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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 […]

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 […]

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!

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]