Slashdot Mirror

theodp writes "In his latest Ask Tim, Tim O'Reilly suggests the failure of BountyQuest could be blamed on the inability of amateurs to penetrate the patent mess, noting that numerous people sent in what they thought was important prior art on the Amazon 1-Click patent, but the attorneys who reviewed it didn't find it useful. But in this case, the "amateurs" included two patent attorneys (one an ex-USPTO examiner), who found their 1-Click prior art rejected by BountyQuest for not being specific to the Web, an argument a Federal Court told Amazon a month earlier was an irrelevant distinction that could not be used to exclude prior art. Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"

BSD Forums writes "While Unix has roots in document formatting and layout, configuring printers has always required more black-arts arcana. This hasn't been helped by the appearance of low-cost commodity WinPrinters. Fortunately, tools like Ghostscript, gimp-print, and Apsfilter make configuring printers much easier. Michael Lucas demonstrates quick and dirty -- and working -- printer configuration."

chromatic writes "O'Reilly & Associates is working with COMDEX to create an Open Source Innovation Area. We've nominated 21 important, interesting, and useful applications. Here's your chance to vote on the six most deserving applications. Steve Mallet has more details in his weblog." There's lots of good choices for applications on the list as well. Chances are that you've used one of them at least once.

chromatic writes "O'Reilly & Associates is working with COMDEX to create an Open Source Innovation Area. We've nominated 21 important, interesting, and useful applications. Here's your chance to vote on the six most deserving applications. Steve Mallet has more details in his weblog." There's lots of good choices for applications on the list as well. Chances are that you've used one of them at least once.

mactari writes "Jack Herrington at the O'Reilly Network has had the audacity to claim that both PHP and J2EE architecture... are converging on the same design [regarding scalability]. Can it be that he's disproven the idea that 'Java scales and scripting languages don't' when he says, 'The idea that PHP does not scale is clearly false at the performance level'? Even if a little oversimplified (ignores horizontal scaling), it's an interesting comparison that takes a peek at the architecture beneath both hypes."

mactari writes "Jack Herrington at the O'Reilly Network has had the audacity to claim that both PHP and J2EE architecture... are converging on the same design [regarding scalability]. Can it be that he's disproven the idea that 'Java scales and scripting languages don't' when he says, 'The idea that PHP does not scale is clearly false at the performance level'? Even if a little oversimplified (ignores horizontal scaling), it's an interesting comparison that takes a peek at the architecture beneath both hypes."

Alex Moskalyuk writes with the review below of John Viega and Matt Messier's Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++, a book which he says is useful -- but only if you have the background to use it. Read on for the details, including Alex's alternative reading suggestions. Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ author John Viega, Matt Messier pages 790 publisher O'Reilly rating 8/10 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0596003943 summary Real-life recipes for using secure code even in the basic algorithms

The Target Audience of the Book In the foreword to this book Gene Spafford observes that there really are four types of programmers:

1. Those who are constantly writing buggy code, no matter what,
2. Those who can write reasonable code, given coaching and examples,
3. Those who write good code most of the time, but who don't fully realize their limitations,
4. Those who really understand the language, the machine architecture, software engineering, and the application area, and who can write textbook code on a regular basis.

There are, as Spafford claims, too many people in category 3 who think they belong to the category 4, and that's the primary target audience of the book. John Viega and Matt Messier co-wrote Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ not with the intent of proving the necessity of application security, as they mention in the foreword, but to illustrate its application. If you're reading this book, you are probably well aware of the security needs at your workplace or in your projects, and you would like to have a large library of sample code for various operations.

The book has yet another Web site, and since John Viega didn't mind a little slashdotting during the launching stage, so he probably won't mind another link to SecureProgramming.com.

The Book Itself The structure of the book will be familiar to anyone who has read an O'Reilly Cookbook before. The "cookbook" part of the text is nothing more than a collection of solutions to common problems. The code is generally of high quality and written by an expert in the field. What's more important is the discussion section following the code, which explains why things are done in a certain way, what alternatives exist, and what are the best practices in the field.

Viega and Messier have expanded the discussion session, basically doubling the content, by introducing separate Windows and Unix sections where applicable. The reader has a chance to peruse the code for both platforms as well as read separate discussion sections, which helps in navigating the content of the book.

Microsoft platform developers, though, will only be introduced to native Win32 API -- the authors chose to ignore the STL/ATL/COM/DCOM/.NET solutions on the assumption that those could be derived by someone closely familiar with the lowest-level API available from Microsoft. Even though the discussion section is quite detailed and informative for both Unix and Windows developers, the authors do not discuss the design and architecture issues behind secure programming in C and C++. That falls outside the scope of this book; besides, John Viega co-authored Building Secure Software , where a lot of attention is paid to the philosophy of secure programming as well as initial application design with security in mind.

The Contents You can view the table of contents on the O'Reilly Publishing Web site, and with the cookbook format, it's pretty much WISYWIG -- whatever the title of the subchapter is, you will be introduced to the nature of the problem, followed by C/C++ solution, followed by the discussion of the subject with occasional URLs to relevant information on the Web.

Just to sum it up, usage of encryption, message integrity checks, symmetric and public-key cryptography and secure programming get a lot of attention. With 41 recipes (Chapters 4 and 5) on symmetric encryption and 29 (Chapters 7 and 10)on PKI-related code snippets, you can get your yearly supply of Unix and MS CryptoAPI examples.

