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So where is the Learning Mac OS X for the unix geek?

It just so happens it's available from O'Reilly as well. The Panther edition is due out in June.

The dead-tree version is in third edition. I'm nearly done with it - I enjoy paper more than pixels for such subject matter.

See O'Reilly if you're interested..

I'm amused to see that the name 'Parrot', originally coined for an April Fool's joke over at O'Reilly, has now been used to christen the bytecode interpreter for Perl 6. Life imitating art I guess.

As for the 'extreme makeover' ... I hope it loses a bit of the excessive punctuation ...

$broken ? fix($it) : s/!@#\$%\^\*//g if $ugly >= $all_hell;

This book is available on Safari for subscribers. Cheapest subscriptions start at $10/month. If you're not a subscriber, you can still read the first few sentences of each chapter and section.

If, like me, you find the PHP docs frustrating, then please consider the O'Reilly Programming PHP. I'm working on a large PHP project at the moment and this book has clarified a lot of PHP's counterintuitive strangeness (especially with respect to scoping) for me.

Supposedly the third edition of Linux Device Drivers will be released soon, and will be geared towards 2.6 development (obviously). Anyone who's ever wanted/needed to do linux module programming should definitely take a look at this book, it's basically *the* reference.

...Open Source Toys?

Get it to spread into other languages in addition to Japanese, and add some open source electronic and mechanical toy designs and it might take off.

On a related note, I see O'Reilly and Associates is putting out a "Hardware Hacks for Geeks" book as part of their excellent "Hacks" series - possibly a starting point?

reading the article again your right. Try checking your cookie log and look for the google one. I think the googlewatch site was making a point about *cookies with long expiry dates*.

looking at the cookie on my machine it had an expiry date of 8FEB2038 attatched was the following data ID=36accc993aa66c41:LD=en:NR=100:CR=2:TM=107394243 5:LM=1075939002:S=swKwossf4gh4rD50 Now this is most likely the prefs cookie I set while I was mucking around with some google hacks.

• The fact that you record unique cookie ID, plus IP number, plus date and time, makes much of your information "identifiable." Authorities can also do a "sneak and peek" search of a Google user's hard drive when he isn't home, retrieve a Google cookie ID, and then get a keyword search history from you for this ID. [www.google-watch.org]

this is the type of problem I guess I was trying point out. One should not be overtly alarmed - but wary.

why your searchs of course. this information is gold - advertising, law enforcement etc

MBTI is ISTP

It may be a better fit for those of us with absolutely no background, really short attention spans and very strange ideas about what might be cool to do to a toilet...

Actually no, IIRC. 32-bit architectures brought more than enough advantages over their 16-bit predecessors to make virtually everybody want one. The price difference was rather huge, though.

Linux was born on a 32-bit processor (see the legendary Linus vs. Tannenbaum discussion, where Tannenbaum claims - among other things - that normal people are never going to be in a position to afford a 32-bit processor for a home machine)

I used to use Charter Communications with their cablemodem in California. The service was identical to Time Warner/BrightHouse/RoadRunner in Florida, down to using the same boxes, and the same sorry support.

I bought a Hughes DVR2 (sometimes called DVR3), which is a DirecTV receiver with two connections to the dish (I'll explain more in a minute). I also got the oval dish, with two seperate LNB's, but it has expansion space for the third LNB, should I want to hook it to a HDTV (I don't have one yet).

The bills are very reasonable. I get all the local channels and cable channels for about $100/mo.

I upgraded the receiver with a 140Gb hard drive. From what I gathered on the Internet, that's as big as the BIOS on the box supports, but you can put in a second hard drive as well. As it is right now, I have over 100 hours of recording time, and it would almost be trivial to add a second 140Gb drive. As it is right now, we have weeks worth of stuff recorded.

I strongly recommend the O'Reilly book, "TiVO Hacks". There's lots of fun things you can do with it. I'm working on getting network connectivity to mine, so I can copy movies off to DVD to watch later. :) You can watch recorded shows and movies on your Linux or Windows PC using a modified version of mplayer. If you do both, you may not ever get any more work done again. You can watch soaps at work.

I have absolutely no complaints about reception. It's been perfectly stable even in rain and wind. That's much better than my "digital cable" service was. Movies would always get blocky or go blank, and they just said that was normal.

