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Writing and Editing Technical Books for O'Reilly
Monday, July 25, 2005
On August 11th, I'm going to be speaking to STC-Carolina, the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. My session is titled "Writing and Editing Technical Books for O'Reilly". As an author, one of the most frequent questions I get is: How do you become an author? In this session I'll cover that and more including my tips on what makes a book successful and the art of engineering Amazon. This is a different, less technical kind of topic than I usually present so I'm looking forward to it.
Going to Foo Camp
Thursday, July 21, 2005
I've been invited to Foo Camp (Foo = Friends of O'Reilly) for the second straight year. I had a great time last year and it is neat to see so many big names in technology in one place. Only 150 people are invited which makes for an intimate setting. On the FooCampers page I recognize some names from last year along with some new ones. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to present, but I have a few ideas brewing. I hope someone is bringing a football again!
Cover for Windows XP Cookbook
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
My editor just sent me the cover for my latest book, Windows XP Cookbook ( Amazon), which is due out in August. The animal for this book is a garter snake. So far I've had a house cat, tuna, raven, baboon, and garter snake don the covers for my five O'Reilly books. Quite an assortment! 
Learning the Piano
Saturday, July 16, 2005
In school I never participated in band. I never played a musical instrument. I was too busy with sports (playing four different ones will keep you busy). But I always had a yearning to play an instrument. My mom was always partial to piano although she never learned to play. Early on I was more interested in drums, but over time I started to get interested in piano. When I lived in California I bought a nice digital upright Yamaha piano. I even took a few lessons, but since it was during the Internet boom, work consumed all of my free time. This summer, I dusted the piano off and promised myself I'd have another go at it. This morning I attended a class by Scott Houston - The Piano Guy at UNC-TV. Scott is well known for his PBS special a couple of years ago. Scott's method is different from most traditional piano teachers. He teaches you to play like professional players do, not the classical style. Turns out there is a big difference. Long story short (too late), Scott teaches the chord style of piano where you play chords with your left hand and a melody with your right. He also showed us how to read lead sheets which are MUCH easier to read than traditional music notation. I bought a Fake Book so I'm ready to roll. Scott did a great job dispelling the myth that piano playing is like rocket science or requires years of agnozing classes. It is all about playing music you like not fingering the keys perfectly. His class was great and he was very entertaining.
Microsoft 2005 MVP Global Summit
Friday, July 15, 2005
I missed out on the Microsoft MVP Summit last year, but this year I'm going to go. It has been a while since I've seen many of my fellow Directory Services MVPs -- probably the last DEC conference I spoke at in 2004 when I was horribly sick. This year's Summit looks to be interesting. I'll have to miss a couple of classes at MIT, but I'm sure it will be worth it. I'm going to stay at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue courtesy of Microsoft. If you are a MVP and planning to go, let me know!
Converted to Blogger
Sunday, July 10, 2005
For a while now I've been wanting to make this page Blogger-generated. I created the rallenhome site from scratch back in 2003, before I really knew what I was going to use it for. This front page has turned into my personal blog for writing/public speaking/misc topics. I was using FrontPage to create new entries before manually uploading them to the site. Using Blogger is much easier. I had to create my own template that looked like the old page, which wasn't hard. It took a little time to import some of my most recent blog entries. I'll probably add the RSS feed back to the site now that it will be auto-generated. And each entry has a comments option. Well worth the time.
Active Directory Cookbook in Laura's Top 10
Saturday, July 09, 2005
The always enjoyable Laura Hunter, a fellow MVP and author, told me that Active Directory Cookbook made her Bookpool top 10 favorite book list. That's very nice of her. I'm looking forward to reading her recently released Active Directory Field Guide. Maybe it will give me some ideas for the second edition of AD Cookbook which I should have already started!
First patent issued
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
I received news today that the first patent I submitted at Cisco back in 2001 was "issued" with the USPTO. It is patent #6,915,309 - "Automatically generating replication topology information for use by a directory service." In a nutshell, a colleague and I developed an algorithm that interrogates routers and creates a network topology that can be used for, among other things, automating the process of maintaining a replication topology for directory services. This is especially useful in the context of Active Directory environments. The algorithm turns out to be quite complicated (was over 15 pages if I recall) in order to handle all the special cases that arise in networks. Our implementation was tailored to Cisco's internal network (which is probably one of the more complex ones around), but the patent applies more generically. I have mixed feelings on this patent because many companies have approached me about wanting to use the process, but I've had to turn them away because it is Cisco proprietary.
Exchange Server Cookbook available
Sunday, July 03, 2005
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The highly anticipated Exchange Server Cookbook is now available in stores (including Amazon). This is the first O'Reilly Windows Admin Cookbook that I didn't author. I changed hats for this book and served as the primary developmental editor. This was the third book I've edited. An editor is part project manager, part technical reviewer, part grammarian, and part content designer. I enjoy doing it.
The three authors for Exchange Server Cookbook are Exchange MVPs and well-known in the Exchange community. We had an all-star line-up of tech reviewers which also included numerous MVPs. We have high expectations for this book.
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