But this book is not entirely about encryption, since current security problems are rarely caused by the encryption algorithm failures. The networking and Internet-related programming issues are covered in Chapter 8 (Authentication) and Chapter 9 (Networking). In Chapter 3, those designing Web interfaces will find some useful examples of validating the input URL and checking the SQL string against injection attacks. Admittedly, such examples would serve a better purpose in Perl/PHP/ASP, however, anyone familiar with C should be able to derive their own variations of the algorithm. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a great deal of insight into operating system specifics in regards to such system security issues as environment variables, spawning child processes, revealing memory dumps, using temp files on Windows and Unix, etc.

Off-the-beaten-path chapters include information on random numbers (the chapter is available online for free) and preventing tampering with applications. The random number chapter would be interesting to both professional programmers with good math skills and beginners in the computer programming field writing their first number-guessing C++ game. Recipes on gathering entropy and access to standard Windows/Unix APIs for random number generation are of great practical use. The application tampering chapter was probably the most informative thing for me - great collection of information, rarely found in other application or network security publications. How do you protect against software piracy by using checksums? How much time should you dedicate to software protection? What is the theory behind code obfuscation? How do you hide ASCII strings in data segment? How do you detect modern debuggers? The answers to such questions are usually fragmentary and are usually considered either intellectual property of the company or belong to a 'warez' site, where the quality of sources is questionable.

Is the Book Useful? This book is a great resource for quick look-up of readily available solution (I've read it online on Safari, so I cannot vouch for the usability of the paper edition when searching for information). I've written a Master's thesis on this topic (although my actual topic was way more narrow than the scope of this book) and still found a lot of great information. If you've never seen C/C++ code or feel uncomfortable with Unix/Windows API programming, you will probably find the Cookbook overly technical. A higher-level application security text is available for those new to the subject (besides the Building Secure Software title mentioned above, there's a great title called Writing Secure Code from Microsoft), while this book gets into dirty, nitty-gritty details.

Yeah, everyone and his brother knows how to implement a symmetric encryption algorithm, but how do you actually do it without compromising the system and introducing new possible loopholes? The cookbook answers questions like that, and, as mentioned above, provides detailed overview of programming strategies for the two most popular platforms. Taking the cookbook concept further, this book teaches you how to make a basic ham-and-cheese sandwich as well as fine cuisine. Too often the code measures for basic security and preventing buffer overflows are summarized in higher-level concepts, thus allowing the developers to make errors even with the most trivial applications. If you're a professional programmer and do not get tired by looking at sometimes profuse code examples, this book would probably be a good read from the beginning to the end. If C/C++ is not your preferred area, the usefulness of this title decreases severely, however, it might serve as a good reference.

You can purchase Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader submits "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting that one of Yahoo's employee's has hacked together a way roll your own Yahoo! News rss feed. Jeremy Zawodney, said hacker, is also an editor of Linux Magazine. News search over RSS is a feature Googlites have been pining for. It's interesting that Yahoo has, in a round about way, beat them to the punch on this one."

An anonymous reader submits "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting that one of Yahoo's employee's has hacked together a way roll your own Yahoo! News rss feed. Jeremy Zawodney, said hacker, is also an editor of Linux Magazine. News search over RSS is a feature Googlites have been pining for. It's interesting that Yahoo has, in a round about way, beat them to the punch on this one."

Andy Oram writes "Anyone who writes programs or plans system deployment should start thinking, "What can I do to bring average people back into the process of wealth creation?" A few suggestions."

chromatic writes "The O'Reilly Network has just published an interview with Paul Vixie, chairman of the board of the Internet Software Consortium and a primary author of BIND. Topics include the recent VeriSign controversy, ISC's BIND patch in response, and other potential issues that might come to light in the near future." On a related note, dmehus writes with a link to the letter sent by David Maher, chairman of the Public Interest Registry -- the .org registrar, to ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey. "The letter says that it supports ICANN's call for VeriSign to voluntarily suspend SiteFinder and the Internet Architecture Board preliminary position paper. It goes on to say that PIR will not be implementing any DNS wildcard to the .ORG zone. It urges ICANN to stand its ground, but also to implement a policy preventing registries from taking this kind of unilateral action in the future." The letter is in .doc format, but AbiWord and OpenOffice.org both open it fine.

briandonovan writes "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Director Tim Berners-Lee and his compatriots would like to transform the current Web into a 'Semantic Web' where 'software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users' using 'structured collections of information and sets of inference rules.' The Resource Description Framework (RDF), designed as a language for expressing information about resources on the Web, and allied technologies are the result to date of ongoing efforts at the W3C to furnish Semantic Web proponents with the requisite tools. While it's far too early to predict whether TimBL's grand vision will be realized, RDF/XML (the XML serialization of RDF) is already in widespread use, having been incorporated into a surprising array of applications." Read on below for briandonovan's link-stuffed review of O'Reilly's Practical RDF. Practical RDF: Solving Problems with the Resource Description Framework author Shelley Powers pages 331 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 9/10 reviewer Brian Donovan ISBN 0596002637 summary Great introduction to RDF, an assortment of tools and utilities for working with RDF, and some real-world applications.

RDF first hit my radar screen a couple of years ago while I was working on a barebones tool to manage my personal website. I was writing the code to generate RSS feeds ("What is RSS?") for my site and had to choose whether to support RSS 0.9x (non-RDF) or RSS 1.0 (RDF-based) or both. Long story short: I went with RSS 1.0 and was able to implement the feeds, but never got any further into RDF afterwards. I couldn't make headway through the RDF-related working drafts rapidly enough to justify the time that I was spending, there weren't any worthwhile-looking books available at the time, and the few online tutorials that I found were sorely lacking -- possibly because the specs themselves were still evolving as the RDF Core Working Group hashed out some remaining issues.