If you live in the Northern US, you may wish to buy a larger dish. My friend who owns dssaccessories.com sells bigger dishes, and de-icers if you're in a frozen wasteland or something.

I really enjoy watching tv shows that are on when I'm not home, or forget to sit down and watch. I can sit down at 2am and watch my favorite shows, rather than bitching that I missed an episode. The downside to this is that now I've seen every Simpsons and Futurerama, so now I see the description, know I've seen it, and just delete it.

TiVO absolutely rocks for watching TV though. If you pause for a few minutes at the beginning of the show (get a beer or whatever), you can then skip through the commercials through the whole show. It's definately better than watching 8 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes. I didn't realize how short shows really are. Now I watch a 1 hour show in about 1/2 hour. If someone calls, I just pause the show, and I can rewind a few minute (up to 30 minutes) to catch back up with what they were saying. The day I hooked it up, my friend watched the "Fanta" commercial over and over frame by frame, and insisted that the girls were saying "want to f***". I could see it but only after hours of seeing her do it. We're easily entertained.

I wasn't aware that you needed to download special software to run this Google search application.

I think the application comes into picture via the Google Toolbar and also the need to somehow organize all the Google Services & Tools. & Google has also gotten into one-click Blogging via Blogger.

In addition there are tools that visually organize the Google Search results, SearchDay - Visualizing the Web with Google - 8 January 2003

When you start having a book called Google Hacks , you know that there are a lot of HPI's (like API's but for H-Hacking), you know that there is a better way to offer access to these hacks via well organized tools. That is the form and function of the application.

Of course there are other applications like Copernic ( a longer listing here Search Tools), but I think the current applications have miniscule following. What will come from Microsoft or Google will flood the market.

CGI isnt a language! And thats a direct quote from him. What kind of idiot says "I can program in CGI."

This kind

Amit Singh of the IBM Almaden Research Center has written in in-depth technical introduction to Mac OS X, entitled What is Mac OS X? Intended for an audience of Linux and UNIX users, the paper is available here (and covered in this previous slashdot article.

It does a fabulous job of explaining the major differences between Mac OS X and Linux and other UNIX variants.

Every time anyone has ever come to me and said "why can't do X, Y. or Z on OS X?" or "how come I don't have tool X?" or "why does Y behave in this fashion?", there is always a solution or an answer. You make it seem as if OS X is a mystery, and no one knows how it works. There is plenty of information out there, and obscurity isn't the primary place OS X gets its security: it's through good design and basically all services being shut off out of the box, and the fact that security and OS updates are easy for anyone to install without having to keep track of every single security issue out there, and without breaking things every time you patch your machine. It's a lot easier for the average person, or even some people forced into the de facto sysadmin role, to run a reasonably secure OS X machine as opposed to other OSes.

O'Reilly also publishes an execllent book, entitled Mac OS X for UNIX Geeks, that does an excellent job of explaining Mac OS X to people already familiar with Linux or other UNIX variants.

The information is out there, on Apple's own documentation, the Internet, books, and other places. OS X is different from a lot of other OSes, and a lot of the schemes, like Frameworks, Directory Services, and SystemStarter for example, are arguably better. But there is a way to use almost every tool, or do anything you wish, sometimes in exactly the same fashion, that you have previously done on Linux/UNIX.

For a straight-up GUI, he might try MySQL Control Center. It's a Qt-based app, so it'll run on Linux and Windows. It lets you build and run queries, manage the server, etc. Even has a "viewer" for images stored as BLOBs.

There's phpMyAdmin as another option. It's web-based, so the "GUI" should run on anything. It does the same kind of stuff that MySQLCC does: lay out tables, create fields, run queries, etc.

On the admin side of things, the upcoming MySQL Administrator looks like it should be very nice. It lets you drop users, tune the DB, monitor the server, etc.

No matter what he winds up using for a GUI, if he uses MySQL, I couldn't recommend the MySQL Cookbook highly enough. It's an amazingly well-written book and very helpful. Every time I find myself with a "what's the best way to do so-and-so..." question, the answer is never more than 30 seconds of page turning away. It's also good for beginners because it's an easy way to find out how to do particular tasks without having to read an entire manual. It'll let a novice user figure out what query to type into MySQLCC, in other words. And the novice user might eventually find out that all the "database theory stuff" isn't all that difficult to learn.

