Want to impress friends and family with professional-looking photos? Professional photographer and best-selling author Derrick Story provides his favorite tip--using a flash setting--for taking great shots for better skin tone, reduced texture in the face, and adding a twinkle to the eyes.

In the latest installment of Joe Gregorio's The Restful Web column Joe goes a bit nuts, presenting httplib2, a Python HTTP client library written with the goal of doing caching in HTTP right.

With the advent of Tiger, there are more ways than ever to capture pictures of your screen. Picking up where "Screenshot Hacks for Mac OS X" left off, this article explains how to grab the exact pixels you want, add window shadow, and even capture DVD stills.

In this second article on Java-oriented podcasting, some more unique voices are featured, including a single-product podcast, and an amusing show that kicks back its feet and declares itself "drunk and retired". In this article, we interview the voices behind the ZDot, NetBeans Podcast, and DrunkAndRetired.com podcasts.

Andrew Sheppard opines that the battle between VoIP and PSTN/POTS is over, and the battle for mobile telephony is about to begin. Andrew is the author of O'Reilly's recently released Skype Hacks.

In his latest XML Annoyances column Micah Dubinko examines a common force behind the good and bad aspects of XML.

Portlets aim to be your next desktop, providing small pieces of web-based functionality that can be aggregated on a portal page. In this article, Sunil Patil delves deeper into the JSR-168 portlet spec by showing off edit mode, JSP integration, the portlet tag library and preferences API, and Pluto's admin console.

Jesse Liberty is creating an application from scratch in ASP.NET 2.0 while you watch over his shoulder. In part 2, he starts building the application, making use of Amazon Web Services.

Our favorite music app, iTunes is much more than a player. It's Apple's representative to the non-Mac world, a focal point for Apple's growing media empire, and a pioneering combination of desktop application and online service. With all that in mind, let's ask ourselves: how can we mess around with iTunes? Giles Turnbull shows you how.

In this second of two articles, Martin Redington shows you how to add a new style preferences window to your application that behaves in all respects exactly like the Apple preferences windows.

Jack Herrington talks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Brad Templeton about wiretapping, Brazilian technologist Bruno Souza explains why software freedom is important in his country, O'Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest wants to turn down the volume on all the noise in his various in-boxes, and Derrick Story and Chuck Toporek report from Macworld. (DTF 01-27-2006: 28 minutes 53 seconds)

Someday your program will have to parse text. If you're lucky, a few regular expressions will handle it. Otherwise, you need to write a parser. Don't be afraid of that dragon book from college--writing a parser in Python is easy with Pyparsing. Paul McGuire explains everything you need to know.

The most popular "proper" way to build a web application seems to be to use the Model-View-Controller design pattern. While it sounds complex, the concepts are sound and the ease of development it provides are compelling. Joe Stump shows how the View works by developing a working version in PHP 5.

Virtualization is an old idea--running multiple distinct operating systems atop a powerful box has a lot of advantages. Xen is a new virtualization platform. Despite its youth, its Linux support is very good. Kris Buytaert explains the basics of virtualization and shows how to configure and install Xen and to create new virtual machines.

What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has changed over the years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO. Now a lot of it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways to work more smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.

Listen in as Jack Herrington, the author of Podcasting Hacks, chats with pioneer podcasters Doug Kaye and James Polanco. Doug is the founder of IT Conversations, the influential site that features podcasts covering important events, programs, and interviews with industry luminaries. James is the founder of "Fake Science," the popular podcast radio show covering all things digital music--news, reviews, and profiles of digital artists.

In his latest Agile Web column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to use Python to interact with Flickr as a lightweight web service.

The NAMM show is Mecca for musicians—acres upon acres of sparkling new instruments, pro audio gear, and music software, most of it not even released yet. But the show is not open to the public. Our team spent four days combing the halls and prodding the prototypes to round up this audiovisual gallery of what you'll be playing this year.

As podcasting takes off, a number of podcasts specifically tailored to the Java developer have become available. Ranging from the serious to the silly, covering the whole Java realm or just a single product, there seems to be something for every developer with a set of headphones. In this article, we interview the voices behind the Swampcast and Java Posse podcasts.

Spring is powerful and popular, but in practice, the configuration files it needs for beans, dependencies, and services can quickly become confusing and hard to maintain. Jason Zhicheng Li offers some real-world advice on how to keep control of your configs.

Many reviewers have given Apple a pretty good thrashing over its new professional photography software, Aperture. After delving into Aperture, Scott Bourne has come to some conclusions about where the critics went wrong, and he puts forth his ideas in this article.

There's some pretty interesting stuff on Google Video. In this article, Erica Sadun shows you how to download videos, convert them to an iPod-friendly format, and load them onto your new 5G video iPod.

Emulators are a must-have for anyone developing mobile applications. To get you started, Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to use the emulator tools that shipped with Windows Mobile 5.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

In this first of two articles, Martin Redington shows you how to add a new style preferences window to your application that behaves in all respects exactly like the Apple preferences windows.

Based on his work developing a stable wireless mesh platform that allows true peer-to-peer multi-hop network connectivity, Chris Ngan discusses some proof-of-concept applications that demonstrate the power of this network infrastructure and the ease with which text/chat, voice, and video applications can be made location-aware. Chris will discussing these concepts in more detail at the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference.