File this under books I didn’t know O’Reilly published.

Uncle Eli’s Passover Haggadah

Everyone will love this delightful children’s Haggadah. Its beautiful illustrations and enchanting rhymes will transform your traditional Seder into a magical experience, while capturing the hearts and imagination of your children and sleepy relatives. Awaken the senses in every ho-humming child at the Seder table with Uncle Eli’s Passover Haggadah.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

I relate to such sentiments in a whole new way (now that I work for O’Reilly).

Tim Bray: O’Reilly books unfortunately were harmed in its making

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

I would like a Firefox Extension that allows me to:

1. View Source in New Tab (View Rendered Sources comes close, but I don’t need all the rendered gunk)
2. Toggle between whether a tab renders the HTML source or displays the raw HTML source. Presumably with a right-click “View Source in Tab” option. Then something like “View Rendered HTML in Tab” to toggle back. An ability to see the rendered JavaScript would be nice too.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Back when I was developing applications with Microsoft Access, one of my favorite reference books–that I often described as being worth its weight in gold–was the Access Cookbook. I actually learned VBA by going through the chunks of code in the book that were geared towards addressing common problems.

So I was tickled this afternoon when I stumbled upon Gastronomy for Geeks, the O’Reilly Community Cookbook.

An O’Reilly cookbook with actual recipes.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Every morning I head west on 9th Street in Santa Rosa to Stony Point and then get on Occidental Road all the way to Sebastopol.

The 15 or so minute commute to O’Reilly could be considered one of the perks of the job. Once I’m on Occidental (a word which means “western” as opposed to oriental, which means “eastern”) and pass the last big housing development on the west side of Santa Rosa, I find myself literally in farm country. Or wine country.

I pass at least one winery on the way, Hanna Winery, and what seems like several vineyards, row after row of grape vines on rolling hills. I also go over the Laguna de Santa Rosa, which I know very little about other than what I’ve just read at the website above (apparently it’s the largest freshwater wetland complex in coastal Northern California). I hear it’s also popular among birders.

All this was true this morning, until I turned onto 116 heading toward O’Reilly and noticed a pungent, displeasing smell. Like I had literally evacuated myself. Like I had driven through rancid dogdoo which had somehow coated my car’s ventilation intake.

Usually these things pass, and I’m reassured that I haven’t actually run over someone’s pooper scooper. Except that after I parked and got out of the car, the smell was even worse. It was all around. Someone, somewhere has fertilized something and my beautiful idyllic commute was punctuated with a little too much pastoral reality.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.