The Newsletter of UKUUG, the UK’s Unix and Open Systems Users Group
Volume 20, Number 2
June 2011
| From the Secretariat | by Jane Morrison |
| Chairman’s Report | by Paul Waring |
| UKUUG rebranding | by Paul Waring |
| Spring Conference: March 2011, Leeds | by Roger Whittaker |
| OpenTech 2011 | by Paul Thompson |
| OpenTech report | by Martin Houston |
| IWEEE 2011 Free Software for e-health and education in developed countries | by Gerald Marie-Nelly |
| The £100 PC | by Martin Houston |
| Government Consultation on Free and Open Source Software | by Martin Houston |
| Designing Interfaces | reviewed by Lindsay Marshall |
| Vi and Vim Editors Pocket Reference | reviewed by Andy Thomas |
| Programming Python | reviewed by Andy Thomas |
| HTML5 and CSS3 | reviewed by Daren Chandisingh |
| Mining the Social Web | reviewed by Paul Waring |
| REST in Practice | reviewed by Paul Waring |
| jQuery Pocket Reference | reviewed by Mike Fowler |
| Learning the iOS 4 SDK for JavaScript Programmers | reviewed by Mike Smith |
| Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! | reviewed by Roger Whittaker |
| Contributors | |
| Contacts |
I am pleased to advise that the Spring Conference held 22nd—24th March in
Leeds was very well attended and the feedback forms indicate that delegates
enjoyed the event. See the write-up elsewhere in this issue.
The 4 days of Perl tutorials in February (Intermediate and Advanced) also
attracted a good number of delegates and we thank Dave Cross for
working with us again.
Since then we have been busy organising a full schedule of events for the rest
of the year.
The next Spring Conference will be held in March 2012, possibly in Edinburgh
and the 2013 event may be held in Newcastle.
Also next year, we have already planned the following course:
“Intensive Introduction to Google App Engine with Python” — full day
tutorial/hands on practical course by Paul Barry — London — 12th April 2012
The Call for Papers for Spring 2012 will be available shortly.
We are again pleased to be working in collaboration with Josette Garcia at
O’Reilly to bring you various tutorials.
Novell have renewed their Gold Sponsoring membership with UKUUG for a further
12 months. The sponsoring memberships do greatly assist us and allow us to
keep event fees as low as possible.
The UKUUG Annual General Meeting will be held this year on Thursday 22nd
September. Further details, Agendas etc. will be sent to you automatically
during August.
Don’t forget the Inland Revenue allows UKUUG members to claim their
subscription amounts for tax allowance purposes. See further details on our
web site.
The next Newsletter will appear in September and has a copy date of: 19th
August. Interesting articles from members will be very welcome — all
submissions should be sent.
Our annual Spring conference was held in Leeds towards the end of March and was
a successful event as always, with a packed programme covering topics across
all aspects of system administration, over a hundred delegates, and several
opportunities to sample the varied cuisine on offer in the city. Thank you to
all the speakers who gave up their time to discuss their latest work with us,
and the numerous volunteers who helped the event run smoothly. Where speakers
have provided slides we have made these available online on the conference
website:
http://www.ukuug.org/spring2011
Plans are already underway for the 2012 and 2013 conferences, which we are
hoping to hold in Edinburgh and Newcastle respectively. There are lots of ways
to help out, from chairing sessions to preparing the timetable, so please let
us know if you would be interested in getting involved.
In a previous newsletter I reported that due to the resignation of John Collins
there was now a vacant place on Council. I am pleased to announce that Martin
Houston volunteered to step in, and he was co-opted onto Council at our last
meeting. Martin will stand for election formally at this year’s AGM, when
members will be able to vote on his appointment.
You may have noticed a branding on the front of this newsletter
(mentioned in the previous issue), and in our regular advertisements in Linux
Magazine. Input from members on UKUUG’s activities and branding during recent
conferences, on feedback forms and at the discussion session following the 2009
AGM, suggested that a broadening of scope beyond the “Unix” specifics implied
by the UKUUG name. Council discussed these ideas at its quarterly meetings and
took the decision to begin branding events, starting with the
unconference in October last year, where it was well received and brought in a
number of people who had never attended a UKUUG event before.
The new name is intended to reflect our broader scope, as well as the
co-ordinating role we hope to play with other similar groups, a suggestion
which arose from the post-AGM discussion. In particular, we are fortunate to
have an office and infrastructure which we can use to handle event
administration, allowing other groups to concentrate on obtaining speakers and
publicising their events without having to worry about booking venues. We
already have plans to run a PostgreSQL stream alongside our Spring conference
next year, and hope to undertake similar events in conjunction with other
groups.
The UKUUG site will remain online at its current address, together with all the
content which has built up over the years. Council intends to continue hosting
the site as an archive of past conferences, newsletters, book reviews and other
activity. Mailing lists and member email addresses will also continue at
ukuug.org for the foreseeable future, and the UKUUG brand still exists if there
are events where Council feels it would be appropriate. Finally, the name of
the company remains as UKUUG Ltd, and invoices, purchase orders etc. will
continue to be issued from UKUUG Ltd.
Council hopes that the new branding will encourage new members to join, attend
events and get involved, and we will be monitoring the impact of the change
over the coming months.
The Spring Conference this year was held in Leeds on 23rd and 24th March, with
a tutorial the preceding day. The venue was the very civilised 3 Albion Place,
in the centre of the city.
The tutorial this year was on Haskell, given by Edwin Brady of St Andrews
University. This was an enjoyable and interesting introduction: as a
functional programming language, Haskell challenges assumptions and forces
different styles of thinking on those who are new to it. The morning session
consisted of an introduction to the language and some of the common functions
in the standard library. The afternoon session went into the problem of
interacting with a pure functional language and then used the concepts taught
so far to show how a simple parsers can be built in Haskell. I found this a
most interesting day.
Throughout the two days of the conference proper, there were two tracks most of
the time. As always, that sometimes made for painful choices when both talks
seemed interesting, but in general the programme was well planned, although
there were occasions when one room became over-full.
On the first day I particularly enjoyed Simon Wilkinson’s introduction to Git,
which was very clear and well presented. Jan-Piet Mens gave three DNSSEC
related talks in total, including a good introduction to the Unbound DNS server
and its use as a caching validating DNSSEC resolver. Adrian Kennard’s talk on
the current state of IPv6 was illuminating and perhaps worrying.
The conference dinner was held at the Royal Armouries. The walk to the
Armouries was just long enough for everyone to develop an appetite for dinner,
and provided scope for lively (and even ‘religious’) discussion about whose
smartphone had the best navigation app. After assembling in a room filled with
armour and ancient oriental weapons, we sat down to an enjoyable meal with good
conversation.
One the second day I gravitated towards the track with the talks about storage
and virtualisation. John Leach spoke about ceph, and Stuart Teasdale discussed
MogileFS as deployed by we7. These were both interesting talks about projects
to do similar things (large scale distributed storage) but with slightly
different design decisions.
Thierry Carrez spoke about OpenStack: it was interesting to see him one year on
from his talk at last year’s Spring Conference, now with a different employer
and talking about a different cloud management solution. But there is no doubt
which way the wind is blowing in this area, and his old employer has moved in
the same direction.
In the afternoon, after a session on PostgreSQL, there was the usual session of
lightning talks — unfortunately I could not stay for these.
This was another successful and well attended conference, with a good
atmosphere and plenty of opportunities for discussion.
This year’s “informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different
approaches to technology, transport and democracy” was held on 21 May at the
University of London Union.
Whilst walking through Russell Square towards the event, I was wondering how
many would-be attendees might instead decide to spend their Saturday soaking up
the glorious sunshine, but was pleasantly surprised to see all the sessions
very well attended. The organisation was better than I remember of previous
years, and that added to a great day. Talks with similar themes were grouped
together well so I didn’t have to dash between seminar rooms to catch the
tail-end of talks in other tracks this year.
Particularly interesting for me was Julian Tait’s talk on FutureEverything’s
Open Data Cities programme. He recounted how in 2009 they realised that cities
might evolve differently if data were made open and how that could reduce
inequalities. They had then set out to try to change the way that public
bodies within Greater Manchester share data. He detailed how they attempted to
demonstrate to local authorities that there was demand for open data from the
2.6 million population, whilst also grappling with apparent disinterest from
residents who didn’t seem to care who provided services across Manchester’s
porous administrative boundaries. Challenges included authorities often not
knowing what information they held, and being inefficient at handling that
data. The breakthrough appears to have been when they specifically targeted
Trafford’s transit department who agreed to make some transport data open.
FutureEverything created apps around that data to build momentum, and Trafford
subsequently identified 2000 datasets that could potentially be released. The
hope is that Trafford will become a model for other authorites.
Also on the theme of Open Data, Jag Goraya gave an engaging presentation about
how the OpenData Sheffield community had developed. His fascinating props
included a “command-line time-phased histogram” showing how the demographics of
the community membership had evolved, accompanied by a more familiar chromatic
pie chart for traditionalists. The aims of the community include: to keep pace
with the agenda of Open Data, improve data literacy amongst the wider
population, and to “make cool stuff”. His “lessons learned” would undoubtedly
be useful for others persuing a similar agenda with local government, and
included a realisation that they’d engaged Sheffield Council too soon (should
have done more of what geeks usually do: “to hack cool stuff in isolation then
try to get buy-in later”) and that they’d “bitten-off too big a bite of the
exploding ODS pie” rather than stimulating grass-roots innovation. Interesting
data-visualisation devices such as an “expressionist gant”, a “sweat-equity
stacked area chart” and a “heat-spectrum bubble chart” neatly illustrated that
the end result of some of the community’s activities didn’t always justify the
effort required.
The various talks around open data all carried the message that data isn’t
necessarily the property of institutions or companies, but of the citizens:
information about when and where I swipe my bus pass is as much mine as it is
the bus company’s. However, changing to a more open model can’t be achieved
without the co-operation of those already controlling it — as they’re the ones
with the power, access and knowledge. Private organisations also have useful
data that should be opened, but the citizens have to learn to consume (and
contribute) that data and to exercise their rights to it: an illustrative
example was given by Greg Hadfield of how, despite Brighton & Hove having
talking bus-stops, talking buses and swipe cards, the only available app was
written by someone in his spare time, obtaining the data via a circuitous
route.
Other notable talks included an introduction to Open Spending: “Where Does My
Money Go?” by Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation. An example of
the reuse of open government data, it has teamed with OpenSpending.org to
combine government spending datasets from other countries, so can scale-up to,
for example, an EU level to see where most money is being spent — such as
Common Agricultural Policy, then scale-down to the level of individual farms.
They have also created an open source platform providing a simple solution for
the exchange and visualisation of data. After-talk discussions became quite
animated, with even suggestions that some of the “where your tax is spent”
bubbles should be capable of being dragged by individuals to adjust their size,
thereby giving citizens direct influence on tax policy.
Another interesting talk that I attended was about a collaborative translation
project, ‘Adopt a Paragraph”, by UCL student Juliano Spyer. Motivated in 2009
by being frustrated at the effort involved in translating texts into his native
Portuguese, he pasted a document into Google Docs and invited friends to
translate one paragraph each. Within 24 hours that first document was
completely translated. Juliano provided lots of advice for anyone considering
launching such a project, including having Google Translate do the “donkey
work” of translating any straightforward text, keeping the required investment
in time of translators to an absolute minimum, giving credit to contributors,
and maintaining a database of participants.
The organisers’ hard work made for a very enjoyable day (and indeed evening, as
the bar remained open long after the sessions ended), the quality of the
speakers and the sessions was excellent — and I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the
fresh air and sunshine of Russell Square.
This was my first OpenTech and sadly I missed the first session because I got
caught out not being able to change onto the Northern Line at Tottenham Court
Road.
