Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader notes that CSIRO has sued Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in — wait for it — East Texas District Court. "Australia's peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world's biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo, and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organization is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents."

TimKrause writes "I just recently received Packt's new Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide by Tiggeler. If you're new to Joomla!, this is one of the best titles out there in terms of helping you get started with your first (perhaps second or third) Joomla! site. Tiggeler does a nice job covering all of the basics: everything from downloading and installing Joomla on a server, configuring it, and confirming the installation to working with and then removing the sample data that Joomla provides. The book lives up to its promise by including a chapter that promises the reader they'll have a site up and running in about an hour. Based on my own experiences, I suspect that, for most intermediate developers, Tiggeler is right; for beginners, expect to take a little more time." Read on for the rest of Tim's review. Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide author Eric Tiggeler pages 380 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Tim Krause ISBN 1847199909 summary If you want to build and maintain your own web site, the Joomla! Beginner's Guide is perfect for you. One of the challenges that I observe with many new Web developers is struggling to understand how to develop enough sample content for one's site in order to make adjustments to the site template, and define it's structure, before adding remaining content and functionality. Tiggeler actually does a nice job carefully moving back and forth between creating content, and giving it structure. In doing so, it's also important to note that this book isn't about theory, or just reading, it's about doing. Every section includes a "Time for action" that walks site owners through doing what was explained on their own site. For more adventurous site owners, there's also a "Have a go hero" activity that is much less directed, and which provides additional (but appropriate) challenges.

Tiggeler starts out with the basics of downloading and installing Joomla. If you're going to use this book, you'll either need Web hosting (preferably Linux) or the expertise to install a flavor of XAMPP on a local computer. Either aren't necessarily difficult (most Web hosting offers 1-click installation of Joomla, making it as easy as a click of a button), but require thinking about Web design differently than with static HTML pages.

In any Joomla! book, there are a couple of must-haves for me, and Tiggeler does a nice job discussing them. The include: SEO, metrics and site security. Under site security note that JoomlaPack has been replaced with Akeebo Backup. It's the same great functionality, but with a new name (and a new subscription-based version that offers enhanced options). It's important to note here that Tiggeler is not only thorough in covering the basics, but often provides more advanced direction, and discusses any of the more technical issues which a developer might run into when installing a component, for example.

The book also includes screenshots that make it very easy for the reader to follow along. In fact, I found myself trying out a number of things on my own site as I read. The screenshots and directions were all accurate and correct.

Once you get comfortable with everything Tiggeler has to offer, including the very basics of component and module installation and configuration, I'd recommend that you turn to some of Packt's other titles, like Joomla 1.5 — Multimedia by Walker for additional guidance on learning the more detailed ins and outs of specific types of components. Joomla Cash is another option, and discussions key e-commerce components like VirtueMart.

Nevertheless, what sums this title up best for me is Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour. I was suspicious at first, but am confident that with Tiggeler's guidance, it's quite possible to build your first basic Joomla! Web site in about an hour. That's an excellent premise, and the book delivers on it well.

If you're looking for a beginner to intermediate book, there aren't many other alternatives available. O'Reilly has a titled called Using Joomla! by Severdia and Crowder, that was published earlier this year. At the time, I was pretty impressed with it, but I think readers will find Tiggeler to be both more direct and more focused in his approach. For example, Severdia and Crowder devoted a chapter in their book to Joomla 1.6. It was interesting, but largely academic given that 1.6 is still in beta and not something most of us will be working with.

I teach Web Design, including a course on Web Content Management Systems (Drupal, Joomla and WordPress) and have literally read dozens of these types of books in the past year or so. I also teach a capstone course where my students create Joomla-based sites for local non-profit organizations. We have completed sites for nearly 100 clients in the past two years. Currently, Joomla 1.5 Beginner's Guide is what I recommend to new Joomla! site owners. As a result, I also will begin using the same book in class starting next semester so that students are familiar with what their clients will be reading.

Tim Krause is an Assistant Professor of Computing and New Media Technologies at the University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point. He writes regularly about Joomla and Web Content Management systems.

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

TimKrause writes "I just recently received Packt's new Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide by Tiggeler. If you're new to Joomla!, this is one of the best titles out there in terms of helping you get started with your first (perhaps second or third) Joomla! site. Tiggeler does a nice job covering all of the basics: everything from downloading and installing Joomla on a server, configuring it, and confirming the installation to working with and then removing the sample data that Joomla provides. The book lives up to its promise by including a chapter that promises the reader they'll have a site up and running in about an hour. Based on my own experiences, I suspect that, for most intermediate developers, Tiggeler is right; for beginners, expect to take a little more time." Read on for the rest of Tim's review. Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide author Eric Tiggeler pages 380 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Tim Krause ISBN 1847199909 summary If you want to build and maintain your own web site, the Joomla! Beginner's Guide is perfect for you. One of the challenges that I observe with many new Web developers is struggling to understand how to develop enough sample content for one's site in order to make adjustments to the site template, and define it's structure, before adding remaining content and functionality. Tiggeler actually does a nice job carefully moving back and forth between creating content, and giving it structure. In doing so, it's also important to note that this book isn't about theory, or just reading, it's about doing. Every section includes a "Time for action" that walks site owners through doing what was explained on their own site. For more adventurous site owners, there's also a "Have a go hero" activity that is much less directed, and which provides additional (but appropriate) challenges.

Tiggeler starts out with the basics of downloading and installing Joomla. If you're going to use this book, you'll either need Web hosting (preferably Linux) or the expertise to install a flavor of XAMPP on a local computer. Either aren't necessarily difficult (most Web hosting offers 1-click installation of Joomla, making it as easy as a click of a button), but require thinking about Web design differently than with static HTML pages.

In any Joomla! book, there are a couple of must-haves for me, and Tiggeler does a nice job discussing them. The include: SEO, metrics and site security. Under site security note that JoomlaPack has been replaced with Akeebo Backup. It's the same great functionality, but with a new name (and a new subscription-based version that offers enhanced options). It's important to note here that Tiggeler is not only thorough in covering the basics, but often provides more advanced direction, and discusses any of the more technical issues which a developer might run into when installing a component, for example.

