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Blog
Tuesday's OSCON Event Schedule
July 22 2008
OSCON is happening right now at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, bringing together thousands of experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer. Today's afternoon sessions include: - Creating Location-aware Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform -… read moreJuly 21 2008
O'Reilly News interviews Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON, for a quick survey of what's new and interesting in the world of open source. read moreDan Kaminsky: Upgrade Your DNS Now!
July 15 2008
DNS is the fundamental human-friendly abstraction of the Internet. It maps names such as oreilly.com to addresses computers can understand. Yet there are flaws in the protocol, which mean that malicious users can redirect your request for oreilly.com for their own nefarious purposes. Security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered this danger… read moreThe Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander
July 09 2008
What kind of software does it take to send a 700+ pound device millions of miles away to land safely on another planet? Peter Gluck is the project software engineer for the Mars Phoenix lander mission. In this interview with O'Reilly News, he describes how rocket scientists write and manage… read moreA Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, part three
June 26 2008
Modern Perl development is quick, easy, powerful, and maintainable. Doug Sheppard and chromatic demonstrate how to find and manipulate text in documents with regular expressions. read moreTodd Ogasawara on Microsoft Competing with F/OSS
June 25 2008
On Port 25, Todd Ogasawara asks Does Microsoft Really Need to "Compete" With Open Source? According to Ray Ozzie, the competition has led directly to interoperability concerns -- and interoperability means cooperation, at least once you reach the point of... read moreJune 20 2008
What's most interesting to me about Jonathan Schwartz's Anything But a Flash in the Pan isn't the argument that solid-state storage devices will make servers faster, more reliable, and less power-hungry. (If you pay attention to Brian Aker -- of... read moreOne-Bit Social Networking Doesn't Work
May 30 2008
Giles Bowkett's Never Hate. Only Destroy. (disclosure: contains language your local third graders probably use and your work filter might block as inappropriate) contains a side point which crystallized something I've pondered for several weeks: The whole point of the Cory Doctorow... read moreHow to Add a Feature to Perl 5
May 29 2008
Yesterday's How to Patch Perl 5 explained the big picture of how to add a new feature to a dynamic language with a virtual machine. Now it's time to discuss the technical details.... read moreMay 28 2008
Perl 5 change #33858 adds three new features from Perl 6 to Perl 5.12. With recent interest in implementations of dynamic languages on various virtual machines, I thought it interesting to discuss how a feature comes about and how it works --... read moreFrom "Interesting" to "Uninterested" in a Sentence
May 22 2008
The ever-creative Wade Olson (of KDE fame) tells an interesting story of immediately losing interest in otherwise-interesting hardware due to "Intellectual Property" protections. He caught himself going from caring to not caring in the time it took to read the phrase "Don't... read moreParrot 0.6.2 "Reverse Sublimation" Released (and Perl 6 Progress)
May 21 2008
You know the drill by now. You can read the Parrot 0.6.2 release announcement on your own. User-visible improvements include a tremendous amount of progress in Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot), including better object orientation, placeholder variables, and type checking. Much of... read moreWhat's the "Linux Tax" Worth to You?
May 20 2008
In When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?, I mentioned that I'm considering upgrading my System76 laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper: Dude... read moreThe Optimization That Didn't Matter
May 16 2008
I've spent several hours optimizing Parrot over the past few months. In particular, I've concentrated on the build process for Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot), as it exercises a lot of parts of Parrot. We don't yet have accurate numbers on the... read moreMay 15 2008
For years, many people have argued that one of PHP's big successes is deployment. The language has little to recommend it for anything beyond simple database-backed HTML templating, but there's little easier than dropping a couple of .php files in a directory... read more