However the rest of the day was a great success. I am not going to just
reiterate what was said as the schedule can be found at
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2011/schedule/
I really liked the format of talks in banks of three then a chance for
questions. I also liked the fact that it was a ‘why’ conference rather than
just the technical ‘how’ that software development conferences usually concern
themselves with.
I sat through talks from three different areas: Gavin Starks on the amee
project about collecting and collating data on CO2 emissions; Chris Taggart on
constricting an open source database to shine a light on the interrelationships
between companies worldwide
(http://www.opencorporates.com) and Nick Bull on having
unrestricted access to Case Law, including being able to index it in search
engines so the general public has a chance to find things for themselves
(http://judgmental.org.uk/).
I detected a common pattern.
Data is in a bit of a mess. Sometimes this is just through human mess-ups but
often too vested interests want to keep it messy so they can charge a lot
for simply finding things out that ought to just be a simple matter of a
search.
We need good provenance so that particular data can be relied upon, something
that the Amee Project in particular is working on.
It was a very intense day with three, sometimes four different streams of talks
and a chance to meet like minded people who use computers as a tool to do
something. Another common theme was requests for help with the technical side
of projects such as websites and natural language processing skills. The event
happened as much in twitter as in the halls so looking for the
#opentech hashtag is a good way to catch up on the discussion and
background material of talks you would have liked to have gone to but had
inevitable timetable clashes.
The price (a suggested donation of a fiver) was no bar to going along as
long as getting to Central London is not a problem for you.
The icing on the cake was that the whole conference was literally next door
to a good old fashioned Computer Fair so I found myself stocking up on
various hard to get bits and pieces too.
I think the large number of free software fans made an impression on the
vendors of the reconditioned PCs and Laptops for sale. I had an interesting
conversation with one and found that it takes them just 4 minutes to blast a
minimal copy of XP onto a reconditioned business PC. With such little time
involved it begs the question why second user systems not be sent out with a
choice of Linux too? Even at the low end machines that have done their 3
years service in the corporate world have 40 — 80GB disks nowadays.
Allocating 20% to Linux would give 8 — 16GB to play with, plenty for someone
who mostly just surfs the web.
Getting Linux pre-installed on new PCs in the mass market has been a tough
nut to crack but having Linux as well as XP gives the purchaser of a £100
reconditioned PC some real extra value, and at no real extra cost to the PC
recyclers.
Find who does PC recycling in your area and offer to help them change their
procedures to include Linux (whichever you prefer). It would be a very
effective way to get many thousands of people to see that there is an
alternative to just using the same old thing.
Let me know how you get on.
This event (International Workshop on E-health in Emerging Economies) took
place in early April in Luxembourg and was organised by the GNU SOLIDARIO
association during the Med-e-tel 2011 conference (Official event for the
Society for Telemedicine and eHealth).
I attended the event because I am currently investigating Open Source solutions
that would be relevant for non-profit Organizations, especially for education
and healthcare purposes.
I gained interest in those matters after doing a 2 months charity mission in
Haiti last year. I was working in an orphanage and teaching kids computer
literacy with Open Source software in 4 schools, trained the charity staff in
OpenOffice and setup a website for donations (http://pwojeespwasud.org).
That was a priceless experience but I went there without knowing what to
expect. Knowing a bit more of the real problems on site, many projects could be
potentially done in the area. Solutions for managing the kids/patients in local
clinics with the orphans records or even setting up media labs for schools
would make a tremendous difference. We see earthquake and misery through the
media but there are projects down there which inspires lots of hope.
I have been looking for some OSS projects around healthcare and education
online but it was hard to find any concrete feedbacks or case studies. A lack
of centralised information was also an issue.
I decided to go straight to the community and found out about the IWEEE. My
overall feedback about this event is that I was agreeably surprised to discover
an international community and a plethora of strong OSS applications used in
many Organizations. The emphasis was towards e-Health solutions in emerging
countries and the coordination between the OSS ICT solutions in healthcare.
The first day was the proper IWEEE event and the two other days were
Tracks for the Med-e-tel parent event.
The IWEEE was launched by the organiser Luis Falcon (GNU SOLIDARIO) from
Argentina with an inspiring presentation about the “social” aspect of Free
software. Basically, seeing “Free Software” as “Social Activism” imply
focusing on people instead of corporation in this context.
Mr Falcon is also responsible for the OSS project “Medical” which is based on
openERP (a python based OSS ERP solution). It is a centralised Health and
Hospital Information System that provides Electronic Medical Records (EMR), a
Hospital Information System (HIS) and a Health Information System. It offers
30+ modules for different pathologies and also the logistics of healthcare
Organizations. That project was cited many times in the different talks and is
used by Hospitals and clinics around the world:
http://medical.sourceforge.net.
Among the other talks during that day, a pertinent overview of the use of Open
Source at a Governmental level in Brazil was done by Cesar Brod. Due to the
ex-president Lula’s open source policies, OSS portals ran by the Government are
acting as a catalyst for the national OSS community and most essentially for the
country’s development. Many projects used by the Government in Healthcare and
Education are created through those portals:
http://www.softwarepublico.gov.br and
http://www.softwarelivre.gov.br.
An excellent example is
InVesalius, an application generating 3D images from Xray 2D scans:
http://svn.softwarepublico.gov.br/trac/invesalius
The VistA (not the windows one) platform used in US hospitals was also
mentioned. Several open source versions exist (WorldVista GPL, OpenVista AGPL,
vxVista EPL) and have been broadly deployed in the states:
http://vistapedia.net/
Another talk was done by the United Nation University (Institute for Global
Health) from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I was quite impressed by their
initiatives around Open Source since I didn’t even know that their was such a
thing as a United Nation University which delivers degrees and PhDs. They
implement an open CaseMix tool
(http://www.unuiigh-casemixonline.org)
providing a classification of patients’ treatment
episodes. For instance, similar tools or services are used by the NHS or in
Australia as a key funding model for reimbursement of the cost of patient care
in hospitals.
