Tag Archives: oreilly

26th Mar, 2008

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Slashdot Review for Regular Expression Pocket Reference


Michael J. Ross gave the second edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference a score of 9/10 in his Slashdot review. He was particularly impressed by the lack of errors.

As of this writing, there are no unconfirmed errata (those submitted by readers but not yet checked by the author to see whether they are valid), and no confirmed ones, either. In fact, in my review of the first edition, published in 2004, it was noted that there were no unconfirmed errata, despite the book being out for some time prior to that review. The most likely explanation is that the author — in addition to any technical reviewers — did a thorough job of checking all of the regular expressions in the book, along with the sample code that make use of them. These efforts have paid off with the apparent absence of any errors in this new edition — something unseen in any other technical book with which I am familiar.

I’m sure that the book isn’t actually error free, but the fact that it can masquerade as so is a tribute to the tech reviewers, Jeffrey Friedl, Philip Hazel, Steve Friedl, Ola Bini, Ian Darwin, Zak Greant, Ron Hitchens, A.M. Kuchling, Tim Allwine, Schuyler Erle, David Lents, Evan Henshaw-Plath, Rich Bowen, Eric Eisenhart, and Brad Merrill, and to my editors Andy Oram, Nat Torkington, and Linda Mui. That’s a lot of people for such a small book but the draft I turned in warranted them. Thank you.

My goals for the second edition were to increase coverage for things that I used (it turns out that one of the best reasons to write a book is so you can look things up later) and to add content for system administrators (who, based on feedback, seemed like the biggest users of the book). I’m a ruby developer now, so this edition has a ruby chapter, plus I added an Apache chapter and a cookbook of common regular expressions for the system administrators.

People often ask me why I covered so many implementations and the answer is because as a web developer I used regular expressions in so many places: ruby/perl, javascript, shell, vim, and apache. I bet system administrators are the same way.

Make sure to buy a few copies from Amazon.

13th Nov, 2006

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Introduction to Salesforce AppExchange

I went to a Salesforce conference recently to investigate Salesforce as a platform for building applications for the business web. I liked what I saw. The tools they are building for developers fit very much with the trend toward smaller development companies (i.e. one or two people) who can focus completely on the product because the infrastructure for running the rest of the company already exists.

Today O’Reilly posted part one of my three part series on building for Salesforce AppExchange, An Introduction to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

29th May, 2006

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How Tom Raftery Rallied the Trolls and Escaped Culpability

The latest in the dust-up between Tom Raftery and O’Reilly is a group of trolls telling Marc Hedlund to can the puff pieces until Tim O’Reilly can return. Apparently O’Reilly needs to shut down it’s publishing program until Tim can earn the forgiveness of Raftery’s cronies.

My take: O’Reilly was unprepared for an influx of trolls and vitriol, and because of that Tom Raftery has completely escaped culpability for misreading a cease and desist letter, then misrepresenting a followup letter, then villifying Cory Doctorow in spite of the facts. Most important, he’s completely escaped blame for picking a name for his conference that was already taken.

The O’Reilly/CMP conference is called “Web 2.0 Conference.” IT@Cork’s conference is called “Web 2.0 Half-Day Conference.” It’s common sense and common courtesy: pick a different name.

CMP, on behalf of itself and O’Reilly, sent IT@Cork a cease-and-desist letter that has drawn a lot of fire for asking IT@Cork not to use a similar title as the established conference. Thus far, Raftery–and the debate–have focused on whether anyone can use the term “Web 2.0.” But they’re ignoring this key paragraph of the C&D:

“It has come to my attention that you have scheduled a conference entitled Web 2.0 for June 8 2006. Through this title you are misrepresenting and recipients are given the direct and false impression that you are providing them with CMP’s event.”

In other words, the reason he’s being contacted is because he’s running a conference called Web 2.0, not merely because he’s running a conference that contains the term Web 2.0. Tom would have more credibility if he were organizing a conference with an original name.

