O'Reilly Radar: OSCON 2004 by Daniel H. Steinberg
Daniel Steinberg reports on Tim O'Reilly's OSCON 2004 keynote. Tim's remarks focused on what is currently on his radar. He discussed Internet applications and social software, and ended with the announcement that O'Reilly will be producing the third annual MySQL Conference this year in Santa Clara, California. 07/29/2004

The Expo Opens (OSCON Wednesday) by Derrick Story
Wednesday is a day of firsts. The Expo Hall opens, regular sessions begin, keynotes kick off the day, and parties close the night. This is OSCON in full swing and flying high. 07/29/2004

Humor and Tribute (OSCON Tuesday) by Derrick Story
In many ways, Larry Wall mirrors the humor and the passion of this gathering. His "State of the Onion" address on Tuesday night was one of his most compelling ever. And this was after a full day of activity that was educational, yes, but not without its moments of lightheartedness. 07/28/2004

Getting in Gear (OSCON Monday) by Derrick Story
Day One at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention was for many, finding their way, then getting in gear. Tutorials ran all day in many of the session rooms, and the evening event featured the SCO Moot Court. Overall, the verdict for the first day: success. 07/27/2004

Creating Custom Email Queries by Robert Bernier
Searching your corpus of email should be easy, but with a mishmash of text and binary attachments, it can be difficult. If you're clever, though, you can build a system to translate Microsoft Word documents into searchable, indexable text. Robert Bernier demonstrates building custom email queries with DBMail, PostgreSQL, IMAP, and a little Unix magic. 07/22/2004

How to Write a Basic Gtk# Program with Mono
Gtk#, the Mono API for the GTK+ UI toolkit, is the open source alternative to Windows.Forms. This article shows how to install Mono on Windows, how Gtk# works, and how to write a simple Gtk# program. This kind of mini-project is just the sort you'll find in O'Reilly's upcoming Mono: A Developer's Notebook. 07/08/2004

Building a Mailing List by Glenn Fleishman
There are dozens of free and proprietary systems for managing mailing lists, ranging from the trivial to bulletproof and exceedingly full-featured. Nearly all of them face the same challenges to provide the same behavior. Glenn Fleishman recently built his own LAMP-based mailing list in a few hours; here's how he did it. 07/01/2004

Why Write PostgreSQL Extension Functions? by Joe Conway
Relational databases are very powerful, but they don't do everything for you. In some cases, they don't do enough. Fortunately, many make it possible to write extension functions to add behavior you need. Joe Conway demonstrates why you might need this with C and PostgreSQL. 06/28/2004

The Pragmatic Programmers Interview by chromatic
The Pragmatic Programmers, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, recently launched their own line of books on pragmatic software development. Since O'Reilly helps to distribute their books, we convinced them to do an interview about self-publishing, the state of the software industry, and how to become better developers. 06/24/2004

The Mythical Man-Month Revisited by Ed Willis
Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" may be the classic text on professional software development. Almost 30 years later, which lessons have computing advances made obsolete and which lessons are still valid? Ed Willis explores issues raised by a careful re-reading. 06/17/2004

Paul Graham on Hacking by chromatic
Paul Graham is a hacker, a painter, and an essayist known as much for his thoughtful writings on spam, hacking, and Lisp as for creating the Arc programming language. In this interview with the O'Reilly Network, Paul discusses hacking, creativity, computer science education, and language design. Paul's collection of essays has just been released in a new book from O'Reilly, Hackers & Painters. 05/27/2004

Open Source in Africa by Kwindla Kramer
Open source software is good for the developing world. Not only is the price often right, but the openness offers nascent developers the chance to learn from their peers despite geographic and cultural distances. Kwindla Hultman Kramer recently attended the Africa Source conference, a gathering of free and open source software developers and fans. Here are his thoughts. 05/06/2004

Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea by Randall Hyde
Randall Hyde makes his case for why learning assembly language is still relevant today. The key, says Randall, is to learn how to efficiently implement an application, and the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language. Randall is the author of Write Great Code (from No Starch Press). 05/06/2004

Building a Parrot Compiler by Dan Sugalski
Parrot, the virtual machine for Perl 6, is not just for Perl 6 anymore. It's a surprisingly high-level, high-performance target for all sorts of languages. Dan Sugalski demonstrates Parrot's capabilities by building a compiler for a simple, yet business-critical, 4GL. Dan is a coauthor of Perl 6 Essentials. 04/15/2004

Eleven Metrics to Monitor for a Happy and Healthy Squid by Duane Wessels
Duane Wessels offers 11 tips to help you stay on top of Squid's performance. If you follow this advice, you should be able to discover problems before your users begin calling you to complain. Duane is the creator of Squid and the author of Squid: The Definitive Guide. 03/25/2004

Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? by Edd Dumbill
Miguel de Icaza recently led a two-day meeting that brought together developers and early adopters of the Mono project, an open source effort to create a free implementation of the .NET Development Framework. Edd Dumbill attended the gathering and reports on how Mono could become the first-choice platform for Linux software development. 03/11/2004

A Ticketing System for a Three-Tiered Architecture by Elena Garderman and Howard Feldman
Modern business apps often use a three-tiered architecture, separating the user interface from the data store from the application logic. Of course, this separation can add wait time, as users wait for their requests to process. Elena Garderman and Howard Feldman explain how adding a ticketing system can improve the process. 02/12/2004

The New Breed of Version Control Systems by Shlomi Fish
CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, is showing its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs. 01/29/2004

RouteWord Solutions by Andrew Odewahn
We've run the puzzles, now find out the answers! Here are the solutions to the 30 RouteWord puzzles Andrew Odewahn provided for us. 12/31/2003

The Best of ONLamp 2003 by chromatic
This year, 2003, was a big one for ONLamp. With 200+ articles under our belt, what did we like best? Where are we going next year? 12/23/2003

Ruby's Present and Future by Mike Stok
Ruby's been around for ten years and continues to grow in popularity and usage. What's next for the language? That's just one of the questions answered at the 2003 Ruby Conference. Mike Stok was there. He covers all three days of the conference. 12/18/2003

Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves by chromatic
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but is it effective or useful? Open source developers have the opportunity to learn from the successes and failures of other projects. Are we learning the right lessons, though? 12/11/2003

RouteWord: Daily Puzzle by Andrew Odewahn
Throughout the month of December, we're running daily RouteWord puzzles from Andrew Odewahn. Here's today's puzzle. 12/01/2003

Client-Side Mail Filtering with SaveMyModem by KIVILCIM Hindistan
Junk mail--spam or mail worms--waste bandwidth. If you're running a server, server-side filtering can help. If you're on broadband, the pain is diminished. If neither applies to you, all is not lost. KIVILCIM Hindistan introduces SaveMyModem, a client-side mail filtering program that can save you bandwidth and frustration. 11/26/2003

RouteWord: An Interesting Diversion by Andrew Odewahn
Graphs--loosely connected, unordered collections of nodes--are highly important to computer science. Visualizing graphs is even more important: think of maps, routes, webs, and any other interconnected relationships. Who says that can't also be fun? O'Reilly author Andrew Odewahn explains how he accidentally created a new type of word puzzle playing around with graph visualization. 11/26/2003

Introducing REBOL with Amazingly Easy GUI Programming by Gregg Irwin
Cross-platform development and deployment is tricky, though modern toolkits aim to take away some of the troubles. Some languages have already solved this issue, though. Enter REBOL, a small but powerful network-enabled programming language. Gregg Irwin introduces the language by writing a tiny survey application. 10/30/2003

Open Source: The Whole Product by Bernard Golden
As open source software becomes more popular and widely known, it moves into a new category of users: technology pragmatists. Pragmatists have wildly different goals from early adopters; how can open source software and companies meet their needs? Bernard Golden explains how his team developed a working open source strategy that alleviates risk. 10/16/2003

Which TiVo Is the Right One for You? by Raffi Krikorian
Raffi Krikorian, author of TiVo Hacks, examines the four different TiVo choices available: the Series 1 Stand-alone (SA), the S1 DirecTiVo, the Series 2 SA, and the S2 DirecTiVo. He looks at the pros and cons of each one so you'll know which one is the right one for you; and for the hackers among you, which one is right if you want to hack your TiVo. 10/02/2003

Paul Vixie on VeriSign by chromatic
Paul Vixie discusses VeriSign's recent redirection of nonexistent URLs to an advertising page. 09/23/2003

Inside Prelude, an Open Source IDS
09/18/2003

Inside Prelude, an Open Source IDS by KIVILCIM Hindistan
Keeping the bad guys out is important. Knowing whether, not if, they're in is even more important. Prelude, an open source IDS, takes a hybrid approach to security, collecting information from various sensors. KIVILCIM Hindistan talks to Yoann Vandoorselaere, Prelude's lead developer. 09/18/2003

Hacking TiVo, Part 2 by Raffi Krikorian
This week we bring you two more sample hacks from TiVo Hacks. Learn how to use TiVoWeb to schedule recordings of your favorite programs while you're on the road, and how to play downloaded video streams right from your TiVo over your home network. Break out the popcorn! 09/18/2003

Single Sign-on for Your Web Applications with Apache and Kerberos by Jason Garman
In this article, Jason Garman, author of Kerberos: The Definitive Guide, walks you through the implementation of SPNEGO, which allows for single sign-on of your web applications with Apache and Kerberos. Once you've performed these steps, clients who access the protected area of your Apache web server will transparently pass their domain credentials to your web server, with no separate username or password prompts. 09/11/2003