They also publish a portal online with different course around “Open Source
Training in health care”. There are only 4 full courses on the website but 10
of them are in progress at the moment so check out the website if you are
interested: http://unu-iigh.org
A nice project from Bika labs in South Africa that got my attention was BIKA
LIMS for Laboratory Information Management System. I was impressed by the
maturity of the project and the stories of the project manager (Lemoene Smit)
who have been working more than 10 years on it. The software is based on
Plone/Zope and fully open source. It allows to manage a laboratory workflow
from sample reception to result publication.
It is worth mentioning that Bika labs has also different branches for different
industries such as water quality management, wine and beverage industry,
geology and mining (http://www.bikalabs.com.)
I will not describe each talks done during the two following days (Med-e-tel
tracks) but the ones that captured my attention and also those focused on
providing platforms centralising different OSS projects in healthcare.
Regarding the issue of centralising information about OSS for healthcare,
Thomas Karopka and Holger Schmuhl presented the portal during a
talk about governance for in healthcare. 230 projects were listed on the
website during the talk, this is the ultimate place to seek for Open Source
software in healthcare or submit a project if you are involved or interested.
Holger Schumhl also referred to the Open Health Tools teamforge portal but that
was definitely more oriented to the practitioners with many standards and
protocols of the healthcare industry provided by those
tools (http://www.projects.openhealthtools.org).
Another place listing many projects around this topic is DebianMed presented by
Andreas Tille from Germany. A debian repository with many projects properly
packaged in debs since many scientists tends to just provide sources when it
comes to OSS practices. The repository is currently focused on medical
practice, imaging and bioinformatics. See
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed.
The last day, one track was more oriented towards AAL or “Ambient Assisted
Living” projects governance. I didn’t know what was AAL before which is about
making smart use of technology to support well-being in the preferred living
environment for people who might otherwise find this difficult (e.g. infirm or
very elderly people who want to continue living in their own homes). No OSS
projects were described but a manifesto and an open platform were presented:
http://aaloa.org/manifesto,
http://www.universaal.org.
On the other track, a Spanish company called Andago made a good impresison with
their OSS products for eHealth and eGovernment. They offer a new mobile health
platform (web and android), Open Health Assistant, that is generic and flexible
enough to enable the creation of various kinds of chronic disease management
solutions, tailored to both care providers as the patients themselves. The talk
was more ‘marketing’ orientated but it looked good and promising on the slides,
you can see more at http://andago.com.
The last session was a workshop for “Collaborative care team in open source”
by Etienne Saliez. The presentation was focused on the chronology of ICT in
healthcare, from the paper-based archives to the personal computer and the
current distributed environments. The confidentiality and economic issues were
also treated with a proposed coordination logic model. The outcome of the
workshop was the creation of a Working-Group by Monika Hubler (University of
Basel, Switzerland) with all the attendees to carry on the discussion around
the main topic of governance for a fragmented community in healthcare.
Overall, the IWEEE was definitely the place to be if you needed to have a broad
overview of the Open Source solutions used in Healthcare and eventually
Education. The talks were highly informative, the discussions pertinent and the
networking also was quite enjoyable. I personally recommend this event and will
follow some projects that can fit with some charity missions that I’m
affiliated with.
The under £100 cheap PCs for the disadvantaged have just gone on sale.
http://www.ecycleonline.co.uk/choose-your-computer—from-9200-8-c.asp
Ubuntu 10.10 is there as a solid (and ‘no strings attached’) choice.
But for only £3 more so is Windows XP and Office!
This is very bad news for the disadvantaged, for the rest of the internet
community who are going to have to put up with millions of new potential
malware filled zombie computers to deal with.
The users also have to agree to special licensing terms as Microsoft is
doing them such a BIG favour (not).
Why would Microsoft do such a thing? Is it not trying to end of life XP?
It seems that keeping several million new computer users away from the
freedom of running and learning about the free software that the Internet
itself tends to run on.
We in the free software community should not take this clumsy piece of vote
buying lying down. Make a fuss.
Netbooks were a great chance to free people from having to run Windows.
However Microsoft came in and changed ground rules, forced netbooks to be
non upgradeable and carrying battery sucking hard disks because XP was not
so hot about running from SSD.
We don’t want the same thing to happen in the second user computer
marketplace now it is becoming significant.
Five year old PCs are just fine for running Linux for most peoples use. They
really don’t need to be distracted by XP and weasel worded licences.
The UK Government would like our help.
Those of you at the spring conference may remember that I mentioned there
that the Home Office is in the process of collecting a list of Free and Open
Source software that has a good track record of being in use and of use. The
purpose of this list is to give suggestions to the system integrators of
technologies they could use in constructing complete systems for Government
of NHS use.
Having a list of trusted technology building blocks such as Apache, Python
and Linux means that systems need not have to consist of many proprietary
components that cost the UK taxpayer an arm and a leg in ongoing software
licence payments.
Mr Tariq Rashid the Lead Architect of the Home Office IT Technology
Solutions and Assurance Team has put together a Google Docs site where you
can review the current proposed list and suggest extra packages to be
included on it.
See also:
http://www.osor.eu/news/eu-uk-fsfe-appeals-for-information-on-oss-deployments
where there are links to the consultation document and to the related appeal
for information by the FSFE.
Jenifer Tidwell
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-4493-7970-4
576 pages
£ 38.50
Published: January 2011
reviewed by Lindsay Marshall
I am conflicted about this book. It is, as the blurb says, a genuinely
comprehensive look at “interface patterns” and it should be useful to anyone
who is building interfaces, but…
First, the title — this is not a book about designing interfaces; it’s a
dictionary/catalogue/encyclopedia of approaches to solving particular interface
problems, but it doesn’t tell you how to design interfaces. Second, and this is
just me of course, I find the whole idea that these are “patterns” just
annoying and wrong. “Prominent Done Button” is only a pattern if you stretch
the definition a long, long way, way past breaking point — this doesn’t devalue
the content of course, just makes it annoying for me to read. YMMV, and almost
certainly will. Third, even though I’ve described this as a
dictionary/catalogue etc., there isn’t really a quick way to find a particular
solution to a problem you may have. Looking in the table of contents and seeing
“Pyramid” doesn’t help me identify whether or not I need to go and read that
item.