The book also includes screenshots that make it very easy for the reader to follow along. In fact, I found myself trying out a number of things on my own site as I read. The screenshots and directions were all accurate and correct.

Once you get comfortable with everything Tiggeler has to offer, including the very basics of component and module installation and configuration, I'd recommend that you turn to some of Packt's other titles, like Joomla 1.5 — Multimedia by Walker for additional guidance on learning the more detailed ins and outs of specific types of components. Joomla Cash is another option, and discussions key e-commerce components like VirtueMart.

Nevertheless, what sums this title up best for me is Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour. I was suspicious at first, but am confident that with Tiggeler's guidance, it's quite possible to build your first basic Joomla! Web site in about an hour. That's an excellent premise, and the book delivers on it well.

If you're looking for a beginner to intermediate book, there aren't many other alternatives available. O'Reilly has a titled called Using Joomla! by Severdia and Crowder, that was published earlier this year. At the time, I was pretty impressed with it, but I think readers will find Tiggeler to be both more direct and more focused in his approach. For example, Severdia and Crowder devoted a chapter in their book to Joomla 1.6. It was interesting, but largely academic given that 1.6 is still in beta and not something most of us will be working with.

I teach Web Design, including a course on Web Content Management Systems (Drupal, Joomla and WordPress) and have literally read dozens of these types of books in the past year or so. I also teach a capstone course where my students create Joomla-based sites for local non-profit organizations. We have completed sites for nearly 100 clients in the past two years. Currently, Joomla 1.5 Beginner's Guide is what I recommend to new Joomla! site owners. As a result, I also will begin using the same book in class starting next semester so that students are familiar with what their clients will be reading.

Tim Krause is an Assistant Professor of Computing and New Media Technologies at the University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point. He writes regularly about Joomla and Web Content Management systems.

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

mandelbr0t writes "The Canadian Conservative government is preparing to reintroduce amended copyright legislation on Thursday (we discussed the rumor some weeks ago). Most sources say that the proposed legislation is very similar to Bill C-61, generally dubbed the 'Canadian DMCA.' It still includes definitions of 'technological protections' and criminalizes 'circumvention' of those protections. Bill C-61 died in the summer of 2008, facing massive opposition from the Canadian public. Once again, it's time for Canadians to get politically active; ORC ran a large campaign with the last attempt, and will likely be updated soon with the new proposed legislation." Read below for more of the submitter's thoughts on the coming battle.
As with Bill C-61, the Conservative government has launched a campaign of misinformation to attempt to force the law down our throat. Industry Minister Tony Clement is trying to convince people that "format shifting" is currently illegal. Of course, it is not actually criminal, and enforcement of private infringement, as always, is prevented by the fact that massive invasion of privacy would have to occur. Second, Mr. Clement is claiming that this law is necessary to bring Canada into line with the WIPO Treaty. The above readings discredit WIPO altogether. Furthermore, the two articles that are being referred to are Articles 11 and 12. Note the use of the phrase "effective technological measure" and the absence of any criminality requirement. This legislation is not necessary to provide amended copyright law that is consistent with the WIPO treaty, and will hopefully die an uneventful death, to be buried for eternity.

krou passes along word from Telegraph.co.uk that researchers from Chandigarh's Punjab University claim that they have proven mobile phones could explain Colony Collapse Disorder. "They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives — one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two 15-minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed. After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey. The queen bee in the 'mobile' hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive. They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen." We've talked about the honeybee problem before. Today's article quotes a British bee specialist who dismisses talk of cellphone radiation having anything to do with the problem.

krou passes along word from Telegraph.co.uk that researchers from Chandigarh's Punjab University claim that they have proven mobile phones could explain Colony Collapse Disorder. "They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives — one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two 15-minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed. After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey. The queen bee in the 'mobile' hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive. They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen." We've talked about the honeybee problem before. Today's article quotes a British bee specialist who dismisses talk of cellphone radiation having anything to do with the problem.

crimeandpunishment writes "Facebook is back in Pakistan today. A day after Bangladesh banned the social networking site, the Pakistani government lifted its ban after officials from Facebook apologized for the 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' page and removed it from the site. The page caused outrage and protests among Pakistan's Muslim population, and led to the ban two weeks ago. A spokesman for Pakistan's office of information technology said Facebook assured the government 'nothing of this sort will happen in the future.'"

lbalbalba writes with a BBC story about Bangladesh following Pakistan in censoring Facebook. "Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country's leaders were uploaded. One man has been arrested and charged with 'spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders' with the images. Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed. It comes after Pakistan invoked a similar ban over 'blasphemous content.' ... Thousands of people joined anti-Facebook protests in Bangladesh on Friday demanding the site be blocked over the contest. A telecomm regulator there said, "Facebook will be re-opened once we erase the pages that contain the obnoxious images." And how do they propose to do that?

An anonymous reader writes "The association of German magazine publishers has sent a letter to Steve Jobs (Google translation; German original here) demanding talks about censorship by Apple. The move draws attention to growing concerns about freedom of the press when a single unelected commercial entity has worldwide control over what gets published for the iPhone and, especially, the iPad." While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).

An anonymous reader writes "The association of German magazine publishers has sent a letter to Steve Jobs (Google translation; German original here) demanding talks about censorship by Apple. The move draws attention to growing concerns about freedom of the press when a single unelected commercial entity has worldwide control over what gets published for the iPhone and, especially, the iPad." While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).

An anonymous reader writes "The association of German magazine publishers has sent a letter to Steve Jobs (Google translation; German original here) demanding talks about censorship by Apple. The move draws attention to growing concerns about freedom of the press when a single unelected commercial entity has worldwide control over what gets published for the iPhone and, especially, the iPad." While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).

An anonymous reader writes "The association of German magazine publishers has sent a letter to Steve Jobs (Google translation; German original here) demanding talks about censorship by Apple. The move draws attention to growing concerns about freedom of the press when a single unelected commercial entity has worldwide control over what gets published for the iPhone and, especially, the iPad." While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).