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure some googling or trolling through freshmeat will yield some GUI apps for PostgreSQL if that's what he's into using.

-B

First of all, just read the first few chapters of MySQL & mSQL by Oreilly and you'll be on your way with "all that database theory" stuff. It's pretty easy actually. I learned how to manage an RDBMS at a fairly young age, especially for a simpler database. If worse comes to worse, Open Office does have some Databasing possibilities. In the end, the tools are out there, you just didn't seem to look to hard. There isn't that much to learn, and you would have found that out if you had tried to learn. The database that you seem interested in making (which I hope is simple, because you can't get away from something like MySQL if it's even just a mid-sized) shouldn't cause you any problems with all of the tools available.

I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country.

Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".

Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.

D. J. Bernstein has provided some good introductory about the workings of DNS, including security.

There's a chapter on DNS security from "DNS and BIND" available at the O'reilly website as well.

The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.

The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.

I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country.

Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".

Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.

D. J. Bernstein has provided some good introductory about the workings of DNS, including security.

There's a chapter on DNS security from "DNS and BIND" available at the O'reilly website as well.

The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.

The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.

I'm torn between the cushy redundancy offered by decentralization, and the cushy security of having most of the servers in a stable, well-protected country.

Fuirst of all, Germany is what most knowlegable people would call a "stable, well protected country".

Second, that in and of itself does not affect the security or reliability of DNS as it is designed very much, and has even less signifigance now that anycast is proven to be a reliable technique for increasing redundancy.

D. J. Bernstein has provided some good introductory about the workings of DNS, including security.

There's a chapter on DNS security from "DNS and BIND" available at the O'reilly website as well.

The biggest dispute about DNS security (and internet security in general) is between those who prefer centralized, single point solutions, and those who prefer distributed, autonomous security measures. IMHO, centralized security creates weakness in most (all?) cases by creating a single point of failure, and is an approach that is most often motivated by the desire to exert control over internet usage in hopes of personal gain (re: VeriSign), and to establish an authority because of a misguided belief that there need be one.

The internet's basic strength is due to it's lack of dependance on centralized authorities in order to work. Any proposals that change that basic assumption are either poorly thought out or suspect.

what they are talking about for a change.

The recent flurry of articles giving the impression that VeriSign is somehow "in charge" of DNS has been rather irritating, when in fact, it is not difficult to configure your DNS server to ignore VeriSign operated root servers. (If you're using bind, dont include thier roots in your roots.cache zone file. I'm sure there's an equivalent trick for djbdns.)

I wish all of those who are about to continue the current flood of "what difference does it make?" and "VeriSign controls DNS anyway." posts would kindly read this article and this one as well for a breif tutorial on DNS from that programmer who writes good shit but everyone says they hate him anyway, D. J. Bernstein.

If you like the subject, maybe you should go out and buy a copy of DNS and BIND so you'll have something interesting to talk about at the coffee house this weekend.

The truth is that DNS is a distributed system that is rather well designed to be redundant. The anycast implementation mentioned in the article is a good and needed way (it's the right way[tm]) to increase the redundancy that is already inherent in the system, making DNS much more secure and resistant to DDOS attacks and other attempts to disrupt DNS service. VeriSign showing off thier "secure" sites, and blowing thier own horn about how "important" they in particular are to the internet is a load of sh*t that should not be given a second thought unless you are in the habit of educating our lawmakers about related issues. Not an especially good habit, it will make you enemies (but only if you're right).

HTH

You don't believe me? Look at the living room, the kitchen and your bedroom, for example. Are they arranged and decorated as they would be if you lived there alone, or as they would be if she lived there alone? I thought so.

But as you are a long term guest, and because of your various useful functions (getting things off high shelves, opening jars, killing icky things and changing fluids) you should be alloted some small parcels of guy space.

Traditionally, guy space is found in the garage, the basement, the attic or sometimes in a room in the house that the wife can find no other use for. They are filled with things; guy things; things that the wife will not tolerate anywhere else in the house but cannot outright ban. Your power tools, your games , your books , your semi-abandoned projects, your things that are too close to working again to throw away,

This is where your computers should be.