I’m being picky. The content is good (I like the mobile section particularly),
the production values are high: colour, glossy pages and much the heaviest
O’Reilly book I have handled recently. If you work with interfaces and can
afford to buy it then you should, as you will use it. It is certainly one for
the interface development team library at the very least.
Arnold Robbins
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-4493-9217-8
94 pages
£ 11.50
Published: February 2011
reviewed by Andy Thomas
Another gem in the O’Reilly Pocket Reference series, this is a long overdue and
much needed second edition of a pocket book that originally appeared 12 years
ago as a companion to Learning the vi Editor by the same author. Times change,
editors evolve and become increasingly feature-laden and the rising popularity
of Vim is now reflected in the title. But the book also covers elvis, nvi and
vile quite extensively despite the fact that nowhere on the front cover is this
mentioned, which seems a curious omission that could impact sales of this
excellent book; elvis is the default editor in Slackware Linux, for example.
Omitting the formal structure seen in some other books in the series, there are
no chapters or even page breaks separating the different sections — this has
allowed the author to cram as much meat into this 85 page book as possible and
he wastes no time in doing so, jumping straight into the basic editing
functions common to all variants on page 2. Starting with screen mode commands
and moving on through startup and recovery options and substitution tricks to
the ex commands, explanation of vi’s three modes of operation — command mode,
screen mode and ex — switching between them and how they relate to each other
is rather lacking but then this is not a vi tutorial. And comparing this with
the full size book, it looks as if almost every command. option and parameter
in the latter has somehow been squeezed in with nowt left out — it even manages
to find space to cover the differences between the Solaris implementation of
‘traditional’ vi and others.
Moving on to the vi clones, it’s perhaps no surprise that Vim gets the lion’s
share of the treatment and this is really extensive, opening my eyes to
features of Vim I didn’t know even existed. The special features of nvi, elvis
and vile are then covered and the book rounds off with a page of URLs to
vi-related resources, a useful page listing the authors, email addresses and
source download sites for vi and its clones and finally, an index.
O’Reilly’s pocket reference series are a real boon for many as they are
designed as an aide memoire for those who already have a basic knowledge of the
subject, be it C, Gimp, PHP or vi. For those of us who do a bit of everything
and become jacks of all trades, this series is indispensable — not all of us
write PHP or use Gimp day in, day out for months on end and we tend to forget
the more obscure things 2 or 3 weeks after using it. But there is another
aspect to these mini-references — they are very useful when used side by side
with the full size reference book when learning a new package as nowhere in
“the big book” are the commands tabled one after the other with such concise
descriptions of what they do and this is particularly true of the Vi and Vim
Editors pocket book.
And even used on their own, they remain a great learning resource as I had a
lot of fun trying out all the Vim functions I didn’t know about, spending
several hours working my way through the command lists instead of getting on
with writing this review…
I found it a very enriching experience, although I doubt I’ll be able to recall
all of it in 3 weeks time — which is precisely what this book is for!
Finally, like the others in the Pocket Reference series, this is a true pocket
book that will fit into any shirt or jeans back pocket, slim enough not to do
the the wearer an injury if he/she sits down forgetting it is there. Many moons
ago when I repaired TVs for a living, Newnes used to publish a range of “pocket
books” for engineers — only a little larger than the O’Reilly books of the same
name but so thick they would not fit any normal garment’s pocket (although I
suppose they’d fit the pockets of the voluminous white lab coats all the old
hands in the trade wore at the time). And I love that creature on the front
cover — well done Arnold and the O’Reilly Pocket Reference team!
Mark Lutz
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-0-596-15810-1
1632 pages
£ 49.99
Published: January 2011
reviewed by Andy Thomas
Leaning back in my chair and contemplating the bookshelves as I ponder how to
start off this review, I notice the middle of the bottom shelf is sagging
badly, sagging mostly under Sendmail, 3rd edition which I had always regarded
as O’Reilly’s weightiest (and loftiest) title to date. All 1200 pages of
it. Until now that is — Mark Lutz’s Programming Python, 4th edition comfortably
beats that at getting on for 1600 pages and is about the heaviest book I have
ever picked up.
The centrepiece of a trilogy, where it is partnered by Learning Python on the
one hand and the Python Pocket Reference on the other, this book makes it clear
from the outset that it is neither a tutorial nor a Python reference — the
reader needs to look elsewhere for that. The emphasis is very much on
application programming while the core Python fundamentals are covered in the
Learning book — there is no full-sized reference book, at least not yet.
This latest edition covers Python 3.1 only — this means only those parts of
earlier versions of Python that have lived on into 3.1 are covered and nothing
else. The author explains this was to keep down the page count of this already
large book but it seems a shame that an all-encompassing book such as this
doesn’t at least cover 2.5 and 2.6 which are still being bundled with many
Linux distros at the time of writing. However, we need to move on at some stage
even if it does make for version incompatibility and experienced programmers
should have little difficulty adapting some of the concepts and code examples
explored here to Python 2.x.
After a lengthy preface we finally get into the book proper and find that it is
organised into six parts; part 1 is a short and gentle introduction to
applications programming in which we are shown in six stages how to create a flat
file database and then further augment it using the pickle module to ensure
consistent record storage. Subsequent stages introduce OOP Python style, adding
persistence and console interaction before moving up to a full GUI and
finishing with making the application web-accessible, preparing us for the
in-depth applications programming techniques covered in the remainder of this
tome.
Part 2 is about systems programming, containing six chapters on Python’s
extensive library of modules for system file, directory and other functions.
*n*x users should not be discouraged by the fact all the examples shown here
(and indeed, the whole book) are for the Windows command shell with references
to using Cygwin where appropriate — there are occasional references to Linux in
the text but none at all in the massive index at the end of the book, although
UNIX gets a few lines here. This section ends with some really quite useful
complete systems utilities although some seem to be Windows specific.
