Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, founder and publisher of Make: magazine, and co-founder of Maker Faire. Dale has been honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change." He's been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, including founding O'Reilly Media, Inc. with Tim O'Reilly. Prior to Make, he was the developer of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in 1995. He was also developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999. Dale was publisher of the O'Reilly Network and he developed the Hacks series of books. He is the author of sed & awk.
Maker Faire Opens Saturday
Maker Faire is here again, our fourth annual event in the Bay Area. Once again, you just won't believe how much there is to see and do at Maker Faire. Makers were busy today setting up on Friday. In the morning, we had 400 kids visit the fairgrounds for a backstage tour and a chance to spend time with dozens…
The Sizzling Sound of Music
Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most? Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's presentation had a slide titled: "Live, Memorex or MP3." He…
Capturing the Knowledge of Mill-Wrights
Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel so called because water pours on top of the wheel, directed there by a long "flume" that brings water from a nearby pond. The…
Big Mo' and The Bears
If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling up scores suddenly becomes tentative and defensive, as was the case with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game, even though they held on to…
Admiring Bill Gates
Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why. This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates…
Clever Emoticarolers App
Open the door and smiley-face carolers sing a song that you can customize and send to others. That's the emoticarolers concept, worked up by Jason Striegel, our Hackszine editor, who leads the development side of things for Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis. The team created this clever holiday "text-to-sing" promotion for Yahoo Messenger at emoticarolers.com. A custom Make carol is here….
The Visible Hand
I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon. As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?…
Annals of the Patently Absurd
Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments." Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666 A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in…
What A Tiger Can Do
This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in sports. Late Saturday afternoon, I began watching Tiger fight his…
Hurrah for Home Chemistry
Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and experimentation. Nothing quite embodies the practice of science like a…