O’Reilly Media

Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase in U.S. visits from September to October and is thus about to experience the sort of explosive growth that will propel it into mainstream consciousness. That could well be... Read more.

Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services is considered to be the most definitive treatment of Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) available. In it, Juval provides both the guidance and insight needed to master the skills for building maintainable, extensible, and reusable WCF-based applications. Juval's talent as a teacher—that for tackling vast subjects and making them easy to learn—comes through especially well in this appendix from his book: An Introduction to Service-Orientation. These days, there's no avoiding the phrase "service-oriented," but few people can explain what it means and why it's so important. Juval gets to the heart of the matter in this excerpt.

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors... Read more.

Once upon a time, website programming was a fairly arduous proposition. You could spend months putting together the various back end processing pages in ASP or PHP or Perl, writing included files that, if you were thoughtful about it, may contain some reuse, but overall writing such code by hand almost invariably meant that the code was not only very targeted to one particular use but was an absolute nightmare to maintain. Read more.

As I wrote in Daddy, Where's Your Phone?, it's time to start thinking of the phone as a first class device for accessing web services, not as a way of repurposing content or applications originally designed to be accessed on a keyboard and big screen. The release of speech recognition in Google Mobile App for iPhone continues the process begun... Read more.

Stay Competitive. Regroup, retrain, rebuild. Financial markets are in a tailspin. Jobless rates are at a 7-year high. Budgets are shrinking. The good news is that the shifting economic landscape is creating new opportunities for those with the right skills. Do you have what it takes to tackle tough technical problems? To offer bold solutions? To provide businesses with the expertise they need? Learn more.

Social networking software is making trust more transparent to the user of a service. It is creating a new paradigm shift in computing: it allows people to just use resources without worrying about trust issues. Building your social network and integrating social network trust data into your application will be more important than ever. Read more.

While I don't believe that there is a "silver bullet" for security, I do think that end users should be getting a lot more for their money, by getting a better experience (e.g., AV that doesn't slow down their computer) and better security (e.g., AV that is more than one step above "worthless"). Read more.

Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. Learn more.

It is time that legislators, regulators and procurement officials put an end to end-user license agreements (EULA) that prevent publication of comparative benchmarks. Read more.

Two new books from O'Reilly's Companion Series offer a complete photography class, tailored specifically for folks using Canon's new Digital Rebel cameras. Both--The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion and The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion--are by producer and videographer Ben Long. In each of his handy pocket guides, Ben not only provides a detailed one-stop camera manual but he also walks you through all the basic photography theories that apply to any camera. And here Ben provides tips, warnings, and reminders from the books for using the XS cameras (which are applicable to most DSLRs). Read on to learn more. Read more.

Twitter—the messaging service that lets you send instant, short updates to people around the world—is fast becoming a mainstream communication tool. In her Twitter for Business webcast, Sarah Milstein (a Twitter user from day one) shows how to use Twitter and other micro-messaging services at work. She covers the the benefits and challenges of this exciting new medium, along with best practices and potential pitfalls you can avoid. Sarah is the author of the O'Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time.

In this article, we take a look at how the "Heroes" VFX team fried Hayden Panettierre to a crisp, shattered a human Popsicle, and tore Tokyo in two using one of the industry's best proprietary content management systems. Read more.