How to Schmooze at OSCON  OSCON is next week and you have people to meet, questions to ask, and assistance to offer. Where should you spend your time, and how should you start your valuable hallway, BOF, and party conversations? Robert Bernier offers a schmoozer's guide to effective conference attendance.   [ONLamp.com]

Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6  With Pugs and Parrot playing nicely and bringing Perl 6 to the rest of us, enterprising early adopters are experimenting with porting their popular Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. O'Reilly editor chromatic recently pushed the limits of Pugs by porting Test::Builder to Perl 6. Here's what he learned about Perl 6, Pugs, and his design along the way.   [Perl.com]

The Practicality of OO PHP  PHP is an easy language for doing practical things immediately. The easiest ways to begin aren't always the best ways to stay productive, though. PHP's support for object orientation requires a little more learning and a little more discipline, but it has many benefits for larger projects. David Day explains the basics of OO in PHP 4.   [ONLamp.com]

The Commons Doesn't Have a Business Plan  The commons used to be a grassy area in the center of town where anyone could graze animals. Now it's a metaphor for anything available to everyone without restriction. Andy Oram argues that this is the ground from which new businesses spring--and that open source and free software are the wellspring for new software and technology.   [ONLamp.com]

This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005  Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i discussing garbage collection schemes, p6l rethinking object attribute access and plotting GC APIs and access, and p6c reporting problems, documenting PIL, and discussing the grammar.   [Perl.com]

What Is Vlogging (and How to Get Started)  Short for "video blogging," vlogging is another way to take advantage of the RSS enclosure tag. Josh Paul, author of "Digital Video Hacks," explains vlogging and shows you how to get your videos into the iTunes Music Store.   [DigitalMedia.oreilly.com]

XML Tourist
Analyzing the Web  In his latest XML Tourist column John E. Simpson asks whether XML has a role to play in reporting website traffic statistics. He finds two applications that use XML to analyze website traffic.   [XML.com]

Web Services Messaging with Apache Axis2: Concepts and Techniques  The messaging strategies needed for web services vary, and Apache Axis2 has addressed this problem by creating basic building blocks from which many messaging schemes can be built. Srinath Perera and Ajith Ranabahu show how it works.   [ONJava.com]

Country Music’s Digital Surprise  Some of the most cutting-edge music production is going on in Nashville. Join producer Spencer Critchley for a behind-the-scenes tour through the computer-powered recording sessions for “When I See You Smile,” Bo Billy’s acclaimed country remake of the hit Bad English song. Includes 18 MP3 examples.   [DigitalMedia.oreilly.com]

Eclipse Plugins Exposed, Part 3: Customizing a Wizard  Emmanuel Proulx's series on Eclipse plugin development continues by showing how to put together a useful data model and a wizard GUI.   [ONJava.com]

Python and XML
EaseXML: A Python Data-Binding Tool  In this month's Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji examines a new XML data-binding tool for Python: EaseXML.   [XML.com]

What Is AdSense?  Looking for ways to generate some cash for that website you've been developing? Google's AdSense may be your answer. This introduction to AdSense will help you decide if the program, which allows you to sell advertising space for other people's ads on your own site, is right for you.   [O'Reilly Network]

What Is FireWire (and How Best to Use It)  FireWire is a high-speed, data serial interface that has many practical uses. In this article, you'll learn the ins and outs of this powerful technology, plus some inside tips to take advantage of its unique features.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Defining a Baseline Audit Policy  It's vital that you create a baseline audit policy to audit for security events on critical systems. Mitch Tulloch, author of Windows Server Hacks, helps you define the best audit policies for Windows Server 2003 server roles.   [WindowsDevCenter.com]

Refactoring in Visual Basic 2005  Refactoring is the one-size-fits-all name given to a set of coding shortcuts that help you rework code on the fly. C# developers have such a tool, but Visual Basic developers were not so lucky--till now. Matthew MacDonald, author of Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook, reviews Refactor, the free VB 2005 tool, and offers some how-to techniques for using it.   [WindowsDevCenter.com]