Once you establish that your computers are in your space - where everything is as it should be - let your cables be as they should be. The general condition of the guy space must constantly remind her that here, she is the guest A rat's nest of computer cables on the floor sends that message subtly but strongly.

They do have some O'Reilly books at English-language bookshops in Indonesia, but the mark-up is anywhere from 30%-50%.

O'Reilly offers "upgrade" pricing on all of their books. If you have an earlier edition, and buy the latest edition from them, you get 30% off the retail price. Proof of purchase is the ripped out title page.

That's alot of nonsense as GPL software has been included with most commercial Unix variants as soon as Stallman could pump it out. Here's some info on that:"and thus quite often any machine running a commercial Unix variant would stock GNU versions of utilities to take advantage of these features and to have a standardized version of them.". In addition, Sun, RedHat, HP, IBM, Novell, MySQL, SAP and even SCO claim your wrong. GPL'd software is making money, and everyone wants to be in that market.

The BSD license (even the old, "bad" one) was the catalyst that ignited the entire Unix philosophy and mindset, initially in academia, but soon after throughour industry.

Your history is a little mixed up, as it was AT&T's code (not Berkeley's) that was initially circulating in academia. This is how Berkeley got a hold of it, and started tweaking it and eventually got into a lawsuit over it. Here's a timeline to help you out.

The BSD license allowed Sun to build the world's first computer deisgned to run an open OS, and Sun's competitors were all forced to follow suit, making the Unix "idea" the single most dominant way of thinking about computing throughout the world.

Sadly, I don't think I could convince you how bad it is to lock away innovation from the community as the private commercial Unix companies did. But, if you need proof as to the abusive result, take a trip to Redmond and ask them about the countless man hours lost to the Blue Screen of Death.

Damn straight that couldn't have happened under the GPL: all the incentive would be gone. Linux itself owes its very existence to BSD, for without it, that young Finnish hacker would never have heard of Unix and thus to want to do somethinng so daft as to get a copy of it running on a PC.

Umm, how old are you? Please refer to the links I give above for Unix history and how not all Unix variants descend from BSD.

I really wonder what great opportunities we're missing now simply because som much good code is rendered useless for commerce by the GPL.

I understand how a certain perspective can make the mistake, but I believe you meant "rendered useless" for theft.

I jsut made the call on an embedded OS for a proposed product at out new startup: it will be BSD-based rather than Linux based.

Thank you for ejecting yourself from the competition. Natural selection is best viewed in the marketplace.

Partly for BSD's greatly superior stability,

Clearly not up on reading the news. That old argument is no longer valid. Linux is often more stable in recent versions that some of the free BSDs, and as stable as the others. As time goes on, and Linux's maturity continuous and BSD begins to be simpy academic toys, you'll start hearing of how hobbyists wish their favorite BSD variant could support x-number of clients at x-number rate with x-percentage uptime. This is the natural course of things.

, but mostly so that we can freely modify the system and offer those improvements as a real benefit to our customers. That's simply not possible with the GPL...

I wouldn't be overly proud of hiding your sourcecode improvements from your clients. That doesn't engender much sympathy during a time when transparency is in vogue and clients begin demanding that they have access to the code. If you're still in the embedded business in a few years, you'll be using Linux in some form.

= 9J =

I don't think free software is an issue of concern with GPL zealots. However, Free Software certainly is. But, it may be too subtle a point for BSD zealots to understand.

No, the subtle point not being understood here is the difference between Free software (free as in speech) and Copyleft software. This is a distinction made by the holy prophet of software freedom himself. There is such a thing as non-GPL Free software, and even more, the modified BSD license is considered to be a Free software license compatible with the GPL.

BSD cannot lay claim to being more of a community builder than the GPL. If anything, BSD has been responsible for the rise of various proprietary Unix systems, completely splintering the market, allowing other inferior proprietary systems to enter and dominate. A fork in GPL code could never be truly splintered as improvements are guaranteed to be made available for all to profit from.

Well, this is one of the big mistakes that GPL-only advocates make. Software should be free because it is ideas and ideas are non-rivalous resources. But at the same time, software should be protected from "theft" and "splintering", something that just can't happen with a non-rivalous resource.

Perhaps I don't see the problems produced by Unix that you do, being an old unix hand myself. The common set of tools with a predictable interface meant that I could do work on any system, no matter if it was Linux, Sun, NeXT, IRIX or AIX.

