Anyone going to Ignite Boston 3, May 29 at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square? I probably will, and as usual would like to know if I'll recognize anyone there ( Read more... )

Attended the wake, with classicaljunkie. I spent most of the time talking with another O'Reilly person there ( Read more... )

My friend and colleague Erik T. Ray, with whom I worked at O'Reilly and co-authored the Perl & XML book, died suddenly at the hospital last night while recovering from a traffic accident. He was a good guy, and showed up on an episode of The Gameshelf. I still have the strange Korean novelty pen he gave me at the studio that day.

For Volity, it was a win. The audience was quite large (given the venue of a pub's second-floor function room) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded in keeping its attention for the whole four-and-some minutes of my talk. There was much enthusiastic cheering, and I got some nice compliments about it, chatting with lots of folks afterward. These included ( Read more... )

Dunno how long this has been going on, but I just noticed that Google's main search results page now has a prominent "Books" tab-style link above the first result. When I do an ego-search there I get hundreds of hits because I've managed to get into the colophon of many O'Reilly books, thanks to the Framemaker-to-XML conversion thing I worked on ( Read more... )

I (and between 0 and 2 Andys) will be attending Ignite Boston at Tommy Doyle's pub in Harvard Square on the evening of May 31. It's an O'Reilly-sponsored, somewhat FOO/MAKE-y flavored gathering of local techies for networking and lightning talks. I just submitted a proposal for a super-short Volity talk.

Are yooooou coming?

The presentation last night went great. Far better than I expected. I recognized only ahkond and an editor I knew from O'Reilly (and who I was in contact with last year about this-n-that) as people who showed up specifically to hear me, but there were maybe 30-35 people all told. Everyone seemed attentive, and as soon as I got to the slides with code ( Read more... )

I had a nice chat yesterday with Andy Oram, a longtime editor at O'Reilly, about Volity. It resulted in him writing this entry in his own blog: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/volity_opensource_interactive.htmlRead more... )

O'Reilly just sent me a free copy of Windows XP for Starters, one of David Pogue's latest newbie-friendly titles.

Uhhhh what? Most likely some wires got crossed when Chuck asked someone to ship me a copy of the new nutshell book, but it's fun to speculate on what message they may instead be trying to send to me here.

I had forgotten until rifling through some email that eray made me into a superhero a few months ago. I'm about halfway down the page ( Read more... )