An anonymous reader writes "After announcing plans to go open source due to the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, developer Cryptic Sea has released the source code of 2-D platformer Gish under the GPLv2. There's a mirror on github."

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."

theodp writes "After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data, Google had to reverse itself, saying, 'it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks.' OK, mistakes happen. But, as Seinfeld might ask, then what's the deal with the pending Google patent that describes capturing wireless data packets by operating a device — which 'may be placed in a vehicle' — in a 'sniffer' or 'monitor' mode and analyzing them on a server? Guess belated kudos are owed to the savvy Slashdot commenter who speculated back in January that the patent-pending technology might be useful inside a Google Street View vehicle. Google faces inquiries into its Wi-Fi packet sniffing practices by German and US authorities."

Flea of Pain writes "Director Guillermo Del Toro has confirmed upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit has been put on hold indefinitely because the movie has been caught in a 'tangled negotiation' over the future of the MGM movie studio. The film, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's first book in the fantasy series, was reportedly due to begin shooting this summer, but has been mired in delays. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, who will act as producer on the new film, recently dismissed rumors of trouble with the picture, insisting, 'It's not really been delayed, because we've never announced the date.'"

A month ago we mentioned India's suspicions that telecomm equipment from China might contain backdoors. There hasn't been any smoking gun on such speculation. Now reader littlekorea sends in some background on the ties one important Chinese telecomm vender might or might not have to the government there. "Conspiracy theories abound as to whether networking kit vendor Huawei is owned or controlled by the Chinese government and/or the military-industrial complex. But who really owns Huawei? Kiwi journalist Juha Saarinen headed to Shanghai to find out."

Stoobalou writes "Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for one of the biggest video games of all time, the addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release StarCraft 2 on July 27, and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes that have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late. StarCraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection."

schliz writes "A radio telescope in New Zealand has joined five in Australia to challenge Southern Africa to host the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2012. The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 1 Gbps network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 1 Tb of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."

CWmike writes "Intel is considering hardware-based acceleration for Google's new WebM video file format in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity, an Intel executive said on Thursday. Announced last Wednesday at Google I/O, WebM files will include video streams compressed with the open-source VP8 video codec, which was acquired by Google when it bought On2 Technologies in February. 'Just like we did with other codecs like MPEG2, H.264 and VC1, if VP8 establishes itself in the Smart TV space, we will add it to our [hardware] decoders,' said Wilfred Martis, a general manager at Intel's Digital Home Group."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Several years ago a federal court in Texas ordered the RIAA, in an 'innocent infringement' case against a teenager, to either accept $200 per infringed work, or to go to trial over the innocent infringement issue, in Maverick Recording Co v. Harper. Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from MP3 files which bore no such notice. Now, a petition for certiorari has been filed on the defendant's behalf, arguing that the 5th Circuit's ruling would make it impossible for anyone to interpose an innocent infringement case, even where they had never seen a copyright notice. The lawyers filing the petition on defendant's behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Several years ago a federal court in Texas ordered the RIAA, in an 'innocent infringement' case against a teenager, to either accept $200 per infringed work, or to go to trial over the innocent infringement issue, in Maverick Recording Co v. Harper. Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from MP3 files which bore no such notice. Now, a petition for certiorari has been filed on the defendant's behalf, arguing that the 5th Circuit's ruling would make it impossible for anyone to interpose an innocent infringement case, even where they had never seen a copyright notice. The lawyers filing the petition on defendant's behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Several years ago a federal court in Texas ordered the RIAA, in an 'innocent infringement' case against a teenager, to either accept $200 per infringed work, or to go to trial over the innocent infringement issue, in Maverick Recording Co v. Harper. Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from MP3 files which bore no such notice. Now, a petition for certiorari has been filed on the defendant's behalf, arguing that the 5th Circuit's ruling would make it impossible for anyone to interpose an innocent infringement case, even where they had never seen a copyright notice. The lawyers filing the petition on defendant's behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000."

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how long we can go before a truly catastrophic data disaster strikes. 'The lure of potential profits in the information economy, combined with the apparent ease with which data can be gathered and a lack of regulation, creates a climate of recklessness in which a "data spill" of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon incident seems not just likely, but inevitable.' Witness Google mistakenly emailing potentially sensitive business data to customers of its Local Business Center service, or the 1.5 million Facebook accounts and passwords recently offered up on an underground hacking forum. 'These incidents seem relatively minor, but as companies gather ever more individually identifiable data and cross-reference these databases in new and more innovative ways, the potential for a major catastrophe grows.'"

An anonymous reader writes "We all know that flash and other types of solid state storage can only endure a limited number of write cycles. The open source Flash Destroyer prototype explores that limit by writing and verifying a solid state storage chip until it dies. The total write-verify cycle count is shown on a display — watch a live video feed and guess when the first chip will die. This project was inspired by the inevitable comments about flash longevity on every Slashdot SSD story. Design files and source are available at Google Code."

RobHart writes "The LA Times is reporting that the Gulf oil leak appears to have been plugged by the 'top kill.' 'Thad Allen, who is coordinating the government response, says the well still has low pressure, but cement will be used to cap the well permanently as soon as the pressure hits zero.'"

tekgoblin writes "According to Edge-online.com, their source says that we can expect Microsoft's Project Natal to cost around $149. 'The figure for the standalone unit is significantly higher than a previous sub-£50 estimate, but less than pricing recently suggested by European retailers. It’s also more expensive than Sony’s Natal rival, Move, which will be available later this year with a game for less than $100.'"