Distributed Computing Sanity Checking by Howard Feldman
Distributed computing can be a little scary. Clients are running code on their computers and servers are trusting clients to send back valid data. However you're participating, how can you be secure? Howard Feldman suggests several techniques to evaluate the trustworthiness of a distributed computing project. 09/11/2003

Hacking TiVo by Raffi Krikorian
TiVo addicts: View the latest sports scores, weather forecasts, stock quotes, and more without ever leaving your couch. This excerpt from O'Reilly's TiVo Hacks shows you how to use the TiVo Control Station to populate your TV screen with whatever information it is that you just can't live without. 09/04/2003

Five Lessons Open Source Developers Should Learn from Extreme Programming by chromatic
It may be harder to see how Extreme Programming (XP) can apply to open source projects, especially those without a formal customer. But to build a successful open source project, you must solve many of the same problems you'd face with an in-house project. Here chromatic, author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, offers five lessons open source developers can learn from XP. 08/28/2003

Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions by Tony Stubblebine
For many programmers, writing regular expressions is a black art. They stick to the features they know and hope for the best. Tony Stubblebine, author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, says programmers can avoid a lot of trial and error by adopting these five habits for regular expression development. The code examples in this article use Perl, PHP, and Python, but the advice Tony espouses is applicable to nearly any regex implementation. 08/21/2003

Better Search Engine Design: Beyond Algorithms by Peter Van Dijck
Search engine accuracy is important, but convenience may be more important than squeezing the last few ounces of performance out of your system. Peter Van Dijck demonstrates simple but effective query analysis, best bets, and controlled vocabularies -- tools to make your search engines more effective. 08/21/2003

Using libldap, the LDAP Client Library by Rory Winston
Sometimes, the easiest way to get your job done is to reuse existing tools. If you're already storing data in an LDAP directory, it's easy to access that data in an application through libldap. Rory Winston demonstrates how to use the libldap library from a C application. 08/14/2003

Five Lessons You Should Learn from Extreme Programming by chromatic
Extreme Programming (XP) is yet another popular idea gaining press. It adapts the best ideas from the past decades of software development. Whether or not you adopt XP, it's worth considering what XP teaches. chromatic, author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, offers five lessons you should learn from Extreme Programming. 07/31/2003

Terence Spies on Identity-Based Encryption by chromatic
Public key encryption has worked fairly well for decades, but its complexity has kept many people at bay. A new startup has revived a 20 year old idea that just may put encryption in the hands of the average user. Terence Spies, vice president of engineering at Voltage Security, recently spoke to us about Identity-Based Encryption. 07/17/2003

USENIX 2003 by Dustin Puryear
USENIX's annual technical conference took place last month in Texas. Dustin Puryear was on the scene. What's surprising? Microsoft's presence, meeting the needs of Unix administrators. 07/17/2003

Kapor's Thoughts on Desktop Linux by Daniel H. Steinberg
Mitch Kapor examines what stands in the way of Linux as an end-user operating system. Daniel Steinberg reports on Kapor's keynote from OSCON 2003. 07/14/2003

The State of Open Source by Daniel H. Steinberg
Luminaries from the open source communities of Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Linux each presented their take on the current state of their technology and where it is headed. Daniel Steinberg reports from OSCON 2003. 07/09/2003

An Interview with the Author of Practical mod_perl by chromatic
Stas Bekman has maintained the mod_perl guide for ages. He's even been sponsored to work on improving mod_perl full time! The author of the recently released Practical mod_perl graciously agreed to this interview. 07/03/2003

Asterisk: A Bare-Bones VoIP Example by John Todd
Asterisk is both an open source toolkit for telephony applications and a full-featured PBX application. Learn how to configure a simple telephone system with Asterisk in this tutorial. 07/03/2003

Eight Questions for George Dyson by chromatic
George Dyson is Director's Visitor of the Institute for Advanced Study and a historian. His OSCON keynote explores the pioneering work of John von Neumann, and others at the IAS, in computation and computational biology. He draws parallels between that world and modern open source development. We were fortunate enough to engage George in a brief conversation about his talk. 06/17/2003

Nine Questions for Mitch Kapor by chromatic
Mitch Kapor heads the Open Source Applications Foundation, the group behind Chandler. His OSCON keynote explores whether and how collaborative development can bring open source software to the desktop. Mitch kindly agreed to a short interview as a teaser for his talk. 06/16/2003

Privacy and Anonymity in Email by David Mertz
Email has been described as a postcard. Sure, it's rude to read someone else's mail, but it's trivial to do. There exist many technical means to protect your privacy and to help you communicate anonymously. David Mertz explores the history and current state of email protection. 06/12/2003

The Challenges of Remote Collaboration by Mark Murphy
Open source development works because of remote collaboration; developers working together despite physical distance. With mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, in-house developers are struggling with the same issues open source developers have addressed. Mark Murphy explains some of the challenges of remote collaboration. 06/12/2003