Fast forward a few years: the dust in RDF-land seems to be settling a bit (although new working drafts of all of the current RDF specs were released on September 5th, most of the changes from previous versions appear to be relatively minor) and, with the publication of Shelley Powers' Practical RDF: Solving Problems with the Resource Description Framework, there's finally a good book available on the subject.

Overview After an introductory chapter that touches on the history of RDF and some applications of RDF/XML (the preferred, W3C-blessed serialization of RDF), the book is divided into three broad sections. In the first, the reader is guided through the raft of documentation produced by the RDF Core WG, including : Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model, RDF/XML Syntax Specification, RDF Model Theory (formerly Semantics), and RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema. Before moving on to Part II, where she surveys programming language support and tools available for working with RDF (with code snippets where appropriate), Powers spends a chapter developing an RDF vocabulary, "PostCon," that's used throughout the remainder of the book for demo purposes.

Chapter 7, the first in the tools-focused portion of Practical RDF is dedicated to (mostly Java-based) editors, parsers, validators, browsers, etc. for desktop use. Next, she dives into Jena, the Java RDF toolkit that began life as the labor of love of HP Labs researcher Brian McBride before being elevated to the status of a formal HP Labs project under their Semantic Web Research umbrella. Another HP Labs Semantic Web project, Damian Steer's BrownSauce, a slick little Java-based RDF browser, was introduced back in Chapter7. Means for manipulating RDF/XML in Perl (RDF::Core, part of Ginger Alliance's PerlRDF project), PHP (RAP, the RDF API for PHP), and Python (RDFLib) are addressed in Chapter 9. RDF query engines/languages are taken up next -- rdfDB QL, the query language of R.V. Guha's rdfDB (written in C); SquishQL, implemented in the Java-based Inkling query engine (built atop PostgreSQL); RDQL, used within Jena; and Sesame, a JSP/Servlet querying engine that supports both RDQL and its own query language, RQL, and can be deployed atop MySQL or PostgreSQL. Powers rounds out this part of her book with a chapter that deals briefly with the leftovers. Drive, an RDF API for C#, is briefly discussed along with RDF APIs for less fashionable programming languages : Nokia's Wilbur for CLOS, XOTcl for Tcl, and RubyRDF for Ruby. Redland, an RDF toolkit written in C with Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl wrappers, is covered at some length (about half a dozen pages) and a couple more are given over to Redfoot, a Python RDF framework consisting of RDFLib (mentioned earlier in the Perl/PHP/Python chapter), a small-footprint HTTP server (according to the changelog at redfoot.net, they're using Medusa), and a native scripting language called Hypercode that lives within CDATA blocks in RDF/XML (example).

The last third of Practical RDF is devoted to uses of RDF and begins with a chapter on the OWL Web Ontology Language, an extension to RDF that's designed to supply more constraints for RDF vocabularies than can be provided by RDF Schema alone. This chapter would have been better situated after Chapter 5, which addresses RDF Schema, and feels a bit out of place here. RSS 1.0, the RDF-based syndication format, gets a chapter all of its own, beginning with a short synopsis of the evolution of RSS and the rift between the RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 camps, progressing through descriptions of the RSS elements, some discussion of the use of modules, RSS autodiscovery, and aggregators (Amphetadesk, Meerkat, and NetNewsWire are mentioned), and finishing with an example RSS file (a syndicated list of book recommendations), producing RSS 1.0 using the Informa RSS Library (a set of Java classes), and merging two RSS 1.0 files using the XML::RSS Perl module. Two "Applications Based on RDF" (commercial and noncommercial) chapters top off the book. Noncommercial applications of RDF are visited first : Mozilla, where history and bookmarks, among other classes of information, are stored in RDF; the Creative Commons licensing scheme, whose proponents encourage content creators to embed RDF snippets into their documents and applications to provide information about the work itself and the restrictions placed on its reuse under the particular CC license that they've chosen; a Java and PostgreSQL based digital library system jointly developed by MIT and HP that uses RDF; and FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend), an RDF vocabulary designed to express personal information and interpersonal relationships. Among the list of commercial applications utilizing RDF that comprises the final chapter in the book is Chandler, the same as yet very-alpha personal information manager that's managed to garner multiple mentions on this site.

The Verdict

The real meat of Practical RDF, for me, was in Chapters 1 through 6 (plus the OWL chapter, Chapter 12). This is not to say that the material in the last 2/3 of the book isn't useful or interesting. The section on RDF software tools is a great annotated survey of what's out there right now ... and I would imagine that installing and testdriving each of the software applications featured in those chapters must have been an extremely time-consuming process. The chapters describing real-world applications of RDF could be useful to someone trying to convince a manager that RDF is a viable, widely-used technology. Given a choice, though, I would rather have seen those pages spent on additional coverage of RDF, RDFS, and OWL with more example RDF vocabularies developed (like PostCon, which the author formulated, then refined through RDFS and OWL). The displaced material could have been made available online at the author's site for the book. A lot of that information will become less accurate over time as the software evolves and people come up with more applications for RDF anyway.

All nitpicking aside, though, if you're looking for a book on RDF, then you can't go wrong with Shelley Powers' Practical RDF.

You can purchase Practical RDF from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "O'Reilly Developer News is running a brief on how the banking industry will be running a stripped down version of windows on 65% of its ATM machines by 2005. On a morning when I'm receiving the latest windows virus in my inbox every five minutes I feel very comfortable with this."