Ponca City, We love you writes "Live Science reports that researchers say playing video games before bedtime may give gamers an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, which could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma. 'If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice,' says Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, who says that hardcore gamers represent the leading edge of immersion in virtual worlds that increasingly has come to define a large part of contemporary entertainment and communication. 'Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.' One intriguing theory holds that dreams are a sort of threat simulation where nightmares help organisms hone their skills in a protective environment, and ideally prepare organisms for a real-life situation. To test that theory, Gackenbach conducted a study using independent assessments that coded threat levels in after-dream reports and found that gamers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation (in which the dreamer became the threatening presence), with fewer aggression dreams overall. In other words, a scary nightmare scenario turned into something 'fun' for a gamer."

mantis2009 writes "After recent complaints of anti-competitive behavior, the US Department of Justice has opened an inquiry into Apple's business practices for selling music. Investigators have specifically asked whether Apple colluded with record labels to thwart Amazon.com's music download store, according to the ever-present anonymous 'people briefed on the situation.' Allegedly, Apple threatened to retaliate if any music label participated in Amazon's 'MP3 Daily Deal' promotion, which offered early access to some MP3 tracks." So it looks like the Justice Department won the DoJ vs. FTC fight for the regulation bully pulpit.

johnmccollum writes "A wealth of tools are available to debug and test Django applications, but knowing when and how to use these resources can intimidate the new user. Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging, by Karen M. Tracey, aims to walk the user through the process of creating a web application from scratch, ensuring that the resulting code is bug-free and ready for production." Keep reading for the rest of John's review. Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging author Karen M. Tracey pages 409 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer John McCollum ISBN 978-1-847197-56-6 summary Building rigorously tested and bug-free Django applications In a way, Django makes it deceptively easy to write a dynamic web application. With a few lines of code, you can have an fully functional application up and running in a short space of time, and complex applications take less time than ever to develop. Inevitably, though, bugs will creep in to the development process, and the professional developer will want to make sure that their application is as bug-free as possible before launching.

The book opens with a simple question: "How do you know when code you have written is working as intended?" The answer, of course, is that you test it. But if you're not a cowboy coder, you'll want to leverage the full power of Django's automated testing framework for best results. In the course of this book, the author develops a full web application, from start to finish, and describes how each section would be tested and debugged.

The author's intended audience for this book is perhaps one that is relatively new to Django. Ideally, the reader will have a functioning installation of Django, will have worked through at least the tutorial, and may well have written a couple of applications. This book would also be excellent for someone migrating to Python from another language, or moving into MVC frameworks for the first time. Crucially, the book doesn't just explain how to test, it also explains when and what to test too, so it serves as an ideal introduction into testing in general. There are many code examples and screenshots, and each line of code is fully explained.

The book kicks off with an examination of doctests and unit tests. Their relative pros and cons are explained in some depth, and the author does a great job in this section of discussing exactly what you should be testing, initially beginning with data models. She then moves on to more advanced unit testing strategies and applications, such as testing views and customizations of the admin area.

One of Python's greatest strengths is its ecosystem, and the following chapters cover some of the other tools you might want to integrate into your project. Django-coverage provides reporting on how much of your code is covered by tests, and Twill is a package that essentially replaces Django's test client to provide enhanced functionality — particularly for working with forms. Both packages have fully explained and in-depth examples to work through. (Code downloads are available at Packt Publishing's web site for the terminally lazy!)

With the testing section of the book complete, the author moves on to the debugging section of the book. Starting with the very basics (setting up Django in debug mode), the book then takes a detailed look at the Django debug page. This is something that I could see being useful for many new users — the debug page contains a wealth of information (and not all of it is always entirely relevant, if not outright misleading), so learning to understand this page is crucial to your success as a Djangonaut.

The book then takes a tour of the excellent django-debug-toolbar, before moving on to what was, for me, the most valuable chapter of the book: "When you don't know even know what to log: Using Debuggers." This chapter introduces the PDB (Python Debugger) library.

Like many others, I suppose, Django was my first introduction to Python. For that reason, my knowledge of the standard library is perhaps not as strong as it could be. For me, learning about the different ways of using the debugger was the highlight of the book, and something that will probably change the way I develop with Django.

The book concludes, of course, by taking the application into a production environment. And in line with the latest advice, that means setting up the site using Apache and mod_wsgi. In keeping with the theme of the book, the most common issues in deployment are identified and resolved.

This book weighs in at over four hundred pages, and its greatest strength is its wide scope. Although the basics of testing in Django are easy to understand, it's another thing entirely to see an entire application built from the ground up with testing at the forefront. As I mentioned before, the focus is as much on developing a testing and debugging strategy as it is on the technical aspects.

From a more technical point of view, the subject matter ranges from beginner to advanced. From writing the most basic doctests to debugging multi-process race conditions, the difficulty level increases incrementally, and no important details are skirted over. The prose is well-written and easy to read throughout.

If I had one gripe about the book, it would be that in places, it goes into a little too much detail. There's a section on using the Django web site (the bug tracker, the mailing list etc.) that I could have done without entirely. Although it might be useful for some users, the site is pretty self-explanatory and doesn't really warrant the attention it gets, in my opinion.

You shouldn't let that put you off though — this really is an excellent exploration of the topic. In addition, Packt Publishing will make a donation to the Django project for every book sold, so in purchasing this book, you'll be indirectly helping the project financially too.

This book is worth a place on any Django developer's bookshelf.

You can purchase Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

johnmccollum writes "A wealth of tools are available to debug and test Django applications, but knowing when and how to use these resources can intimidate the new user. Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging, by Karen M. Tracey, aims to walk the user through the process of creating a web application from scratch, ensuring that the resulting code is bug-free and ready for production." Keep reading for the rest of John's review. Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging author Karen M. Tracey pages 409 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer John McCollum ISBN 978-1-847197-56-6 summary Building rigorously tested and bug-free Django applications In a way, Django makes it deceptively easy to write a dynamic web application. With a few lines of code, you can have an fully functional application up and running in a short space of time, and complex applications take less time than ever to develop. Inevitably, though, bugs will creep in to the development process, and the professional developer will want to make sure that their application is as bug-free as possible before launching.

The book opens with a simple question: "How do you know when code you have written is working as intended?" The answer, of course, is that you test it. But if you're not a cowboy coder, you'll want to leverage the full power of Django's automated testing framework for best results. In the course of this book, the author develops a full web application, from start to finish, and describes how each section would be tested and debugged.

