Hurley's World

Visit the O'Reilly booth (#2210) at Macworld in San Francisco, January 5-9! We'll have a dynamic lineup of entertaining talks and will be offering a 30% discount on timely new Mac and digital media titles during the conference. We'll also have goodies, and a raffle drawing. View the complete schedule of author presentations.

Can Digg increase your overall audience growth? It could, but it's usually a long and painful process.

I'll be speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York (Jan 5 - 9).

The bz2 module is an interface for the bzip2 library, used to compress data for storage or transmission.

In which the author recounts his adventures getting an IPv6 tunnel hooked up to his home network.

Is Digg Sexist? No. Is the community it attracts "sexist"? Likely. This post is a response to the recent criticism, a diagnosis, and a prescription for future collaborative filtering evolution. The problem with the current iteration of collaborative filters is that they don't account for more than one dominant preference cluster.

After eight years in business California-based MadTux, an online retailer specializing in systems preloaded with Linux, has closed.

My New Year's Resolution for this year is simple: practice. You don't have to achieve (or even aim for) total mastery for the practice to be worthwhile.

The Internet is still broken, but no more broken than normal. The risk level is acceptable for the average user, even though if a single user were being targeted, there's a good chance an attack would be successful. This is how it's always been. Let's go back to our lives.

When I was in Boston this last September I was fortunate enough to be introduced to John Werner, one of the founders of http://citizenschools.org/, by John Palfrey who thought I could be helpful in helping John achieve success with Citizen Schools on the Web 2.0 front. John has a chance to make it in front of President-elect Barack Obama and Congress, but he needs your help. Please take a moment to learn more.

I tried a little experiment in 2008: living smaller. I caught public transport only. I got rid of extra lightbulbs. I baked my own bread. I froze my own dumplings. I didn't buy any gadget. I didn't buy any CD. I didn't get a flatscreen TV. No home phone; no home internet; no cable TV; no new art; no gin.

Let’s get this out of the way first thing. It’s Mah-tay, not M-eight. Like the drink, the creators of Mate, Nahuel Faronda and Laura Arguello, come from Argentina. If you’ve never tried Mate (the drink), you should - it’s tasty....

In my last post I talked about how anybody with enough money (a small 6-figure sum) could create a rogue certification authority (CA). This would allow them to generate certificates for any web site that seem to be genuine. That...

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In this interview Mike Mathieu, founder of Frontseat.org, discusses how he is helping to build “software for civic life”. Using publicly available data and web services (many of their applications use S3 and EC2) Frontseat creates simple, highly functional tools like Walkscore (rating neighborhood walkability) and Countmore (helping students in the recent elections decide which state to cast their...

Programmers know the impact that design patterns have had on designing and coding. Could patterns have just as strong an impact on people taking action in their communities? That's the thrust of the patterns published at the Public Sphere Project. The most fleshed-out patters are now published in the book Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution by the initiator of the project, Douglas Schuler.

Any major changes to the way we establish trust are probably too big to actually happen. That leaves the Internet fundamentally broken.

Scott Berkun, the bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, discusses how innovators and inventors get their ideas in Guy Kawasaki's popular new book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.