented the three faces of Steve. Daniel Steinberg reports.

Derrick Story is back from sunlight twenty-two hours a day in Iceland. He talks to George Jardine about shooting pictures and working on them in Adobe's Lightroom. Chuck Toporek talks with Google's Brian Fitzpatrick about Google Code and Subversion, and Andy Oram talks about Linux Certification Testing with James Stanger. (DTF 08-14-2006: 25 minutes 40 seconds)

A new MySQL storage engine allows you to use tables in remote servers as if they were local. Unfortunately, the documentation doesn't explain much more than that. Fortunately, Giuseppe Maxia can explain everything you need to know to make federated tables work correctly and efficiently.

Python is a powerful and usable language for network programming; its standard library includes several modules for multiple Internet protocols. There's also the powerful Twisted framework. How do you get started? When do you use the standard library and when do you go Twisted? Kendrew Lau demonstrates usable applications with both approaches to help you decide.

Most Java developers use Ant to do builds and are familiar with its core tasks. But Ant's tasks tend toward an undesirable coupling: everything important had to be a core task because it was hard to distribute new plug-in tasks. Fortunately, Ant 1.7's new antlibs feature makes it much easier to distribute and use new Ant tasks. In this article, Kev Jackson shows you how to use, write, bundle, and test antlibs.

Solr uses the Lucene text indexer and a REST HTTP interface to index XML and other text collections quickly and efficiently.

This article will provide you with an in-depth introduction on how to use the NSTableView Cocoa class to display tabular data. You will first learn how to add an instance of that class to your application project using Interface Builder. Then, you will learn how to properly implement the data-source process used to retrieve the data to be displayed by the instantiated table. Jose Cruz shows you how.

Confused by file sharing in XP? You're not alone. Mitch Tulloch brings you under the hood and shows you XP's secrets, in the first part of a two-part series.

With all the attention that Ruby on Rails has been getting, have we not been paying enough attention to the Smalltalk Seaside framework? Also, we'll look back at some OSCON moments.(DTF 08-07-2006: 28 minutes 15 seconds)

By now, many internet users know that they need a firewall to protect their computers while they're online. Knowing that doesn't convey the knowledge of how to create and maintain a firewall. A nice GUI firewall builder called fwbuilder makes it possible to set up a working firewall in ten minutes--on Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Dru Lavigne shows how it works on FreeBSD.

Sometimes a picture can save you thousands of words of description--and debugging. A sequence diagram shows the flow of methods and function calls between modules. Perl lets you generate these almost automatically for Perl code--or even Java. Phil Crow shows how to use UML::Sequence.

Pro Tools guru Gina Fant-Saez has mastered dozens of audio plugins while running her world-class recording studio. Here she reveals her favorite virtual instruments and effects, then recommends what to get if you can only afford a few.

Java SE 6 (aka Mustang) brings with it a new set of improvements to the JDBC API for accessing databases. Improvements include support for the RowID interface, better exception handling, annotation-based queries, and (finally!) and end to the clumsy Class.forName() system of loading database drivers. In this article, Srini Penchikala tours the major features of JDBC 4.0.

Dave Horlick shows us how to use XSLT to fix HTML rendering bugs in Swing user interfaces.

Think you need to write scripts and use JavaScript if you want to write Atlas apps? Think again. Jesse Liberty shows you an easier, more effective, and more productive way--using drag-and-drop programming.

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, is winding down. Conference publicist Suzanne Axtell took a microphone into the exhibit hall and asked various attendees and sponsors for their thoughts on OSCON. (6 minutes 07 seconds)

Is LDAP a database or a protocol? Is it understandable and deployable without reading a thousand pages of explanation and documentation? Brian Jones untangles some of the myths and legends about LDAP to explain what it is, why it's useful, and how to put it to productive use.

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention began with the traditional night of fun--this year featuring Larry Wall's State of the Onion, Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users, and Damian Conway's geek interpretation of the Da Vinci Code. (4 minutes 33 seconds)

The OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open source file format standard for electronic office documents, is poised to change the world from an application-centric model of computing to a document-centric model. Sam Hiser looks at this new standard, how it implements XML for office documents, the technical and political wranglings in the standard, available tools, applications that offer ODF support, who's implementing ODF, and more.

If you have a need for generating or displaying reports, you may want to have a word with BIRT. The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project is an open source Eclipse effort to enable the creation and deployment of complex reports. Jason Weathersby shows you how to grind out reports and display them in web applications and RCP-based desktop apps.