The author's intended audience for this book is perhaps one that is relatively new to Django. Ideally, the reader will have a functioning installation of Django, will have worked through at least the tutorial, and may well have written a couple of applications. This book would also be excellent for someone migrating to Python from another language, or moving into MVC frameworks for the first time. Crucially, the book doesn't just explain how to test, it also explains when and what to test too, so it serves as an ideal introduction into testing in general. There are many code examples and screenshots, and each line of code is fully explained.

The book kicks off with an examination of doctests and unit tests. Their relative pros and cons are explained in some depth, and the author does a great job in this section of discussing exactly what you should be testing, initially beginning with data models. She then moves on to more advanced unit testing strategies and applications, such as testing views and customizations of the admin area.

One of Python's greatest strengths is its ecosystem, and the following chapters cover some of the other tools you might want to integrate into your project. Django-coverage provides reporting on how much of your code is covered by tests, and Twill is a package that essentially replaces Django's test client to provide enhanced functionality — particularly for working with forms. Both packages have fully explained and in-depth examples to work through. (Code downloads are available at Packt Publishing's web site for the terminally lazy!)

With the testing section of the book complete, the author moves on to the debugging section of the book. Starting with the very basics (setting up Django in debug mode), the book then takes a detailed look at the Django debug page. This is something that I could see being useful for many new users — the debug page contains a wealth of information (and not all of it is always entirely relevant, if not outright misleading), so learning to understand this page is crucial to your success as a Djangonaut.

The book then takes a tour of the excellent django-debug-toolbar, before moving on to what was, for me, the most valuable chapter of the book: "When you don't know even know what to log: Using Debuggers." This chapter introduces the PDB (Python Debugger) library.

Like many others, I suppose, Django was my first introduction to Python. For that reason, my knowledge of the standard library is perhaps not as strong as it could be. For me, learning about the different ways of using the debugger was the highlight of the book, and something that will probably change the way I develop with Django.

The book concludes, of course, by taking the application into a production environment. And in line with the latest advice, that means setting up the site using Apache and mod_wsgi. In keeping with the theme of the book, the most common issues in deployment are identified and resolved.

This book weighs in at over four hundred pages, and its greatest strength is its wide scope. Although the basics of testing in Django are easy to understand, it's another thing entirely to see an entire application built from the ground up with testing at the forefront. As I mentioned before, the focus is as much on developing a testing and debugging strategy as it is on the technical aspects.

From a more technical point of view, the subject matter ranges from beginner to advanced. From writing the most basic doctests to debugging multi-process race conditions, the difficulty level increases incrementally, and no important details are skirted over. The prose is well-written and easy to read throughout.

If I had one gripe about the book, it would be that in places, it goes into a little too much detail. There's a section on using the Django web site (the bug tracker, the mailing list etc.) that I could have done without entirely. Although it might be useful for some users, the site is pretty self-explanatory and doesn't really warrant the attention it gets, in my opinion.

You shouldn't let that put you off though — this really is an excellent exploration of the topic. In addition, Packt Publishing will make a donation to the Django project for every book sold, so in purchasing this book, you'll be indirectly helping the project financially too.

This book is worth a place on any Django developer's bookshelf.

You can purchase Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Julie188 writes "Details on this are admittedly sketchy, but both Red Hat and Xen.org have gone on record promising that some kind of support for the Xen hypervisor is forthcoming for Fedora users. As we know, on Monday, Fedora 13 was released, chock full of features to appeal to business users. One of the ballyhooed improvements to 13 is virtualization — meaning KVM and only KVM — for Red Hat. Xen was dropped from Fedora a few releases ago and it hasn't come back in 13, except that 13 still supports Xen guests. Meanwhile, 'work is underway in Xen.org to add platform support to Fedora 13 post-release,' promises Xen.org's Ian Pratt."

1sockchuck writes "Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different from the overbuilding during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook — which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara."

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson's startup, Whisper Systems, has released a public beta of two Android applications that provide encrypted call and SMS capabilities for your Android phone. In the wake of recent GSM attacks, it'll be interesting to see if smartphones end up providing a platform that fundamentally changes the security we can expect from mobile communication."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman questions the viability of Windows 7 on tablets in the wake of the news that HP will use Palm's WebOS as the foundation for iPad rivals, rather than follow through with the previously hyped Windows 7-based Slate. 'The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed. Even though technical components are shared between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, the irrelevant Mac OS functions aren't gumming up the iPhone OS, and Apple's development environment doesn't let you pull through desktop approaches into your mobile applications. You're forced to go touch-native,' Gruman writes, adding that, when it comes to touch capabilities, Windows 7 leaves much to be desired. 'Sure, a few Windows 7 slate-style tablets will ship — Asus and MSI are said to have models shipping later this year. But those products will go nowhere, because Windows 7 is simply not the right operating system for a slate.'"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman questions the viability of Windows 7 on tablets in the wake of the news that HP will use Palm's WebOS as the foundation for iPad rivals, rather than follow through with the previously hyped Windows 7-based Slate. 'The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed. Even though technical components are shared between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, the irrelevant Mac OS functions aren't gumming up the iPhone OS, and Apple's development environment doesn't let you pull through desktop approaches into your mobile applications. You're forced to go touch-native,' Gruman writes, adding that, when it comes to touch capabilities, Windows 7 leaves much to be desired. 'Sure, a few Windows 7 slate-style tablets will ship — Asus and MSI are said to have models shipping later this year. But those products will go nowhere, because Windows 7 is simply not the right operating system for a slate.'"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman questions the viability of Windows 7 on tablets in the wake of the news that HP will use Palm's WebOS as the foundation for iPad rivals, rather than follow through with the previously hyped Windows 7-based Slate. 'The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed. Even though technical components are shared between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, the irrelevant Mac OS functions aren't gumming up the iPhone OS, and Apple's development environment doesn't let you pull through desktop approaches into your mobile applications. You're forced to go touch-native,' Gruman writes, adding that, when it comes to touch capabilities, Windows 7 leaves much to be desired. 'Sure, a few Windows 7 slate-style tablets will ship — Asus and MSI are said to have models shipping later this year. But those products will go nowhere, because Windows 7 is simply not the right operating system for a slate.'"

