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Andy Oram

Editor

Biography

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, which is a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Andy is also a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and writes often for the O'Reilly Network and other publications. Topics include policy issues related to the Internet and trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.

Andy works at the O'Reilly office in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lives nearby with his wife, two children, and a six-foot grand piano that can often be heard late at night.

Articles

Multimedia

Webinar: Control a World of Computers From Your Linux PC
March 20, 2008
In this webinar, Carla Schroder, columnist, blogger, and author of the Linux Cookbook and Linux Networking Cookbook, covers the finer points of secure remote graphical administration from your Linux PC, showing how to run graphical applications, your...

Blog

O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures

June 25 2008

Andy Oram offers an open response to issues raised by Baron Schwartz, lead author of O'Reilly's "High Performance MySQL, Second Edition." read more

Reasons for the Linux Plumbers Conference

June 24 2008

The first Linux Plumbers Conference has just been announced. It takes place on September 17-19 in Portland, Oregon, back-to-back with this year's Linux Kernel summit. The main topics of this conference are laid out in advance, but the organizers are leaving time for last-minute additions and have set aside rooms for ad hoc meetings. There will… read more

O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures

June 20 2008

Andy Oram offers an open response to issues raised by Baron Schwartz, lead author of O'Reilly's "High Performance MySQL, Second Edition." read more

Full disclosure--two views collide

May 31 2008

Both Viega and Zdziarski.are security experts and authors of books by O'Reilly and other publishers. Viega used the bully pulpit for an entreaty against the "full disclosure" philosophy, a fundamental article in the open source catechism. Zdziarski, who had not consulted with Viega beforehand, endorsed full disclosure whole-heartedly and with a doggedly pragmatic intent. So… read more

Why open source developers can be more productive, and other tales from a Google open house

May 14 2008

Google likes hiring programmers who contribute to open source projects because they're more self-motivated. On open source projects, volunteers may be assigned tasks, but often they recognize a need and propose to fill it. This and many other interesting topics came up at the party celebrating the opening of Google's larger Cambridge, Massachusetts office. read more

Consider the economics in network neutrality

April 22 2008

Four days ago, the FCC held a widely publicized hearing at Stanford about bandwidth regulation on the Internet. In my summary analysis and background explanation of an earlier hearing at Harvard, I referred to the highly unpopular Brett Glass, whose experience running a rural wireless ISP radiates a different perspective from all other commentators. Glass got to speak at… read more

MySQL is not simple

April 15 2008

A conference attendance that tops 2000 suggests that a technology involves a certain number of subtle angles. MySQL became a hit because installing it and manipulating tables were so simple--and yet when you get serious, the simple things start growing hair. The attendees I've talked to at this conference have their hands greasy every… read more

Can a program lie to you the way a story or essay can?

April 06 2008

I just finished an unusual conference called Codework at the University of West Virginia, where computer science experts and writers batted around the similarities among their disciplines and the differences between writing code and writing fiction. Ruby inventor Yukihiro Matsumoto gave us a chapter for Beautiful Code in which he compares programming to essay-writing, with many positive… read more

An evening with Ted Nelson: visionary prerequisites for a vision

April 04 2008

Readers have plenty of ways to learn about Nelson's famous Xanadu and his more recent project Zigzag, one of the best ways being to hear him speak as we did in a full hall last night. To me, the fundamental and most breath-taking aspect of Xanadu is not the linking and sharing of information, but its… read more

Personal responsibility for Internet safety: What O'Reilly is doing

April 01 2008

O'Reilly is soon to release its first graphic novel, Hackerteen\, a book teaching young people basic Internet technology and a deeper understanding of where and why Internet use can be risky. If people start out indifferent about security, or unconfident that they can do something about it, fear can actually decrease protective actions. Moreover, education can fall on… read more

Beautiful Code wins JOLT award

March 19 2008

Beautiful Code won Dr. Dobbs Journal's JOLT award as the best general book of the year in computing at SD West earlier this month. JOLT awards are some of the most prestigious in the field of software engineering. Details in our publicist's blog. read more

Companies crunch public stats for services to developers and administrators

March 18 2008

Companies are constantly opening new veins of ore as they attempt to mine the Internet for useful information. A service from SourceLabs recalls efforts by Splunk and Black Duck Software. Services such as these should lead to change in the tools used by developers and users to submit bug reports. The more data users provide, and the more that… read more

SD West 2008 wrap-up

March 08 2008

If observation is the first stage of scientific discovery, watching what people are doing in a field will tell you what the academics and theorists will write about in a few years. By this reasoning, SD West and SD Best Practices are important bellwethers for programming theory, even though there's little theoretical about… read more

iPhone toolkits: complementary development and O'Reilly coverage

March 07 2008

The Apple SDK bears a considerable resemblance to the open source SDK, but naturally has some differences. It's quite possible Apple will undo some of the changes and bring their toolkit closer to the open one. Regardless of which SDK you plan on using, you will find Jonathan Zdziarski 's iPhone Open Application Development valuable, in… read more

Android Code Day: gateway to a new kind of application

February 23 2008

Google's new operating system, Android, is not just a comprehensive runtime for mobile applications. Nor is it just a rapid application development platform for such applications. In addition to these things, I see Android as a redefinition of what interactive applications... read more
Andy Oram