magazine dedicated to the renaissance that is occurring within the world of crafts. Celebrating the DIY spirit, Craft's goal is to unite, inspire, inform, and entertain a growing community of highly imaginative people who are transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected and even renegade techniques, materials, and tools; resourceful spirits who undertake amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities. We call them "Makers." <http://www.craftzine.com/> We anticipate a very quick sellout (as was the case with the inaugural issue of MAKE). Avoid the crushing disappointment of an empty newsstand, and reserve a copy today by subscribing with this special UG discount URL: <http://www.craftzine.com/go/craftug> ***O'Reilly Media Announces Co-Publishing Agreement with Adobe Systems We just announced the Adobe Developer Library, a new publishing imprint in partnership with Adobe Systems, designed to meet the rising demand among developers for tools and resources to help create the next generation of rich internet applications. Adobe and O'Reilly have entered into an agreement to co-publish and co-brand books and online learning resources for developers creating applications with technologies such as Adobe Flex, ActionScript, and Adobe Flash and Flash Video. Stay tuned for more information. ***Work for O'Reilly We have immediate openings for the following: -Digital Content Specialist -Senior Software Engineer -Strategic Sales Executive For more information and more job openings, go to: <http://jobs.oreilly.com/> ***User Group Members receive a special 30% discount on O'Reilly Learning Courses As an O'Reilly User Group member, you save on all the courses in the following University of Illinois Certificate Series: -Linux/Unix System Administration -Web Programming -Open Source Programming -.NET Programming To redeem, use Promotion Code "ORALL1," good for a 30% discount, in Step #3 of the enrollment process. Each course comes with a free O'Reilly book and a 7-day money-back guarantee. Register online: <https://oreillylearning.com/enroll/> --------------------- Open Source --------------------- ***Unit Testing Your Documentation It's fairly easy to prevent errors in code from occurring and reoccurring; unit tests are an effective strategy to prevent regressions. But what about the example code in your documentation? Errors there can frustrate and thwart readers and learners. Fortunately, it's possible to test your documentation almost as effectively. Leonard Richardson, coauthor of the "Ruby Cookbook," demonstrates how he kept his code examples correct. <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/09/07/unit-testing-docs.html> ***Understanding Newlines Munging text is familiar to agile language programmers. It's very straightforward, right? Text comes in, text changes, and text goes out. Yet in a multi-OS world with networks, internationalization, and character sets, is text really that simple? Xavier Noria delves into how computers handle text to explain the newline problem and how to work with it in agile languages. <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/08/17/understanding-newlines.html> --------------------- Digital Media --------------------- ***Digital Media Insider Podcast: Playing with Audio Plugins Listen as songwriter and Pro Tools guru Gina Fant-Saez transforms a dust-dry vocal into a gorgeous soundscape by chaining four cool effect plugins, and then builds a song from scratch using only virtual instruments. <http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2006/09/07/playing-with-audio-plugins.html> ***George Jardine Discusses the Adobe Lightroom Adventure George Jardine, pro shooter and Adobe Lightroom Evangelist, was part of the Lightroom Adventure team that traveled to Iceland during the summer of 2006. In this interview by fellow Adventurer Derrick Story, George talks about working with other world class photographers on location and the development of Adobe Lightroom... and how the two forces came together in Iceland. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/08/17/george-jardine-lightroom-adventure.html> ***Image Sharpening With Photoshop CS2 Having trouble applying Photoshop's Unsharp Mask filter to your creations? Using the Unsharp Mask can be tricky business but, as author Corrie explains, some good technique, a little patience, and an artistic eye is all you need to sharpen your images to a professional standard. <http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sharpening-photoshop-cs2> --------------------- Mac --------------------- ***A Briefing on Synching The idea behind synchronizing, or synching, is simple: take information you collect on one device, like the contact lists you keep on your laptop, and combine it with similar information on other devices so that the two sets of information match. Sounds easy enough, but there are a few tricks to understand. In this "Take Control" excerpt, Michael Cohen provides an informative overview for getting your info in sync. <http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/09/05/synching.html> ***Unify and Synchronize Your iTunes Libraries Last June, David Miller published an article that explained how to synchronize playlists on iTunes. Today, Matthew Russell extends this idea by investigating and presenting three different ways to synchronize the actual contents of your iTunes music libraries when they are scattered across multiple machines. Then in the second half of the article, Matthew lays the foundation for a custom Python script that you can extend across multiple platforms and in various other ways. <http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/08/22/synchronize-itunes-libraries.html> --------------------- Windows/.NET --------------------- ***How to Remove Startup Programs Got a PC that takes a week and a day to boot up? Most likely, it's filled with programs that start at bootup--programs you don't need. Mitch Tulloch shows you all the secrets of how to ferret out and remove these time and resource wasters. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/windows/2006/08/22/how-to-remove-startup-programs.html> ***Building Photo Uploaders with XAML Who says Windows can't play nice with open source applications? Jack Herrington uses the XAML technology on Windows Vista to create a visually appealing and user-friendly image uploading application for getting pictures into a PHP web application. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/windows/2006/08/29/building-photo-uploaders-with-xaml.html> --------------------- Java --------------------- ***Separation of Concerns in Web Service Implementations The principle of "separation of concerns" is much repeated in SOA circles... so why are transactional integrity, security, and business logic so often intermingled in SOA implementations? In this article, Tieu Luu shows how to use Spring to separate out security concerns in an Axis-based web service. <http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/09/06/separation-of-concerns-in-web-services.html> ***How to Publish Multiple Websites Using a Single Tomcat Web Application While the idea of mapping several names onto one Apache instance with VirtualHost directives is well known, what do you do when you're serving web apps with Tomcat? Satya Komatineni has both the code and the configs that you'll need to make this work. <http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/08/30/publishing-multiple-sites-using-single-tomcat.html> --------------------- Databases --------------------- ***Batch Updates with PL/pgSQL Loops are slow, algorithmically speaking. Every time you find yourself looping over data, you have a process that, at best, scales linearly with the number of items to process. SQL gives you options to perform multiple updates at once; David Wheeler demonstrates how to make them work with PL/pgSQL. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2006/09/07/plpgsql-batch-updates.html> ***Visualizing Database Information with Tableau Although there are several tools available to help users efficiently and easily create pivot tables or cross-tabulations, being able to visualize the cross-tabulations in real time is much more useful. Ben Lorica and the O'Reilly Research team recently tried a visual analysis and reporting tool called Tableau. It worked well for them; might it work in your data warehouse? <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2006/08/24/tableau_review.html> --------------------- MAKE --------------------- ***MAKE Japan Now Available MAKE is coming to Japan! It will share content from the pages of MAKE, but will be specifically for Japan. <http://www.oreilly.co.jp/books/4873112982/> You can download a sample MAKE 01 (Japanese PDF) here: <ftp://ftp.oreilly.co.jp/download/make01_sample.pdf> ***Weekend Projects: Batometer Instructions <http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/09/weekend_projects_batometer_ins.html> For More MAKE Projects and info, go to: <http://makezine.com/> --------------------- Podcasts --------------------- ***Barbara Brundage discusses "Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual" In this podcast, O'Reilly Media's Sara Peyton interviews Barbara Brundage. Barbara's an extraordinary harpist who has performed for dignitaries and celebrities around the world including Margaret Thatcher, Tom Cruise, the Clintons, and Isaac Stern. She's also the go-to expert when it comes to using Photoshop Elements. Her brand new book, "Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual" is all about the just-announced version of Elements. And she's going to talk to us about the cool new tools for digital photographers and scrapbookers in this new program. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/09/12/barbara-brundage-interview-ps-elements5.html> ***Life Cycles Releasing early and often. Mark Lucovsky contrasts his experience at Microsoft and at Google. Simon Phipps says that "lock in is the new lock out" and we preview Euro OSCON. Six Apart's Anil Dash has a stack of services you might use to build your applications and Damian Conway pokes fun at the world of Web 2.0 businesses. (DTF 09-11-2006: 26 minutes 45 seconds) <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/09/11/distributing-the-future.html> --------------------- Web --------------------- ***Flex 2: Rich Internet Applications in a Flash Take your interactive web apps to the next level with Adobe's Flex 2--it's fast, fashionable, and free! Join Josh as he walks through the process of developing a simple Flash project that shows just how easy it is to build cross-platform web apps with Flex 2. <http://www.sitepoint.com/article/flex-2-internet-applications> ***Advanced Accessibility Techniques If you think the W3C guidelines are your ticket to an accessible site, think again! While the W3C guidelines are important, if you want your web site to be truly accessible, you'll need to venture beyond these guidelines. Trenton explains all in this hands-on technical tour. <http://www.sitepoint.com/article/accessibility-techniques> -- steve ulrich <sulrich at botwerks.org>