An anonymous reader says "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting details of the newest Google programming contest, Google Code Jam 2003. Prizes range from t-shirts to ten grand and you can use any programming language you want to solve the increasingly challenging problems." Update by J : ... as long as it's Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.

viega writes "Matt Messier and I have just launched a secure programming web site. While this site does support our new book The Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ , it also serves as a thorough resource for developers. It has numerous links to articles and other topical resources, new recipes that demonstrate secure programming techniques a large glossary and the obligatory web log. We accept outside submissions, and will reward the best recipe submission each month-- O'Reilly will publish it on the O'Reilly Network web site and will give the author a free book. There's already a decent amount of new content, including recipes on avoiding malloc()/new-related integer overflows, watching out for security problems in API differences and issues when truncating data. There's also an RSS feed for the web log."

chromatic writes "ONLamp has just published an interview with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, author of Hacking the Xbox. Bunnie discusses the effect of the DMCA on his work and the state of Xbox hacking as he sees it."

An anonymous reader writes: "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting this morning that Taipei is under cyber attack by a Chinese 'army of hackers'. The Taipei government is saying that the attacks are trojan-horses against windows machines that are being staged to break in to government databases."

O'Reilly's new news site is reporting that PHP's new license, v3.0, has finally been approved by the OSI as meeting the open source definition. There was a small technical issue that prevented it in previous versions.

Tonight's Slashback brings you more on Florida's LAN-taxation proposal, the BBC's public archive (which won't be quite as big as you might have hoped), one user's plea to those who respond to viruses, and more. Read on for the details. They're taxing whatnow and hownow? Chad Eric Watt, author of the story posted yesterday on Florida's proposal to tax LANs, writes with a helpful clarification:

"The layout of our Web page doesn't do a great job of showing that the story continues on a second page. That's where I explain what is up for taxing.

Quoting the story now:

'...That brings them under the purview of the proposed rule, which includes computer networks as 'substitute communications systems' -- subject to a 9.17 percent state tax, plus local option taxes.

In Orange County, the local tax typically runs between 5.5 percent and 6.5 percent. That would bring the total tax to between 14-15 percent.

[end of first page, you hafta click to get to the rest of the story]

Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.'"

He also provides this link to the full, uninterrupted text.

Willie Sutton has met his betters. Syphtor writes "DE Tech has responded to a reporters inquiries as to their patent claims (DE Tech refuses to say why NZ firms were targeted first) DE Tech appeared previously in the /. article, Australian Gov't Moves To Block E-commerce Patent. Latest: the patent has been just granted in Virginia 'after five years of making changes in the application.'
Legitimate protection of IP or a 'fishing expedition worthy of a Sicilian Mafia protection racket.'?"

Well, not releasing everything, No, not as such, that is, you see ... An anonymous reader writes "According to this press release from the BBC, the 'BBC creative archive' (earlier on slashdot) will not be as full as previously assumed. As the page says, 'The BBC Creative Archive would make selected BBC material universally available for private not commercial use in the UK.' (my emphasis) Looks like we won't be able to get the Hitchhiker's Guide and complete works of Monty Python after all, folks."

Who, really, is Peter Lynds, and how old is he? evil_one666 writes "You may remember that Slashdot reported a few weeks ago on ground-breaking work in the understanding of time. Well, it appears that it was all a hoax. While the Guardian is running a story that suggests several interesting conspiracy theories (although they seem to think that Peter Lynds is in fact legitimate), Museumofhoaxes.com present some convincing evidence that he is in fact a 17-year-old student at the same radio college at which he claimed to be a 27-year old-lecturer. Astute Slashdot readers rightly pointed out some big red flags, the first time the topic was aired, and Cesar Sirvent, a researcher in the field, has a list of links related to the controversy here."

Outlook Express not yet left out to rot. dr. electron writes "As stated previously on Slashdot, Outlook was to be slaughtered. Now MS says, in a article on Internet Magazine, it won't be, but developed further. They blame communication problem inside the company about the previous press release. Maybe the ongoing development of Outlook Express isn't the biggest news here, I find the reason 'communication problem' a bit odd (It's not a small decision to kill a product)."

Speaking of Outlook and anguish: caseywest, among others, has had enough blame redirected into his email box. He writes "This is my plea, my Public Service Announcement. Please, please stop bouncing email viruses! I don't run any windows computers, and /dev/null'ing viruses are trivial. I cannot, however, say that this problem is only a Windows-only menace. My email address is plastered all over the internet. As a result, I'm receiving thousands of bounced messages claiming I sent a virus. This is costly, let alone wrong! I didn't send you that virus! If you admin an email server, please answer chromatic's one question test. If you're bouncing email viruses, please reconfigure your filters to send viruses to /dev/null, and save us all money on bandwidth, hard disk space, and general anguish. Thank you."

Michael Pierce writes "SeattleWireless TV has done it again! This months SeattleWireless TV show features an Interview with Rob Flickenger the inventor of the pringles cantenna and co-author of Nocat, an open source wireless captive portal. Then we have a chance to hear from Risto Koiva about his remote controlled helicopter with a 2.4ghz installed camera and gps unit, learn about the Personal Telco Project out of Portland, Oregon and finally a product review on the new WatchGuard SoHo 6 wireless firewall. Download the Mpeg version here or Watch the Windows Media Stream here, or the RealPlayer stream here."

MilenCent writes "The O'Reilly Network posted an interview with super-deluxe Nethack variant SLASH'EM's Warren Cheung and J. Ali Harlowe last month talking about the impending beta release of v0.0.7E2. (Don't you just love incredibly provisional version numbers? In development for years and not even a 0.1 yet!) There's another recent O'Reilly article on the game too."