But I think that you don't really know your history here. The Free BSDs developed about the same time as GNU/Linux in response to a primarily proprietary Unix market. If anyone is responsible for the rise of proprietary Unix, it was Bell Labs and AT&T during the 1970s! (See this history for more details.) Since the Open Source BSDs were stalled due to a lawsuit from 1992-1994 (the same period when Linux started gaining mindshare) it is rather difficult to blame operating systems released under a BSD license for a market that existed before their development.

It is really not clear as to whether the GPL actually inhibits splintering, or why splintering should be such a great fear. For example, while vi has spawned off numerous clones and expansions, this has not caused major problems. One would think that apache, as a hugely successful program that does not benefit from copyleft, would be a prime candidate for appropriation and splitting. And yet its very success appears to elevate it to the level that Stallman argues free software should be, a commodity item.

The nice thing about commodities and non-rivalous resources is that it doesn't matter if a company chooses to make a trade secret from a derivative product. Kellog's corn flakes didn't stop people from making grits for breakfast. The fact that you could buy flour and baking soda mixed in a box as bisquick did not stop people from making biscuits the old-fashioned way. Which is what the BSD philosophy is all about, software as a commodity. So what if a company makes money by adding value to a bushel of corn, or a standard tcp/ip stack? I have just as much access to the base commodities as Kellog or Gates.

I've spent several years writing various bits of functionality in JavaScript for clients. It is the worst platform to code for I've seen in some time.

I've tried some of the debuggers, and found them to not be very useful at all.

Sadly, you can't beat 'doing it the old way' using either alerts (useful as they're blocking) or setting up a debug layer (div) to output your debug content to.

It sounds more like you're looking for a reference than anything else. I'd highly recommend the DHTML Definitive Reference. It covers everything, along with good structural tips, like creating a platform independent DHTML API.

For those of you that suggested just using XHTML and CSS.. that tends not to be an option in the real world. You would be amazed at how many Companies use version 4 browsers. And anything on the Mac is just a nightmare.

Hope this helps.

My advice to you, is dont use Javascript , DHTML unless it is really neccesary. Its good for image rollovers and validating forms but the moment you try and do anything fancy with it like manipulating layers you will be plagued by crossbrowser incompatibilities.Generally speaking most of the dynamic content driven things can be done with your existing PHP / backend code.

I have been developing websites for a number of years, and when I do have problems i have usually found that by typing "javascript:" into the offending browser (after an error has occurred) and / or stepping through the code and evalutating variables using the javascript command

alert(insert_problem_variable);

has been able to help me debug frustrating problems most every time. I really dont think you need to fork out hundreds of dollars for a debugger when you just need to use your nonce and a copy of the best javascript book ever written

"NDA's aren't immoral, and they're certainly not forced on people in my experience -- they're the tool that you use to protect yourself when you're given someone special, early access to something in return for them agreeing to keep it secret. If they don't agree with the NDA, they don't sign it, and don't accept the information (or movie) that they would have received under the NDA."

Hahaha... if only there wasn't the long saga of companies using NDAs to keep information that should be open, closed. I would highly reading (at least) the first chapter from the book Free as in Freedom:

Four words. O'Reilly Pocket PHP Reference. This sounds like your kind of book then. It comes in terribly handy, it has a place right next to my Obj-C pocket reference.

No, I'm not selling, but here is a link at O'Reilly's website.

If you know PHP to a certain degree, this book is very useful, and presents real world examples. It is very up to date, and even covers things like PHP OOP and PEAR.

Book links:

Grokking The GIMP - 100% free online or you can buy a copy.

ORA GIMP Pocket Reference -- prettty handy. You might find that in your local B&N or Borders or whatever.

Of course, both of these are for The GIMP 1.2.

Posting as AC, you can guess why. The best book I ever saw for shell scripting has *got* to be O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools. You'd be amazed at what those guys did, and they did it with a *lot* less machine than we have now. Includes a CD full of Good Stuff (TM), BTW.

I have not read the book, but I have looked at the table of contents and the index. The book looks to be a designed to answer many of the questions that you have asked. Hopefully someone on Slashdot has read the book and can tell you if it will help you in your effort to set up a wireless network at your local coffee shop.