Did Raftery make an honestly misread the letter or is he posting intentionally inflamatory remarks in order to draw attention to himself? I thought honest mistake until I read his two followup posts.

First he writes of “O’Reilly’s mean-spirited response.” Mean-spirited? IT@Cork received a second letter offering to let the organization go on with its conference–name unchanged–but reserving CMP/O’Reilly’s rights to the term. He can disagree with their rights, but I have a hard seeing the meanness in the letter. The comments on O’Reilly’s Radar blog, including accusations that Tim’s a child molester, that certain employees are hemroids and need to be fired, that all O’Reilly books should be burned, those seem mean-spirited. The O’Reilly/CMP communications are professional and business-like. If O’Reilly is wrong on any points, Raftery’s accusations are preventing a thoughtful discussion of those points.

And while Raftery says in his post that it’s unlikely IT@Cork will sign the second letter from CMP/O’Reilly, he’s telling the New York Times that everything is fine and that he appreciates the response he got from O’Reilly:

“Because of Web 2.0 and blogging, I was able to put up a post and have this large multimedia organization apologize and turn around and say, ‘You can use our trademark terms.’ That’s only possible because of the power blogging confers.”

Next, Raftery calls Cory Doctorow an O’Reilly apologist who’s making biased comments without disclosing his relationship with O’Reilly. This despite Cory’s saying in his post that he thought O’Reilly should give up the claim, that John Batelle is a “pal and colleague” and that he (Cory) is a regular contributor to O’Reilly conferences.

Turns out Raftery is the troll. And a good one. He’s garnered a lot of attention. And thus far nobody has held him accountable for running a conference with a copycat name. Robert Scoble was dead on when he suggested changing the name to “IT@Cork’s Web 2.0 Workshop” and moving on.

8th Apr, 2006

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Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

The new edition of Google: The Missing Manual is out. My girlfriend, housemate, and, until a recent promotion, executive editor of the Missing Manual series is the primary author. But it’d still be a great book if that wasn’t the case.

Turns out that Google is about much more than search, although the search sections are pretty useful. I picked the book up mostly for the new section on Google Analytics, which we use and love at Odeo. I’ve read the AdSense and AdWords sections as well. Also great. The core of the book is on search. However, I pick up most of my search tips by watching Sarah. So all I can say definitively, she knew what she was talking about when she wrote the search sections.

Buy it for $15.74 on Amazon

2nd Mar, 2006

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Justin’s Cease and Desist

Ex-coworker Justin received a hilarious cease and desist letter based on his parody of an ex-gay movement billboard. Great explanation of the failings of wikipedia as a source of legal advice:

You appear to believe that the stolen image is exempt from federal intellectual property laws as a ‘parody’ due to ‘fair use.’ Unfortunately, the intricacies of federal law cannot adequately be covered on ‘Wikipedia’ due to the variety of facts addressed by courts in numerous cases.

24th Jan, 2006

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ETel 2006: Day 1.

I’m at ETel today, mostly to see old friends but still really enjoying myself. Kudo’s to the O’Reilly conference team for always putting on such great events. Here’s some notes.

RAGI
Every O’Reilly ‘emerging tech’ conference comes up with one technology that is suddenly very easy and very accessible. I think RAGI, a Rails to Asterisk interface, wins this time. I managed to miss the presentation but heard great buzz afterwards. Here’s an O’Reilly introduction. An anonymous Odeo engineer asked about scaling issues in Rails and got back a response that Rails scales well as evidenced by sites like Odeo =)

AstLinux – HA
This is a linux distro tweaked for running Asterisk (mostly the same tweaks that real-time apps get). He’s working on adding in High Availability support which would give people an N+1 architecture. Too buzz-wordy? Key detail was that HA would work better and be impemented sooner for VOIP.