MilenCent writes "The O'Reilly Network posted an interview with super-deluxe Nethack variant SLASH'EM's Warren Cheung and J. Ali Harlowe last month talking about the impending beta release of v0.0.7E2. (Don't you just love incredibly provisional version numbers? In development for years and not even a 0.1 yet!) There's another recent O'Reilly article on the game too."

eggboard writes "Matthew Gast, author of 802.11 Wireless Networks, filed this article for O'Reilly Networks explaining exactly how fast 802.11g really is: that is, what's the actual data payload and real throughput, not the rated maximum speed. His conclusion? In mixed 802.11b/g networks, which will be common for years to come, g is only 1.6 to 2.4 times faster than b, not 5 times faster as it is in its g-only mode. This article has real math based on the specs, rather than armchair speculation."

Rob Flickenger writes "While poking around on the Linksys WRT54G (one of the new Linux 2.4.5 based APs) at a SeattleWireless Hack Night session, we noticed a number of binaries in their firmware (including Zebra, PPP 2.4.1, and iptables to name three) that are released under the GPL, some of which are obviously modified. The question is, where is the source code to Linksys' modifications? Their "GPL Code Center" has the packages, but they are the pristine distributions, without any changes whatsoever. I've asked Linksys for clarification, but given Linksys' customer service reputation, I highly encourage other interested parties to ask them as well. More details are up on my weblog on oreillynet.com."

Dru writes "Here's an article talking about the details of implementing a network level spam defense with Qmail. It also talks a little about a new site called Trustic which uses a trust system (like Advogato) for nominating spammer/hostile IP's."

elucidus writes "Buy.com on Tuesday launched a new digital music download service -- the site, BuyMusic.com, offers a catalog of more than 300,000 songs. The site only loads in Internet Explorer and all the files are Windows Media 9 formatted with DRM. No word yet on whether the public announcement of a supposed gaping hole in Windows Media DRM caused any concern before the launch. Compatible players include the Nomad IIc 9 and Creative's Jukebox Zen."

chromatic writes "One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually a few other things thrown in for good measure. His talk from OSCON 2003, State of the Onion 7, is now online."

JohnGrahamCumming writes "There's a story running on ZDNet about how OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source. Announcement was made yesterday as OSCON with some big names backing the awards (e.g. Sun, OSAF and (interestingly) a major venture capital firm USVP)."

VladDrac writes "Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python programming language, announced at OSCON last night that he's leaving zope.com, to work for a new startup called 'Elemental Security', founded by Dan Farmer (known from several security tools such as Satan). Guido leaving Zope.com will also probably mean that he will be no longer involved in Zope3 development, but hopefully he'll have more time to spend on Python development." Guido says that he's excited about his new employer, but that nothing substantial will change about Python as a result of the move. "It's just that I'll be working from the West coast." Python is "already quite secure," he says, and will be the basis of an upcoming security product ("just getting started") from Elemental.

caseywest writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere within his legendary humorous presentation). Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make existing XS code work. Arthur 'sky' Bergman is sponsored by his employer Fotango to develop Ponie. Currently, a press release and a FAQ are available. More details will be available in due time."

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

honestpuck writes "Many years ago I learnt my AppleScript skills from a book by a gentleman by the name of Danny Goodman and I was happy to find him tackling the subject of dynamic HTML in "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference". Indeed this is the second edition and seems supremely up to date." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review. Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.) author Danny Goodman pages 1343 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0596003161 summary Truly definitive reference for a huge topic

Goodman has tackled a complex subject. With changing standards and even quicker changing browser compatibility it can be a nightmare trying to get a dynamic web site working across disparate browsers and operating systems. A guide that tells you exact syntax and exact compatibility can be invaluable, but is only as good as the research behind it, an area where I cannot fault Goodman.

This volume covers XHTML, CSS and DOM with a large smidgeon of JavaScript. It's not an easy book to get into and consume in large chunks as it does little hand holding but as I was prepared to knuckle down and work at the topics (with much help from various web sites such as CSS Zen Garden) I found it perfect for me. Goodman has recently released JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook which I have found to be a marvelous volume to assist the process of understanding these technologies, though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).

The target audience would be best summed up as those who have done a fair amount of HTML hand coding and some work in dynamic HTML. The book also adds that you should have "the basics of client-side scripting in JavaScript" and I would agree, when I first acquired this book my JavaScript skills were exceptionally primitive (mainly at the 'plug in example' stage) and found the latter sections of this book heavy going and not much help; now that I am a better JavaScript programmer I find these parts much easier to understand and use.

The book is divided into four parts, 'Applying Dynamic HTML,' 'Dynamic HTML Reference,' 'Cross References,' and 'Appendixes'. I found the first part particularly helpful when converting my old site across to a more dynamic CSS-based site as it helps with various strategies for making sure your content works across browsers and various methods for making sure that visitors with older browsers and search engines can still retrieve valid pages. Goodman's approach of increasing complexity through this part also suited a movement from a straight HTML site to one using XHTML and CSS. This is also where Goodman's writing can shine: it's an excellent guide to all the technologies and acronym soup. The appendices are marvelous, from 'A,' a list of colour names with their RGB value, through a list of character entities to a 50-page list of all HTML tags, their attributes and if they are supported in the two HTML 4 and three XHTML 1 standards.