KirinMercury writes "Google began offering an encrypted option for Web searchers on Friday and said it planned to roll it out for all of its services eventually. People who want to use the more secure search option can type 'https://www.google.com' into their browser, scrambling the connection so the words and phrases they search on, and the results that Google displays, will be protected from interception." Note that you need the 'www' for it to work. Dropping it redirects you to a non-ssl page. You might have read this on Saturday, but if you missed it, it's still worth knowing.

schliz writes "Google's plans to upgrade to high-definition Street View in Australia are on hold until it completes a rigorous internal audit of the processes, it announced today. The company is currently being investigated by international regulators about possible privacy breaches when it became known that its Street View vehicles were capturing not only publicly available SSIDs and MAC addresses, but also samples of payload data transmitted over these networks."

An anonymous reader writes "Pioneer and veteran of genomics Professor John Sulston is extremely concerned about the patent applications on the first synthetic life-form. The patents were filed by the Venter Institute following the announcement of the first life-form to have a synthetic genome. Sulston claims the patent is excessively broad and would stifle research and development in the field by creating an effective monopoly on synthetic life and related molecular techniques. Prof. Sulston had previously locked horns ten years ago with Dr. Craig Venter over intellectual property issues surrounding the human genome project. Fortunately, Sulston won the last round and the HGP is freely accessible — Venter had wanted to charge for access, just as he now wishes to make 'synthetic life' proprietary."

The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time." Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia takes up a topic many IT pros face: 'When you've attached enough Band-Aids to the corpus that it's more bandage than not, isn't it time to start over?' The constant need to apply temporary fixes that end up becoming permanent are fast pushing many IT infrastructures beyond repair. Much of the blame falls on the products IT has to deal with. 'As processors have become faster and RAM cheaper, the software vendors have opted to dress up new versions in eye candy and limited-use features rather than concentrate on the foundation of the application. To their credit, code that was written to run on a Pentium-II 300MHz CPU will fly on modern hardware, but that code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries. Yes, it might function on modern hardware, but not without more than a few Band-Aids to attach it to modern operating systems,' Venezia writes. And yet breaking this 'vicious cycle of bad ideas and worse implementations' by wiping the slate clean is no easy task. Especially when the need for kludges isn't apparent until the software is in the process of being implemented. 'Generally it's too late to change course at that point.'"

Trailrunner7 writes "One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we'll worry about it. Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it's now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects. A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad. Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions and other data to third parties. Google is caught recording not only MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots, but storing data from the networks as well. But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user. You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that."

Trailrunner7 writes "One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we'll worry about it. Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it's now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects. A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad. Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions and other data to third parties. Google is caught recording not only MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots, but storing data from the networks as well. But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user. You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that."

tekgoblin writes "Today Twitter announced on its blog an upcoming change to its Terms of Service. The change will not allow anyone to promote paid tweets through the Twitter API. Twitter had announced previously that it will be releasing a 'Promoted Tweets' platform for advertisers that will be non-intrusive and will always be relevant to the Twitter timeline. This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers that relied on the paid tweets that will be blocked shortly. Depending on how expensive the Twitter Promoted Tweets will be, this will show us whether or not Promoted Tweets will be good for the little guy."

Trevor James writes "Green's book is without a doubt the definitive practical guide to using the Views 2.x module in Drupal 6, and to creating complex and dynamic page, block, and attachment-based views for your Drupal site. One big plus to this book's structure is that Green uses a real "live" production website project as a guide (he states early on that he was working on the site build for the client while writing the book and that the client approved of using the site build as the book's main example) — all of the chapters and subsequent tutorials are focused on building a site for a company that specializes in hiring out contractors and subcontractors. It's nice to see real-world examples being used in a computer tutorial book, especially one focused on Drupal and Drupal Views. The data Green is accessing is real data and this helps to engage the reader and show the multitude of real situations that a developer will get involved with when developing Drupal Views." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review. Drupal 6 Attachment Views author J. Ayen Green pages 300 publisher Packt rating 9/10 reviewer Trevor james ISBN 1849510806 summary If you are a Drupal developer of any level and you are waiting to explore Attachment Views, then this book is for you. Green introduces us to Drupal 6.x Views in Chapter 1 by creating a page View. Green points out how a Views panel relates directly to the SQL statements being run on the backend by Drupal, something I have not seen done in any online tutorial or book — he maps out the panel View and shows, for example, that the Sort Criteria in your Views interface matches your SQL "ORDER BY" statements. A nice touch.

Green also shows us how to Analyze the views we create to test their configuration before previewing the View. This is another trick I was not aware of (and I use Views heavily in the work I do) so I'll emphasize here that the book covers the Views interface exhaustively. Every detail of the interface and building page and attachment Views is covered. Green tackles building Views using Arguments in both Chapters 1-2 and does it in a method that demystifies Arguments and makes them much easier to understand.

The book shows methods of leveraging the Views interface to preview your View data and content without having to leave the Views screen — in chapter 2 Green shows us how to test our attachment View by previewing the Arguments we've added directly in the Views live preview area.

Another nice surprise in this title is that the author covers many other Drupal components besides Views. In chapter 2 Green dives right into Drupal theming showing us how to create template files for our Views and add PHP and CSS to tweak and manipulate our Views display output. So right here you're not just getting a book on using Views but also some basic instruction on how to build theme template files and add code to the tpl files.

In Chapter 3 Green moves into a detailed tutorial on creating a module. First he shows us the core Drupal Contact form (Contact module) and we build a simple contact form. Next he explains that we can extend this simple contact form by building a custom module to add custom fields to our form — for example adding fields to collect address information and also tweaking the labels for the core Contact form. Green explains in detail how to build a module and how to use Drupal's form_alter hook to "alter" our Contact form. It's the best description and explanation of the form_alter hook I've read. Again Green gives us much more here than simple Views building — he shows us how to build a module in Drupal. Finally bringing Views back into the discussion we learn how to glue all of the parts we have — the contact form, custom contact fields from our module, a CAPTCHA field, and an embedded Gmap using the embed_gmap module — into a View and then display this view on our site to show multiple Drupal components on one page. We end up building a dynamic Contact Us Web page that contains a map, contact information and a Contact form. Amazing stuff.