Zork on Asterisk.
Awesome! Coolest demo of the day goes to Zasterisk, a project to let you play Zork over the phone. It’s does Asterisk to speech recognition (Sphinx) to Zork to text-to-speech (Festival) and back out.

Imagine playing Zork while on hold or playing a MUD during your commute (VMUD).

VC Fireside Chat.
Sort of dreading this one but the others in the time slote didn’t look good. Turns out Marc Hedlund was on the panel. Point was start off with a product for yourself, but know when to make the switch to a product for others.

Other VC talking about the types of people he sees in early stage investing (spore stage). Two. One with a plan and no product. The other with a hack but no plan. He’s especially interesting if someone has already payed for the hack.

I think the key concept in those two points is that it’s extremely important to prove that someone likes the product (important if you’re trying to get investment).

Favorite phrase of the day was along the lines of: vc’s blog in order to ‘chum the waters’

Marc gave more advice, be plain spoken. Common theme in his engineering management. Complexity is a sign that you don’t understand the problem. Plain speech also gives people the impression that you know what you’re doing. Convoluted speech just gives people the impression that _they_ don’t know what’s going on.

More Marc. Hit it where they ain’t. Find a need that nobody is talking about and go after that. It’s not that you’ll be the only person in the space, but that you’ll be in the first wave.

Quinn Weaver. Open Source is viral marketing. If you create software that is used my millions you can create a company after. Another example of having proven customers. MySQL is a good example of a funded company and 37Signals of a private company. His company Fairpath is planning to give away a Perl to Asterisk software, Dido. Release tomorrow. I like Quinn.

Usability.
A YakPak guy asked who did not have a microphone on their computer. Several Mac people raised there hands. My hand went straight to my forehead.

Favorite Encounter.
Cooper Marcus of Spark Parking. He’s got a nice clear business model, pragmatic goals, and cool tech that involves phones and gluing wireless devices to the ground. He’s also Lowell ’90.

7th Nov, 2005

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Moving to Odeo

I made a big move a few weeks back, leaving O’Reilly to be Engineering Director for Odeo.

There were a number of reasons, but mostly it came down to wanting to work in a more focused and intense software environment. It had almost nothing to do with sailing trips.

6th Sep, 2005

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Connecting to New Authors

I’m testing out an in-development Connection feature which may or may not be called Leaderboard. One of the leader lists is most active authors, and the most important test is checking if any of the active authors are at all interesting. So far yes! And my two favorites are people I’d never heard of.

Check out this sample from Lisa McMillan:
Best of. Web apps for web developers edition.

Also check out Ian Blenke and his fantastic blog.

25th Aug, 2005

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10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company

Stole this link from Nat on Radar, 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company

I liked this one, especially after all the feedback we got from our beta testers with the early launch of Connection:

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas. They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don’t like stuff. You couldn’t have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don’t rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he’s not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

9th Aug, 2005

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Favorite O’Reilly Connection Feature

O’Reilly Connection aggregates technical things that people in your network of friends are doing and then provides it as an RSS feed. It’s only got O’Reilly articles, weblogs, codezoo tips, and article/weblog comments so far, but it’s already my favorite feature. Here’s the RSS feed from my network.

Today’s batch of items turned up the secret of project management:

If there’s a secret (and this is what the agile development community has been saying for a while — neither Andy nor I make a secret of that) it’s that you have to be relentlessly honest about what you can and cannot handle. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge, but you have to stop deluding yourself and your customer that changes are free, that you’ve made more progress than you have, and that your initial estimates and guesses are completely right and will never change.

Also, I found out that I’m lovable. Not sure how I feel about that.

I’m working on aggregating more, like external RSS feeds, open source contributions, credit reports and del.icio.us links.

22nd Jun, 2005

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XQuery Shell

My coworker Andy Bruno just uploaded an XQuery shell for MarkLogic. It looks pretty sweet.

Read the docs or download the code.

Andy and fellow programmer Ryan Grimm are doing amazing things with xquery. I can’t wait until we can release some of it.