The reference parts are well structured with extensive notes on browser support and which particular standard (DOM 1, DOM 2, CSS 1, CSS 2, or none) the tag or attribute comes from. For example, in the DOM section the reference gives you the object name, which versions of Navigator and Explorer support it, the DOM version (if any), a short explanation, then an object reference example, list of properties, methods and event handlers. For each of the properties it gives an example, the type and if it is read-only or read/write. For methods it gives the return value and parameters. This sort of attention to fine detail is taken throughout the book. You end up with a book 1343 pages long and a 51 page index. Goodman mentions in his preface that the book now encompasses 'more than 15,000 unique instances of properties, methods and event handlers,' a figure I'd believe.

O'Reilly have their usual page for this book that includes a sample chapter in PDF, the Index, Table of Contents and an Errata page. There are few Errata and only one in the code examples. Speaking of examples, you can download the complete set of code examples from the book.

There is also a page at O'Reilly for the author, Danny Goodman with links to some excellent articles and book excerpts on dynamic HTML and JavaScript.

I found this a hard book to review, as are most references. The questions I asked were: one, Does the book cover all the material?; two, Is it correct?; three, Is it easy to find the entry you want? and four, Are the entries laid out in an easy to understand manner? In these criteria this volume rates well, with the added bonus of some good material in the first section for understanding the nuances of dynamic HTML in a multiple browser, multiple operating system world.

If you are doing a lot of work in dynamic HTML then this book is probably an essential. While I don't consult it every time I start working on HTML when I run into trouble it is the first place I turn to make sure my syntax and browser compatibility are straight. This book ain't cheap, and it ain't small but I'd recommend it for your desk if you're working with web sites.

You can purchase the Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.) from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Amy Hsieh writes "A well-known ebook industry expert, Jon Noring, recently wrote an interesting article for eBookWeb, formally calling upon the ebook industry to adopt a single universal ebook distribution format. Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry. In the article, Mr. Noring proposes a promising open-standards candidate which appears to meet a list of basic requirements: The Open eBook Forum's OEBPS Specification. Andy Oram, a Linux programming editor for O'Reilly, wrote an interesting reply to the article that should also be read." On the other hand, Noring's proposal has also met with some skepticism elsewhere.

Amy Hsieh writes "A well-known ebook industry expert, Jon Noring, recently wrote an interesting article for eBookWeb, formally calling upon the ebook industry to adopt a single universal ebook distribution format. Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry. In the article, Mr. Noring proposes a promising open-standards candidate which appears to meet a list of basic requirements: The Open eBook Forum's OEBPS Specification. Andy Oram, a Linux programming editor for O'Reilly, wrote an interesting reply to the article that should also be read." On the other hand, Noring's proposal has also met with some skepticism elsewhere.

cascadefx writes "O'Reilly's Hacks page has a really great article about a wireless access point that was on display at the recent Emerging Technology Conference. The folks at NoCat.net rigged up a Siemens Speedstream series access point with a low power ultraviolet light to create a wireless lightbulb. Just screw it in place and combine powerline ethernet with a wireless network... and a light, to create a wireless lightbulb. Ubiquitous networking, here we come."

cascadefx writes "O'Reilly's Hacks page has a really great article about a wireless access point that was on display at the recent Emerging Technology Conference. The folks at NoCat.net rigged up a Siemens Speedstream series access point with a low power ultraviolet light to create a wireless lightbulb. Just screw it in place and combine powerline ethernet with a wireless network... and a light, to create a wireless lightbulb. Ubiquitous networking, here we come."

cascadefx writes "O'Reilly's Hacks page has a really great article about a wireless access point that was on display at the recent Emerging Technology Conference. The folks at NoCat.net rigged up a Siemens Speedstream series access point with a low power ultraviolet light to create a wireless lightbulb. Just screw it in place and combine powerline ethernet with a wireless network... and a light, to create a wireless lightbulb. Ubiquitous networking, here we come."

Mortimer.CA writes "O'Reilly has a story about someone hacking Ultima VII so that it's multiplatform. Exult is replacing the the rendering engine so the game can be played on more than just DOS. A legal copy of Ultima VII is needed to play Exult. I have 'wasted' so many hours on the Ultima series that it's not funny: now I can waste them again on my Unix box." I might have to see if I still have Ultima VII kicking around. I haven't played it since my college days.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS is a step-by-step guide to implementing RSS. This standard is gaining popularity among the Web community, and some of your favorite sites might syndicate their content as RSS feeds. The new O'Reilly publication focuses on many aspects of this standard, and is of primary interest to developers, Web site designers, data architects and anyone interested in distributing their data around the Web." So if you have a steady stream of information for your customers, family, or fans, read on for the rest of Alex's review. Content Syndication With RSS author Ben Hammersley pages 222 publisher O'Reilly rating 8/10 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0596003838 summary Introduction and guide for RSS implementations

The first three chapters are primarily discussing the multiplicity of RSS standards. While with some other technologies it might seem a bit excessive, remember that RSS is a forked project with the forks at this moment bearing little resemblance to one another. The abbreviations even have different abbreviations - RSS means Really Simple Syndication if you are using RSS 0.91 or RSS 0.92, that was developed by Dave Winer. RSS means RDF Site Summary if the version you're using RSS 1.0. The development credits in this case go to RSS DEV team. To confuse you even more, the RSS 2.0 standard is deciphered as... correct, Really Simple Syndication again.

Hence chapter 4 discusses Winer's implementation (simplistic and user-friendly), while chapter 6 focuses on RSS 1.0 (RDF-compliant and data-architect-friendly), and chapter 8 talks about RSS 2.0 (improved RSS 0.9x). Chapter 4 is available online as a PDF file. Section 4.4 is recommended for those interested in promoting their RSS feeds as it provides pretty good reference to meta data.