Jumping in a bit deeper in Part 3 we come to GUI programming. Five very large
chapters are mostly devoted to tkinter, the Python interface to the Tk library
— I had some problems running some of the examples on my Linux system and had
to tinker for ages with installing tkinter before anything worked. But users of
mainstream Linuxes and MacOS bundled with tkinter-aware Python packages should
find these will work out of the box and there are some useful image
manipulation examples as well as the complete programs that close each part of
the book.
Internet and network-aware applications follow in part 4 which for many
potential readers will be the most interesting part of the book, as this and
GUI programming (part 3) get by far the largest treatment over chapters 12 to
16 covering in turn network scripting, client-side scripting, a complete
working email client (PyMailGUI) that illustrates the techniques learned in the
previous chapter, server-side scripting and finishing with PyMailCGI, a working
webmail-style system. Python’s network support is very standards-compliant so
readers using *n*x will perhaps have more fun with the code here than with the
GUI section and I certainly felt much more at home here; a lot can be learned
from the concepts here that experienced programmers may find useful when
writing in other languages.
Tools and Techniques is the topic of part 5, a four chapter round-up of some of
the techniques used in earlier chapters including information storage and SQL
integration, advanced data structures using stacks, binary search trees and
graphing followed by a further two chapters on text and XML parsing and
integration with other languages and their libraries. This section will
probably be of interest to those who wish to use Python for scientific and
mathematical computation work.
Titled simply ‘The End’, the final part of the book is entirely non-technical
and largely philosophical look at computer programming in general, what the
author thinks is wrong with current programming and development methodologies
and why Python comes to the rescue, galloping in as the Knight in Shining
Armour and does things “the right way”.
A well-written book that explains complex concepts comprehensively yet clearly,
with the occasional references to well-known Monty Python catch-phrases adding
a touch of humour, this book is firmly in ‘advanced’ territory as far as the
intended readership goes. But given the increasing prevalence of Python
scripting even in such mundane areas as operating system install scripts, there
is clearly a need for a book at this level and I think this is about the only
book that fulfils this need. To get the most from this book, consider also
buying the companion learning and pocket reference books and if you do buy the
complete set, you’d better have a strong bookshelf.
Brian P Hogan
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-934356-68-5
280 pages
£ 25.50
Published: January 2011
reviewed by Daren Chandisingh
According to the prerequisites, “HTML5 and CSS3: Developing with Tomorrow’s
Standards Today” is aimed at developers with a good understanding of HTML and
CSS, as well as those having a basic understanding of Javascript in general,
and jQuery in particular. I would echo these sentiments; it’s not a book for
the complete beginner. The book leans quite heavily on jQuery, and while
there’s a primer in the appendices, a reader who does not have appreciation of
Javascript — and its potentially odd-looking syntax — is as likely to be left
bewildered as he or she is enlightened.
The book begins with an overview of new additions to HTML5 and CSS3, and
deprecated tags that are commonly encountered, along with a caveat that these
are specifications that are in development, so could change at any time.
“HTML5 and CSS3” is presented in three parts. Broadly speaking, the first
part covers new semantic and structural elements and attributes; e.g. header,
nav and section elements. Part two covers more presentational aspects such as
the canvas, audio and video elements, and new capabilities of CSS3 such as
rounded corners, gradients and drop shadows. Part 3 covers aspects of “HTML5”
which are neither markup nor presentation, and have either been spun off from
the HTML5 specification, or which were never part of the specification in the
first place; these include local storage, web sockets and geolocation.
Each item is introduced in the context of a realistic example, covering not
only the “what” of new features, but also the “why”. I found the style
quite abrupt, and occasionally lacking enough introduction to blocks of code,
be it the HTML, CSS or Javascript that peppers the pages. Similarly, I
sometimes read comments within the text that didn’t seem to follow or seem
obviously connected to the preceding block of code. As noted before, this book
is intended for intermediate developers at least, and I think a degree of
inference and internal linking of dots is expected.
Most features are accompanied with a fallback proposition for browsers that
don’t yet support the item under discussion; these fallbacks are largely
Javascript dependent, and are accompanied with examples of how to detect
whether the feature is supported. This was one of the most useful aspects of
the book, I felt, as I’ve found it easier to find out what “HTML5” can do,
than I have found material that enables me to use the features with confidence
that my pages won’t be unusable for a significant number of my audience.
The author also tries to keep the accessibility aspects of new features in the
reader’s mind, both offering examples of how the new elements and attributes
can help disabled users, as well as highlighting any downsides of the fallback
propositions.
This book contains a good amount of useful information for the developer who
wants to get stuck in to using HTML5 and CSS3 right now. However, each
feature’s coverage is short, before moving swiftly along to the next item, so
this is something of a whistle-stop tour. Some work is required on the reader’s
part in order to make the most of what’s presented, but it’s certainly a sound
launchpad for exploring the new frontier.
Matthew A Russell
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-4493-8834-8
360 pages
£ 30.99
Published: February 2011
reviewed by Paul Waring
Many people are a member of at least one online social network, whether it be
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or even a collection of emails and mailing lists.
This book aims to show you how to pull together, filter and analyse the rapidly
growing corpus of data available and turn it into something useful.
The introduction chapter is pleasingly short on flowery prose, and by page 4
we’re already connected to the Twitter API, followed a few pages later by an
example of frequency analysis and lexical diversity. The authors have sensibly
decided to re-use existing open source tools rather than writing their own, for
example graph data is output as DOT language, which can easily be visualised.
As a result, by the end of the first chapter we are already writing scripts to
produce graphs showing the connectivity of retweets.
The next few chapters go into more depth in data collection and analysis. There
is an entire chapter dedicated to email, which contains a trove of useful
information about interactions but is probably not the first thing most people
think of when discussing ‘social data’. Broad coverage is also given to the
topic of using CouchDB to store and process social data, particularly its
map/reduce functionality.
Whilst most of the first half of the book focuses on Twitter, chapters covering
LinkedIn and Google Buzz (which feels slightly wasted, given that this network
failed to take off) bring some variety. Part way through the Google Buzz
chapter the mathematical symbols and formulae rear their heads, taking me back
to my time spent in academia where I brushed against the natural language
processing research area. Facebook also gets a chapter, although the speed at
which its platform changes means that some of the information may be out of
date, but the principles remain the same.