Got your XP Pocket Guide a few months back, and it is a very good complement to the A-W series.

Being part of a dev. team slowly migrating to XP, your Pocket Guide is really helpful. You and your editor/s obviously put a lot of effort into communicating a lot of knowledge as clearly and concisely as possible, without losing too much detail.

XP PG accomplishes that, thanks guy.

(Sorry for the OT everybody, chromatic's book was - is - right beside my laptop when I saw his post. Hadda holler..)

Disclaimer: I don't know chromatic, and am not affiliated with either O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley.

I'm not sure if it was just misintentioned
[I don't think I've ever seen the man on TV without yelling at the TV]
a joke, or someone misunderstanding "I like the books O'reilly puts out."

I, too, was using a free bag from WWDC (2000), and it was actually a very well-made bag (converted from shoulder-slung to backpack, and very solid construction), but had to finally put it down (there was an issue with it getting rained on, I think). Now, I carry a bag from Leeds (this model, although I didn't get it from this site), which has proven to be very well-made, as well. I've used it to carry my entire O'Reilly web development book set (Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, Web Database Applications with PHP & mySQL, Managing and Using mySQL, and the mySQL Cookbook), along with my 12" iBook, Palm, cell phone, sync cable, power adapter, and assorted things. It hasn't shown any signs of stress on the shoulder strap stitching, nor do the side seams or zippers show any signs of stress. I don't carry that much all the time, but I do frequently, and I've been using this bag for going on 18 months now.

I, too, was using a free bag from WWDC (2000), and it was actually a very well-made bag (converted from shoulder-slung to backpack, and very solid construction), but had to finally put it down (there was an issue with it getting rained on, I think). Now, I carry a bag from Leeds (this model, although I didn't get it from this site), which has proven to be very well-made, as well. I've used it to carry my entire O'Reilly web development book set (Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, Web Database Applications with PHP & mySQL, Managing and Using mySQL, and the mySQL Cookbook), along with my 12" iBook, Palm, cell phone, sync cable, power adapter, and assorted things. It hasn't shown any signs of stress on the shoulder strap stitching, nor do the side seams or zippers show any signs of stress. I don't carry that much all the time, but I do frequently, and I've been using this bag for going on 18 months now.

I, too, was using a free bag from WWDC (2000), and it was actually a very well-made bag (converted from shoulder-slung to backpack, and very solid construction), but had to finally put it down (there was an issue with it getting rained on, I think). Now, I carry a bag from Leeds (this model, although I didn't get it from this site), which has proven to be very well-made, as well. I've used it to carry my entire O'Reilly web development book set (Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, Web Database Applications with PHP & mySQL, Managing and Using mySQL, and the mySQL Cookbook), along with my 12" iBook, Palm, cell phone, sync cable, power adapter, and assorted things. It hasn't shown any signs of stress on the shoulder strap stitching, nor do the side seams or zippers show any signs of stress. I don't carry that much all the time, but I do frequently, and I've been using this bag for going on 18 months now.

I, too, was using a free bag from WWDC (2000), and it was actually a very well-made bag (converted from shoulder-slung to backpack, and very solid construction), but had to finally put it down (there was an issue with it getting rained on, I think). Now, I carry a bag from Leeds (this model, although I didn't get it from this site), which has proven to be very well-made, as well. I've used it to carry my entire O'Reilly web development book set (Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, Web Database Applications with PHP & mySQL, Managing and Using mySQL, and the mySQL Cookbook), along with my 12" iBook, Palm, cell phone, sync cable, power adapter, and assorted things. It hasn't shown any signs of stress on the shoulder strap stitching, nor do the side seams or zippers show any signs of stress. I don't carry that much all the time, but I do frequently, and I've been using this bag for going on 18 months now.

I, too, was using a free bag from WWDC (2000), and it was actually a very well-made bag (converted from shoulder-slung to backpack, and very solid construction), but had to finally put it down (there was an issue with it getting rained on, I think). Now, I carry a bag from Leeds (this model, although I didn't get it from this site), which has proven to be very well-made, as well. I've used it to carry my entire O'Reilly web development book set (Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, Web Database Applications with PHP & mySQL, Managing and Using mySQL, and the mySQL Cookbook), along with my 12" iBook, Palm, cell phone, sync cable, power adapter, and assorted things. It hasn't shown any signs of stress on the shoulder strap stitching, nor do the side seams or zippers show any signs of stress. I don't carry that much all the time, but I do frequently, and I've been using this bag for going on 18 months now.