Chapter 9 is perhaps of special interest to Web developers and administrators out there. It presents several code samples to properly parse RSS and present the result in readable HTML. The examples include (a) parsing with XML::Simple in Perl, (b) parsing with Perl regular expressions, (c) parsing with XML::Simple and sending the headlines to cell phones via WWW::SMS, (d) parsing via XSLT transformation. Python, PHP and ASP folks might feel left out due to the abundance of Perl examples, but if you got so far in the book, you can probably apply the regular expressions example or search for appropriate support for RSS format in your preferred language.

Going beyond the standard itself, RSS directories, aggregators and readers are discussed. Author makes a distinction between the last two by classifying Meerkat-like services into aggregators and desktop or Web applications designed to present the information to the user into readers. The chapter also provides information about Syndic8, its API, and describes the feed registration process. OReilly's Meerkat is also discussed in chapter, together with reference table for its API (you can make Meerkat generate HTML or RSS news headlines on certain topic or using certain keywords by providing a right query to its Web interface).

The book is quite a smooth read for a text describing the details of data specification. The chapters are informative and the book is not overloaded with useless information just to increase the page count. The tips are quite useful for someone, who is knew to the field and answers some questions not covered by standards (e.g., how often should you request an RSS feed, what to do if you're being screen-scraped, etc.)

I like the way the author divided the chapters into RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 and kept two worlds apart. Most of the time you probably won't be interested in developing a feed to support both standards, but would like to focus just on one. The examples in Perl are perfect with me, although for someone new to Perl or programming in general those examples with abundant regular expressions might look a bit convoluted. Kudos to the author for not expanding on the topic, like many do, and providing an example of a script for RSS manipulation in every possible language out there.

What's missing? I wish more pages were dedicated to desktop RSS readers. FeedReader, HotSheet, Syndirella, Beaver and SharpReader are excellent end user applications currently gaining some popularity among those who'd prefer to browse the favorite headlines at a glance, instead of going to a dozen of sites every morning. To be fair, there's a huge list of readers in Appendix, and some applications mentioned above only came around in the last few months, which was probably after the book hit the press. Some sites also didn't make it into the book. I like DailyRotation and FreshNews that borrow from Meerkat's versatility and provide their own feed portal.

Overall, the book is a pretty good developer's guide to RSS standard. Accompanied with helpful illustrations and numerous tips it's an excellent resource for those unfamiliar with RSS and a helpful reference for those who have been doing Web syndication for a while.

You can purchase Content Syndication With RSS from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Ursus Maximus contributes this review of Python in a Nutshell, writing "Perhaps the best book about Python ever written, this is the perfect capstone to anyone's library of Pythonic books, and also the perfect introduction to Python for anyone well versed in other programming languages. For newbies to programming, this would still be a good second book after a good introductory book on Python, such as Learning Python by Mark Lutz." Read on for the rest of his review. Python in a Nutshell author Alex Martelli pages 636 pages publisher O'Reilly rating Excellent, superb, 5 stars reviewer Ron Stephens ISBN 0596001886 summary Complete reference book for the Python programming language

Written by my favorite author and Pythonista, Alex Martelli, this book manages to fill three roles in extremely pleasing fashion. First and foremost to me, it is a great read, straight through. Mr. Martelli's prose is always sparkling and always keeps the reader interested. No matter how many Python books you have read, you will learn some nuances from this book, and it is about the best review of the whole Pythonic subject matter that I can imagine. While there is absolutely no fluff whatsoever in these 636 pages, it still makes for rather easy reading because the explanations are so clearly thought out and explored as to lead one gently to understanding, without in any way being verbose. It is obvious that Alex Martelli took his time and put in sufficient thought, effort, and intellectual elbow-grease to make this work a classic for all time.

Secondly, this book is the ultimate Pythonic reference book, the best fit to this role I have yet seen. You will keep this book in the most cherished spot on your book shelf, or else right at your side on your computer desk, because you can almost instantly find any topic on which you need to brush up, in the midst of a programming project.

Third, Python in a Nutshell is the most up-to-date book on Python (as of April 2003) and includes the best and most complete expositions yet on the new features introduced in Python 2.2 and 2.3. These topics are not only covered in depth, they are integrated into the text in their proper positions and relationships to the language as a whole. They are explained better here than I have seen anywhere else, so much so as to make them not only understandable to me (a duffer), but indeed so that they appear seamlessly Pythonic, as if they had been a part of the language since version 1.0. Topics explored in depth include new style classes, static methods, class methods, nested scopes, iterators, generators, and new style division. List comprehensions are made not only comprehensible but indeed intuitive.

The book is surprisingly complete. It covers the core language as well as the most popular libraries and extension modules. It is difficult to choose any one portion of the book to highlight for extra praise, as all topics are treated so well. It is a complete book, the new definitive book about Python.

Everything about this book speaks of quality. In addition to the top notch writing and editing, O'Reilly really did the right thing and published this book printed on the highest quality paper, paper so thin that the 636 pages are encompassed in a book much thinner than one would expect for such a size, but strong enough to resist wear and tear. The text is most pleasing to the eye. Holding the book, and turning its pages, gives one a feeling of satisfaction.

Any job worth doing is worth doing well. Alex Martelli and O'Reilly have done justice to a topic dear to our hearts, the Python programming language. Perhaps, in years to come, the passage of time may make this book to be no longer the most up-to-date reference on the newest features added to Python. But time can not erase the quality craftsmanship and the shear joy of reading such a well thought out masterpiece of Pythonic literature.

You can purchase Python in a Nutshell from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Ron Stephens would also like you to check out Python City, with "27+ reviews of books about Python. 67+ links to online tutorials about Python and related subjects Daily newsfeed of Pythonic web articles, new sourceforge projects, etc."