Overall, this is a good starting point for anyone looking to take large chunks
of social data and produce summaries and graphs. You do need to have a good
grasp of natural language processing to make the most of the text beyond the
first half of the book, and probably a reasonable understanding of Python too,
for which Natural Language Processing with Python may prove useful.
Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-0-596-80582-1
448 pages
£ 34.50
Published: September 2010
reviewed by Paul Waring
Having already purchased and read the excellent RESTful Web Services (O’Reilly
2007), I was pleased to see a new and up to date book covering this topic. For
anyone who hasn’t come across REST (Representational State Transfer) before,
the basic concept is to use an existing protocol’s (usually HTTP) capabilities
instead of implementing this functionality for each application which requires
it. For example, HTTP already supports a variety of authentication methods
which can be used instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
The book begins with an introduction which succinctly covers all the main
concepts and jargon related to REST, with some excellent diagrams for those who
prefer graphical explanations to textual ones. This is followed up by two
chapters demonstrating the basic operations involved in REST, centred around
the example of a coffee shop. The chapter covering an example of an ordering
service is helpful, but unfortunately uses .NET for all the example code, and
in my experience the HTTP and web client libraries provided do not work well
across different platforms.
The chapter on Scaling Out is particularly useful, covering not only how to
cache content, but just as importantly how to make content cacheable. Two
chapters dedicated to Atom seem slightly wasted though, and the authors could
perhaps have culled one in exchange for detailed coverage of another topic.
The topic of security gets a dedicated chapter, covering not just
authentication and authorisation but also transport-level confidentiality and
integrity. The performance aspects of security are also covered, including the
overhead of cryptographic operations and the lack of caching which comes with
HTTPS. Finally, the book is rounded off with a chapter of how REST fits in and
compares with other well known concepts associated with web services, such as
SOAP and WSDL.
Overall, this is an excellent overview of REST, with plenty of clear, crisp
diagrams and a broad coverage which takes in everything needed to get started.
David Flanagan
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-4493-9722-7
160 pages
£ 9.99
Published: January 2011
reviewed by Mike Fowler
This book serves as an introduction to jQuery and provides very thorough
coverage of all the aspects of the library. Though a reference for the API is
provided at the end of the book, the book feels more like a pocket guide than a
pocket reference. In fact the whole book is the jQuery chapter from the
author’s much larger Javascript: The Definitive Guide. This has the advantage
of making a very readable little book however the sidebars are preserved and
look quite odd as many overflow to a subsequent page. Given the format of the
book I would have preferred to see the sidebars integrated into the main text for
improved readability.
Each chapter of the book gradually introduces you to more and more features of
the library. The author has assumed that you know JavaScript but not jQuery
which helps keep things to the point. The examples are simple and clear and not
contrived as examples often are. The author takes the time to explain why the
library works in the way it does and what browser limitations the library helps
you to work around. Amusingly the author also provides some critique of the
library, particularly where the naming is confusing. For example the
jQuery.ajax() method has an option called type which
the author rightly points out would be better named method.
jQuery experts probably won’t find this book of much use as the library moves
so quickly the API reference is already somewhat out of date. The book covers
version 1.4 and we are already on version 1.6.1. However for people who only
dip into jQuery occasionally or who have no previous knowledge of jQuery, this
book will serve as an excellent introduction and refresher.
Danny Goodman
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1-4493-8845-4
318 pages
£ 26.99
Published: December 2010
reviewed by Mike Smith
A brand new first-edition book, this one (well, printed at the turn of the
year) but the very first thing I notice is the diagonal flash across the top
right hand corner — “Covers iOS SDK 4.2”! I presume this is to demonstrate
how new and up-to-date the book is, but I’m not sure of the wisdom of this
technique. It is of course already out of date.
I’ve been doing a little tinkering with iOS recently (well, on and off for a
few years now) and so this title grabbed my attention. Another worry I have for
O’Reilly and the author, which I’ll share with you before getting into the
content, is that there is a danger that the way the book is positioned limits
the readership base. How many potential iOS developers are there just starting
out (yes, probably quite a lot); but more importantly how many of those have a
JavaScript programming background? I just wonder why buy this book when there
are other more general iOS texts about. (I think a better title to draw people
in would have been “iOS development for web developers”, or something
similar.) It reminds me of the new near field communication phones coming out
— Orange are making a splash with one at the moment, but you have to be on
their network, have to have a Barclay card to top it up, and have to have the
specific model of phone — all limiting the potential audience. anyway, I
digress, onto the review.
There’s an initial positioning chapter that discusses the relative benefits and
pitfalls of native application development versus web-based apps. The author
talks about his early experiences of the iPhone — life before the SDK, so I
think that’s one reason for the inclusion of this material. This book seems to
be drawn from much personal experience.
The next chapter walks through the SDK installation and loading up a sample
project. Unfortunately, again the world is changing here. I think as a
registered developer you can still download the 4.3 version of the SDK from the
web, but the latest (and nicely integrated version with Xcode and Interface
Builder all together) is now only available through the Mac app store (at a
cost too, the meanies).
The next few chapters gently introduce us to developing our first application,
discuss iOS frameworks and object-oriented coding. Actually this is one area
where a direct comparison is made between creating classes in JavaScript and
performing the same activity in Objective C. It’s not until page 92 that
model-view-controller is mentioned. I’m jumping ahead here, but it’s drummed
into you (at least in many other texts I’ve read) at an early stage that this
is the way it’s done in the Apple/Next/iOS world. Excluding the appendices this
book has 165 pages, so we’re over a third of the way through by now. A mate of
mine has written a PHP MVC framework which is quite cool (some great wizardly
Apache rewrite rules make it all work automatically: impressive.)
Data types and memory management up next, and discussions on various topics —
with mention of C and C# too. Things like structures, variable scope — a whole
mix in chapter 7. But not the special classes in Cocoa — this is saved for
chapter 8. Actually we cover similar subject areas — C arrays in chapter 7
followed by NSArray, NSMutableArray etc in chapter 8.