The real problem is that there aren't any DRM-like controls on the documents. That's a good thing, but obviously it's going to take about a decade before book publishers finally agree to that.

...is "Hacking Exposed - J2EE and Java" from Osborne by Art Taylor, Brian Buege and Randy Layman. It's a really good overview of security in Java, from cryptography, code-signing, sealing jar files, byte code obfuscation etc. It runs the gambit from standalone code hacking, through the client-server tier and on to the J2EE and Web tiers. It has lots of good, reusable code samples too.

I highly reccomend it and it's a great "how to" companion to O'Reilly's Java Security by Scott Oaks.

Are you insane? Hammers, saws and screwdrivers aren't provided to carpenters, but materials that will stay with the customer, like 2x4 planks, I-beams, nails, are. Why on Earth would a programmer, that's not with a VAR, bring a computer to the job? A programmer's tools are nearly all insubstantial (the notable exception being books, but even those are going electronic). Programming is a skill, not a piece of hardware. You don't need a programmer to run a computer. You need the programmer to make the computer do something useful.

The constant equating of programming to an industrial process is without merit and has been debunked before by Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell and others. The construction techniques for software aren't as well understood or as systematized as those known to physical engineers and fabricators. This makes every software project mostly unique, although certainly experiences from previous projects will help the next one. McConnell identifies four legs of software development that must come together to get a successful production. These are people, process, product and technology. In reverse order, the technology piece is simply the OS, the hardware and programming language chosen for the job. The product leg deals with scope of the project, such as listing the required features, inputs, outputs and whatnot. The process bit relates to how the project is (or isn't) managed, risk management and customer feedback. The people aspect comprises the quality of the programmers doing the work. This can have a huge impact on the shipping product.

Outsourcing addresses only one leg of software developement: people. By reducing the cost of this one leg, the cost of the process aspect will go up. It remains to be seen whether paying for more management and process will produce more profitable results than simply working with the native talent pool of programmers. I suspect it won't for most cases. However, there will surely be some outsourcing success stories.

It's grossly unfair to expect the art of programming, which is hardly sixty years old, to be as well understood as construction, which has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. Those managers and market analysts that labor under this delusion are in for a rude surprise.

There are basically two styles of XML parser, event-based (SAX) and document-based (DOM). I find DOM-types easier to use.

Don't know if anyone's pointed it out, but there are some sample links up on the web site. Some really great stuff, just from what I saw. Made me want to buy the book. (Guess that's the point.)

I wonder if Tracking Packages with FedEx is using the new google feature. That would be too simple :)

Does anyone know the name of a small utility to query search engines on the command line? It think it was a 2-letter program, but I couldn't find it anymore :(

I think this is more appropriate.

Your MAC address is easily sniffed and spoofed, but it takes time and determination from the attacker and your NIC needs to be disconnected from the wifi in order for the attacker to gain entry via that MAC. If a neighbor has a completely unsecured open wifi (most likely) chances are very good that they will be targeted first. The attacker would have to *want* to hack your wifi and it takes about an hour or two (depending on your wifi traffic) to get a "weak IV" WEP key. If you're downloading stuff from the net, an attacker can use the packets to construct the WEP, but it does take time. Less traffic takes a lot longer. WEP-plus, however, takes a a prohibitively long time -- WEP-plus is the result of manufacturers removing the presence of "weak IVs" in their algorithms.

Here's a good article that describes how easily "weak IV" WEP can be cracked.

And, yes, the bottom line is, the wire is still a *lot* more secure than wifi. The most secure wifi can be cracked with enough time and the right tools/know-how. Knowing that means you have to decide if the convenience of wifi is worth the risk. I, personally, have nothing of any value on my LAN, so the risk is small.

Basically, make sure you keep backups of your most important files, and don't keep important data (bank accounts, etc) on your wifi accessible LAN and you should be Ok.

Many Linux programming books actually already contain most of the content of these kind of books including Wrox's "Beginning Linux Programming" by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew. You can find the book's webpage here. A very good text to get you started in Unix programming.