Understanding the BackgroundWorker Component  Multithreading is one of the most powerful concepts in programming. Using multithreading, you can break a complex task into multiple threads that execute independently of one another. By default, your Windows application uses a single thread of execution. Wei-Meng Lee shows you how multithreading has been simplified in VB2005 using the BackgroundWorker component.   [ONDotnet.com]

All About Spotlight - David Pogue's Podcast  Listen to David Pogue's secret Tiger tips for Spotlight super searches--how to use spotlight to help access your data faster, streamline searches, and even launch applications faster. (7 minutes, 6.6 MB)   [MacDevCenter.com]

Top Internet Telephone Tips  People switch from their traditional telephone service to an internet telephone provider for three reasons: lower cost, new features, and more control over their telephone service. Of course, the primary reason is always lower cost. With that as the focus, people often forget to ask some other necessary questions. James Gaskin, author of Talk Is Cheap, provides seven questions you should ask about internet telephones before you make the switch.   [O'Reilly Network]

Automated Backups on Tiger Using rsync  Previously on Mac DevCenter, the rsync command was discussed in Intro to Tiger Terminal, Part 2. One of the uses for this command is to compare the files on your internal drive to those on your backup drive, and only archive the files that have changed. Richard Hough explains.   [MacDevCenter.com]

What Are Google AdWords?  What are Google AdWords? What do all those sometimes confusing AdWord terms mean? What do you need to know before you sign up? If you're considering advertising on Google, this article has the information you need to know before you get started.   [O'Reilly Network]

Security Alerts
Problems in SpamAssassin, PEAR, and Bugzilla  Noel Davis looks at problems in SpamAssassin, PHP PEAR, Bugzilla, Heimdal/Kerberos telnetd, Vipul's Razor, TikiWiki, poppassd_pam, zlib, FUSE, the Solaris kernel, HT Editor, GNATS, JBoss jBPM, Trustix Secure Linux, and Trac.   [LinuxDevCenter.com]

Calculating the True Price of Software  Businesses have long viewed support and maintenance as essential components of software. Open source business models often focus on charging for support and customization. Is there an economic model that can demonstrate the true worth of a piece of software and the option for support, maintenance, and upgrades? Robert Lefkowitz argues that open source exposes the true value of software itself as, essentially, worth less in comparison to support and maintenance.   [ONLamp.com]

An Introduction to Test::MockDBI  It is a sweet and fitting thing to test your code, but if you're working with non-Perl, you'll likely run into difficult situations. For example, how do you force a database connection failure to test that you can recover? Mark Leighton Fisher has an answer: mock up the database. He explains the design, goals, and use of Test::MockDBI.   [Perl.com]

Big Scary Daemons
Information Security with Colin Percival  The recent disclosure of side-channel techniques to retrieve cryptographic secrets on hyperthreading machines caused stirs in security and operating system development communities. Colin Percival, a FreeBSD security officer, reported the vulnerability and weathered the questions and criticisms. Michael W. Lucas recently interviewed him on this vulnerability, vendors' responses, and security research.   [ONLamp.com]

This Week in Perl 6, July 13-19, 2005  Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Pugs running on a JavaScript engine, GMC plans for Parrot, and typechecking and metamodel discussions about Perl 6.   [Perl.com]

An Interview with John Markoff  John Markoff is the author of What the Dormouse Said. In this interview, John expands on the idea he presents in his book that the counterculture shaped the evolution of the computer industry. He touches on all the players here: visionaries like Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI, John McCarthy and the people at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), activist Fred Moore, and roleplayers like Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey.   [O'Reilly Network]

What Is Podcasting?  So, you're ready to hop on the podcasting bandwagon, but you're not sure how to get started? This article by Phillip Torrone briefly describes what podcasting is and the software you'll need, then takes you right to the fun with a comprehensive step-by-step guide to podcast production. From recording to editing to publishing and syndicating your podcasts, Phillip covers everything you need to know to serve up your first podcasts.   [DigitalMedia.oreilly.com]

Bean-Managed Transaction Suspension in J2EE  Container-managed transactions seem more capable than bean-managed transactions in the EJB spec, with the latter unable to, for example, suspend and resume transactions. But what looks like a limitation isn't necessarily so, according to Dmitry Maximovich, who shows you how to get to the underlying TransactionManager, making BMT as powerful as CMT.   [ONJava.com]