The purpose of Chapter 9, and in fact the final chapter of the book, goes to
the core of the title of the book. Performing common JavaScript tasks in cocoa
touch. Or that’s what I thought — but actually it’s just a collection of, yes,
useful routines that actually you want to perform in any language. I didn’t
spot any actual JavaScript code here — just a collection of Cocoa/Cocoa Touch
recipes. Useful nonetheless.
A couple of appendices are included. One on using the Xcode documentation, and
a brief one on common compiler errors. The first one is useful to point you in
the right direction; I have my doubts about the latter.
So I have quite a few reservations about this book. It’s not tremendously long,
the content is a bit mixed up, I’m not convinced of the whole premise and I
didn’t see that many direct comparisons between the JavaScript and Objective C
environments. Don’t let me put you off if you do fall into the target
demographic; have a flick through in O’Reilly’s Safari or in Waterstones, but
I’m afraid I’m not convinced this has a place on many peoples’ bookshelves.
Miran Lipovača
Published by No Starch Press
ISBN: 978-1-59327-283-8
400 pages
£ 35.49
Published: April 2011
reviewed by Roger Whittaker
I have been dabbling just a little with Haskell in the past year. As an
(ex-)mathematician, I could not help being intrigued by the idea of a
functional language in which you can define infinite lists, in which valid code
can sometimes look pretty much like mathematical notation, and in which type
classes have rules that look like (and are) mathematical axioms. So I was
delighted when the tutorial at the Spring Conference this year turned out to be
an introduction to Haskell. And likewise it is good to have the opportunity to
comment on this book.
I certainly cannot claim to be any kind of expert on Haskell. But comparing
this book with the other introductory Haskell books that I have looked at, I am
very impressed with the quality of the explanations and examples. There’s a
slight air of zany wackiness running through the book, from its title to the
illustrations to some of the examples. This atmosphere, combined with the
author’s infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter, makes the book a lot of
fun to read. Everything is explained alongside short snippets of code which
serve as direct and self contained examples. Reading the book while testing
out the examples in ghci is easy to do, and the author doesn’t
make the mistake of putting down chunks of code on the page that are too big
and tedious for the reader to test in practice.
The book starts off at a fairly gentle pace and the first few (of the fifteen)
chapters are easy going. Then the learning curve gets steeper. I spent quite
a lot of time working through the examples in the chapters on Applicative
Functors and Monads, and the clarity of the examples and explanations staved
off the “head explodes” experience that I was expecting to happen at any
moment. I particularly liked the example in the Monads chapter of the
tightrope walker carrying a pole on which birds may land on either side,
sometimes causing him to fall.
There were a few places where it was not clear which modules needed to be
imported to make the code examples work (but experimenting to discover the
answer was instructive in itself), and there is at least one small proof
reading error in a code example.
The book started out as a set of tutorials on line at
http://learnyouahaskell.com/ which is all still available
under a Creative Commons licence. The online content differs slightly from the
book, but not greatly. Even the slightly odd pictures (which seem to be by the
author) have been reproduced from the on-line version.
If you are interested in finding out what Haskell is all about, this book can
be strongly recommended.
Daren Chandisingh wrote his first HTML page in 1995, an event
that served to steer him away from Windows application development, and towards
the land of GNU/Linux and FOSS. He currently works as a Web developer at
Lancashire County Council.
Mike Fowler is a Senior Software Engineer at Dotted Eyes. He
is a firm open-source advocate and has helped companies move from Microsoft
based solutions to complete Linux/PostgreSQL stacks. He is a major contributor
to YAWL, an open source BPM/Workflow system. When not melded with a keyboard,
he spends his time playing as many different stringed instruments as he can.
Martin Houston has been using Unix since 1980 starting with a
PDP11/70 and Linux since 1994. He was the founder of the original UKUUG Linux
SIG and is currently a freelance Linux consultant. He lives in Essex with wife
Teresa and 2 cats, 2 dogs and too many computers.
Gerald Marie-Nelly is a freelance Linux Consultant from
Martinique (French Caribbean) working in London via his company Nawflaw Ltd
(http://nawflaw.net/). He has worked for Red Hat in the
past and is currently contracting in the City and studying management during
evening classes. Apart from geeking around, he likes broadcasting Caribbean
music online and takes part in various charity projects.
Lindsay Marshall developed the Newcastle Connection
distributed UNIX software and created the first Internet cemetery. He is a
Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the Newcastle University.
He also runs the RISKS digest website and the Bifurcated Rivets weblog.
Jane Morrison is Company Secretary and Administrator for
UKUUG, and manages the UKUUG office at the Manor House in Buntingford. She has
been involved with UKUUG administration since 1987. In addition to UKUUG, Jane
is Company Secretary for a trade association (Fibreoptic Industry Association)
that she also runs from the Manor House office.
Mike Smith works in the Chief Technology Office of a major
European listed outsourcing company, setting technical strategy and working
with hardware and software vendors to bring innovative solutions to its
clients. He has 20 years experience in the industry, including mid-range
technical support roles and has experience with AIX, Dynix/ptx, HP-UX, Irix,
Reliant UNIX, Solaris and of course Linux.
Andy Thomas is a UNIX/Linux systems administrator working for
Dijit New Media, Imperial College London and a number of small companies.
Having started with Linux when it first appeared in the early 1990’s, he now
enjoys working with a variety of UNIX and Linux distributions and has a
particular interest in high availability systems and parallel compute clusters.
Paul Thompson is based in London and works for Novell as a
Linux consultant specialising in the financial sector.
Paul Waring is chairman of UKUUG and a director of a wholesale
insurance broker. Outside of work he can usually be found filing documentation
bugs against various open source and free software projects.
Roger Whittaker works for Novell Technical Services at
Bracknell supporting major Linux accounts in the UK. He is also the UKUUG
Newsletter Editor, and co-author of three successive versions of a SUSE book
published by Wiley.