For the first 3 chapters alone I recommend this book to anyone just starting to use the Drupal Views module, any Drupal developer who is interested in theming Views, and any Drupal user who is just starting to build their own custom modules. The book covers so much terrain in the first 3 chapters it's a definite must have on anyone's Drupal bookshelf.

Chapters 4-8 of Green's Drupal 6 Attachment Views contains the brunt of discussion and tutorials on building Views to support various content output. These chapters will give developers a good amount of practice building Views since Green emphasized rebuilding a View for the practice vs. simply exporting and importing your View code. I agree with this method. It might be easier to export and import your code but you'll start to understand the inner workings of View arguments and relationships if you build them from scratch each time you need to configure one.

In chapter 4 Green shows us how to override View settings so your attachment View does not conflict with your page or block View. Green also points out here that we can configure Views for multiple audiences and target the View to specific roles such as anonymous users or logged in site admins. In this chapter we create a management role-based View for our admin users to access.

In chapter 5 Green shows us how to create complex Views using attachments to display Bio content of our company's employees. He returns to a discussion of theming showing us how to theme the output of our View, this time focusing on theming content to surround and display next to an image. View relationships are introduced in this chapter so that we can filter specific jobs to specific project managers who are in charge of the job — this is based on using a node reference field in our content type. Again a nice description and tutorial on how to use CCK fields in our View output.

I'll stress here that the entire book (but mostly in these Views intensive chapters) contains a nice balance of screenshots and descriptive text. The screens are important as it's always nice to have the visual aid to accompany the tutorial bullet points and instructional material. In chapter 6 we create another complex 3-view composite display similar to the one built in chapter 5. Again Green stresses practice makes perfect when it comes to using and building Views in Drupal.

Chapter 7 contains a interesting take on how to enhance and theme a simple "About Us" Web page. I liked the use of Views in this chapter to make a basic Drupal page more dynamic and interactive. Green's expertise is apparent in this chapter as he takes something so basic and static and turns it on its head (and takes it completely out of the box) to show you how you can engage static content better by building it using the Views module. This chapter is a gem in the book and one that clients should read — it will give clients ideas about how to take static content and make it vital content on their site. About Us pages do not need to be boring.

Chapter 8 focuses on building simple administrative control panel using Views. Again Green challenges us as Drupal developers to step out of the box and build useful and custom management tools for our clients.

Chapter 9 shows us how to build role specific menus outside of Views using the Drupal menu and block system. Green diversifies here and begins the excellent discussion in these last two chapters of Drupal's administrative functionality outside of the Views module which has up to this point been the focus of the book. Green gives a tutorial on how to create a "peek-a-boo" login block. What's that you ask? Read this chapter to get the full rundown — it's functionality that will impress your client — using Javascript and an API. Good stuff here. Finally a discussion of adding a new theme region to your Drupal theme (always good to know how to do) and a final look at the Views module, creating a current Jobs/News block.

Chapter 10 wraps this excellent title up by showing us some of Drupal's core functionality that always ends up on the "punch list" in our projects — stuff like:

* Setting the admin theme
* Enabling clean URLs
* Error reporting
* File system
* Input formats
* Logging
* Performance
* ... and more

Read Chapter 10 for sure and then show it to your lead admin/project manager on the client side since it's a great cheat sheet for administering Drupal.

Green had published an opus here on Drupal Views and Drupal 6.x in general. I'll enjoy working through this book in more detail and practicing his Views attachment problems in my own work.

You can purchase Drupal 6 Attachment Views from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Trevor James writes "Green's book is without a doubt the definitive practical guide to using the Views 2.x module in Drupal 6, and to creating complex and dynamic page, block, and attachment-based views for your Drupal site. One big plus to this book's structure is that Green uses a real "live" production website project as a guide (he states early on that he was working on the site build for the client while writing the book and that the client approved of using the site build as the book's main example) — all of the chapters and subsequent tutorials are focused on building a site for a company that specializes in hiring out contractors and subcontractors. It's nice to see real-world examples being used in a computer tutorial book, especially one focused on Drupal and Drupal Views. The data Green is accessing is real data and this helps to engage the reader and show the multitude of real situations that a developer will get involved with when developing Drupal Views." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review. Drupal 6 Attachment Views author J. Ayen Green pages 300 publisher Packt rating 9/10 reviewer Trevor james ISBN 1849510806 summary If you are a Drupal developer of any level and you are waiting to explore Attachment Views, then this book is for you. Green introduces us to Drupal 6.x Views in Chapter 1 by creating a page View. Green points out how a Views panel relates directly to the SQL statements being run on the backend by Drupal, something I have not seen done in any online tutorial or book — he maps out the panel View and shows, for example, that the Sort Criteria in your Views interface matches your SQL "ORDER BY" statements. A nice touch.

Green also shows us how to Analyze the views we create to test their configuration before previewing the View. This is another trick I was not aware of (and I use Views heavily in the work I do) so I'll emphasize here that the book covers the Views interface exhaustively. Every detail of the interface and building page and attachment Views is covered. Green tackles building Views using Arguments in both Chapters 1-2 and does it in a method that demystifies Arguments and makes them much easier to understand.

The book shows methods of leveraging the Views interface to preview your View data and content without having to leave the Views screen — in chapter 2 Green shows us how to test our attachment View by previewing the Arguments we've added directly in the Views live preview area.

Another nice surprise in this title is that the author covers many other Drupal components besides Views. In chapter 2 Green dives right into Drupal theming showing us how to create template files for our Views and add PHP and CSS to tweak and manipulate our Views display output. So right here you're not just getting a book on using Views but also some basic instruction on how to build theme template files and add code to the tpl files.