Ursus Maximus contributes this review of Python in a Nutshell, writing "Perhaps the best book about Python ever written, this is the perfect capstone to anyone's library of Pythonic books, and also the perfect introduction to Python for anyone well versed in other programming languages. For newbies to programming, this would still be a good second book after a good introductory book on Python, such as Learning Python by Mark Lutz." Read on for the rest of his review. Python in a Nutshell author Alex Martelli pages 636 pages publisher O'Reilly rating Excellent, superb, 5 stars reviewer Ron Stephens ISBN 0596001886 summary Complete reference book for the Python programming language

Written by my favorite author and Pythonista, Alex Martelli, this book manages to fill three roles in extremely pleasing fashion. First and foremost to me, it is a great read, straight through. Mr. Martelli's prose is always sparkling and always keeps the reader interested. No matter how many Python books you have read, you will learn some nuances from this book, and it is about the best review of the whole Pythonic subject matter that I can imagine. While there is absolutely no fluff whatsoever in these 636 pages, it still makes for rather easy reading because the explanations are so clearly thought out and explored as to lead one gently to understanding, without in any way being verbose. It is obvious that Alex Martelli took his time and put in sufficient thought, effort, and intellectual elbow-grease to make this work a classic for all time.

Secondly, this book is the ultimate Pythonic reference book, the best fit to this role I have yet seen. You will keep this book in the most cherished spot on your book shelf, or else right at your side on your computer desk, because you can almost instantly find any topic on which you need to brush up, in the midst of a programming project.

Third, Python in a Nutshell is the most up-to-date book on Python (as of April 2003) and includes the best and most complete expositions yet on the new features introduced in Python 2.2 and 2.3. These topics are not only covered in depth, they are integrated into the text in their proper positions and relationships to the language as a whole. They are explained better here than I have seen anywhere else, so much so as to make them not only understandable to me (a duffer), but indeed so that they appear seamlessly Pythonic, as if they had been a part of the language since version 1.0. Topics explored in depth include new style classes, static methods, class methods, nested scopes, iterators, generators, and new style division. List comprehensions are made not only comprehensible but indeed intuitive.

The book is surprisingly complete. It covers the core language as well as the most popular libraries and extension modules. It is difficult to choose any one portion of the book to highlight for extra praise, as all topics are treated so well. It is a complete book, the new definitive book about Python.

Everything about this book speaks of quality. In addition to the top notch writing and editing, O'Reilly really did the right thing and published this book printed on the highest quality paper, paper so thin that the 636 pages are encompassed in a book much thinner than one would expect for such a size, but strong enough to resist wear and tear. The text is most pleasing to the eye. Holding the book, and turning its pages, gives one a feeling of satisfaction.

Any job worth doing is worth doing well. Alex Martelli and O'Reilly have done justice to a topic dear to our hearts, the Python programming language. Perhaps, in years to come, the passage of time may make this book to be no longer the most up-to-date reference on the newest features added to Python. But time can not erase the quality craftsmanship and the shear joy of reading such a well thought out masterpiece of Pythonic literature.

You can purchase Python in a Nutshell from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Ron Stephens would also like you to check out Python City, with "27+ reviews of books about Python. 67+ links to online tutorials about Python and related subjects Daily newsfeed of Pythonic web articles, new sourceforge projects, etc."

tadghin writes "I was recently talking with Jeff Barr, creator of syndic8 and now Amazon's chief web services evangelist. He let drop an interesting tidbit. Amazon has both SOAP and REST interfaces to their web services, and 85% of their usage is of the REST interface." Read on for some more thoughts and information on REST and Web services, including information about a free Web services seminar on April 22nd. " Despite all of the corporate hype over the SOAP stack, this is pretty compelling evidence that developers like the simpler REST approach. (I'm sure there are applications where SOAP is better, but I've always liked technologies that have low barriers to entry and grassroots adoption, and simple XML over HTTP approach seems to have that winning combination.)

Amazon's web services have attracted a thriving community, people are making real money building alternate interfaces to Amazon and collecting Associates commissions on the resulting sales, and there are even tool developers who have come up with the creative business model of agreeing with their users to have some percentage of the transactions use the tool developer's Associates id rather than the site owner's. Cool.

Amazon is holding a free all day web services workshop on April 22 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. The event is open to people not registered at the conference (though space is limited to 50 people).

P.S. Slashdot really ought to have web services as a topic area! Despite being over-hyped, this is a really important area, and there's a lot cooking. Amazon's web services"

theodp writes "Just published today by the USPTO--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' patent application for adding advertisements to web pages. Sure would be ironic if those 50,000 online banner impressions on oreillynet.com Amazon receives as a Platinum Sponsor of the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference turn out to constitute patent infringement." Someone *has* to have prior art on this - GEnie/Prodigy/BBSes embedding ads for memberships.

theodp writes "Just published today by the USPTO--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' patent application for adding advertisements to web pages. Sure would be ironic if those 50,000 online banner impressions on oreillynet.com Amazon receives as a Platinum Sponsor of the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference turn out to constitute patent infringement." Someone *has* to have prior art on this - GEnie/Prodigy/BBSes embedding ads for memberships.

theodp writes "Just published today by the USPTO--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' patent application for adding advertisements to web pages. Sure would be ironic if those 50,000 online banner impressions on oreillynet.com Amazon receives as a Platinum Sponsor of the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference turn out to constitute patent infringement." Someone *has* to have prior art on this - GEnie/Prodigy/BBSes embedding ads for memberships.