In Chapter 3 Green moves into a detailed tutorial on creating a module. First he shows us the core Drupal Contact form (Contact module) and we build a simple contact form. Next he explains that we can extend this simple contact form by building a custom module to add custom fields to our form — for example adding fields to collect address information and also tweaking the labels for the core Contact form. Green explains in detail how to build a module and how to use Drupal's form_alter hook to "alter" our Contact form. It's the best description and explanation of the form_alter hook I've read. Again Green gives us much more here than simple Views building — he shows us how to build a module in Drupal. Finally bringing Views back into the discussion we learn how to glue all of the parts we have — the contact form, custom contact fields from our module, a CAPTCHA field, and an embedded Gmap using the embed_gmap module — into a View and then display this view on our site to show multiple Drupal components on one page. We end up building a dynamic Contact Us Web page that contains a map, contact information and a Contact form. Amazing stuff.

For the first 3 chapters alone I recommend this book to anyone just starting to use the Drupal Views module, any Drupal developer who is interested in theming Views, and any Drupal user who is just starting to build their own custom modules. The book covers so much terrain in the first 3 chapters it's a definite must have on anyone's Drupal bookshelf.

Chapters 4-8 of Green's Drupal 6 Attachment Views contains the brunt of discussion and tutorials on building Views to support various content output. These chapters will give developers a good amount of practice building Views since Green emphasized rebuilding a View for the practice vs. simply exporting and importing your View code. I agree with this method. It might be easier to export and import your code but you'll start to understand the inner workings of View arguments and relationships if you build them from scratch each time you need to configure one.

In chapter 4 Green shows us how to override View settings so your attachment View does not conflict with your page or block View. Green also points out here that we can configure Views for multiple audiences and target the View to specific roles such as anonymous users or logged in site admins. In this chapter we create a management role-based View for our admin users to access.

In chapter 5 Green shows us how to create complex Views using attachments to display Bio content of our company's employees. He returns to a discussion of theming showing us how to theme the output of our View, this time focusing on theming content to surround and display next to an image. View relationships are introduced in this chapter so that we can filter specific jobs to specific project managers who are in charge of the job — this is based on using a node reference field in our content type. Again a nice description and tutorial on how to use CCK fields in our View output.

I'll stress here that the entire book (but mostly in these Views intensive chapters) contains a nice balance of screenshots and descriptive text. The screens are important as it's always nice to have the visual aid to accompany the tutorial bullet points and instructional material. In chapter 6 we create another complex 3-view composite display similar to the one built in chapter 5. Again Green stresses practice makes perfect when it comes to using and building Views in Drupal.

Chapter 7 contains a interesting take on how to enhance and theme a simple "About Us" Web page. I liked the use of Views in this chapter to make a basic Drupal page more dynamic and interactive. Green's expertise is apparent in this chapter as he takes something so basic and static and turns it on its head (and takes it completely out of the box) to show you how you can engage static content better by building it using the Views module. This chapter is a gem in the book and one that clients should read — it will give clients ideas about how to take static content and make it vital content on their site. About Us pages do not need to be boring.

Chapter 8 focuses on building simple administrative control panel using Views. Again Green challenges us as Drupal developers to step out of the box and build useful and custom management tools for our clients.

Chapter 9 shows us how to build role specific menus outside of Views using the Drupal menu and block system. Green diversifies here and begins the excellent discussion in these last two chapters of Drupal's administrative functionality outside of the Views module which has up to this point been the focus of the book. Green gives a tutorial on how to create a "peek-a-boo" login block. What's that you ask? Read this chapter to get the full rundown — it's functionality that will impress your client — using Javascript and an API. Good stuff here. Finally a discussion of adding a new theme region to your Drupal theme (always good to know how to do) and a final look at the Views module, creating a current Jobs/News block.

Chapter 10 wraps this excellent title up by showing us some of Drupal's core functionality that always ends up on the "punch list" in our projects — stuff like:

* Setting the admin theme
* Enabling clean URLs
* Error reporting
* File system
* Input formats
* Logging
* Performance
* ... and more

Read Chapter 10 for sure and then show it to your lead admin/project manager on the client side since it's a great cheat sheet for administering Drupal.

Green had published an opus here on Drupal Views and Drupal 6.x in general. I'll enjoy working through this book in more detail and practicing his Views attachment problems in my own work.

You can purchase Drupal 6 Attachment Views from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

neogramps writes "It's been a long time coming, but the first Pandora consoles are finally rolling off of the production line. (Well, this one actually walked out the door to a customer who lived near the 'factory.') Initial estimates had put production and development at taking two months, but Murphy had other ideas. Banking issues, design problems, problems communicating with the Chinese moulding company, escalating assembly costs, and even a volcano all managed to get in the way, but the small and dedicated team soldiered on, and just over a year and a half later, the wait is coming to an end for the 4,000 pre-orderers."

Degrees writes "Although Novell rejected the bid from Elliott Associates earlier this year, reports now indicate Novell has decided to embrace the inevitable. According to the Wall Street Journal (sub. required): 'As many as 20 companies have expressed interest in Novell, according to people familiar with the matter. Most, if not all, of the companies expected to lodge serious bids are private equity firms. ... Novell has four separate businesses, each of which could be attractive to a rival technology company. However, it's unlikely that a tech company would bid for all of Novell, these people said. Private equity firms, however, could break up Novell and either sell off the pieces or run them as standalone businesses.' Are there any companies that don't have an enterprise grade Linux distribution, and ought to? Ditto workstation management, directory services, legacy email, and virtualization suite?"

otter42 writes "It seems that X-37B couldn't stay hidden forever. Launched a few weeks ago, The Flying Twinkie disappeared shortly after separation. Now it has been found in an orbit that takes it as far north as 40 degrees latitude. No additional information has been found about the spacecraft's capabilities or purpose, except for a US Air Force statement that the satellite has no space-weapons purpose. The X-37B is intended to fly for 9 months at a time, opening the door to possible space longevity experiments in addition to its spying tasks."