Poor Pearl, she would have been better off claiming to work for the cigarette industry. Although there are certainly any number of open-source-friendly legislators in Washington, there are also any number that keep the interests of their deep-pocketed corporate campaign contributing corporations in mind. Richard Stallman’s recent trip to Cuba probably didn’t help Pearl’s cause much, nor did the fact that she’s clearly of Middle-Eastern extraction…

Thankfully, you can sit safe at home, free from Congressional witch-hunts, and read this week’s ONLamp news!

Just as The Godfather and The Sopranos have forever associated Italian-Americans with organized crime, Joe Camel has put a stain on all honest, hard-working ungulates. Pearl, of course, would never condone smoking for anyone, especially children. For one thing, it can mucks up hard disk drives, especially those old Century Data removables. But I’m dating myself…

I’ll be at the first Ignite! Boston on Thursday the 31st of May. Drop by and say hi if you’re a fan of the strip. And now, on to this week’s ONLamp news…

Welcome to week three of The Savanna-Wide Wrestling Federation The Watering Hole. Believe it or not, next week plot is actually advanced! We’ve got the story arc written and drawn out through week 14 now, so I can say with authority that there’s some fun stuff ahead, IMHO.

If you happen to be in the Boston area, I’ll be at Ignite! Boston on the 31st of May, 2007. I’ll be the guy in the Watering Hole t-shirt (gotta love Cafe Press…) Of course, once The Watering Hole takes its place among the greats of the webcomic world, they’ll probably be available through O’Reilly. Hubris, what’s that?

Click on Read More for your dose of ONLamp news for the week

Welcome to week two of The Watering Hole, and an introduction to some of our cast. Pearl went to the trouble of introducing herself, you should know her from one of the most famous O’Reilly covers; the bird is Philip, the PHP eagle; and the snake is Pye, the Python… well, python. Specifically, an African Rock Python. Also appearing is Cecilia the Cow, one of the old-timers like Pearl, who graces the C Pocket Reference

I’ve always thought that it’s kind of unfair that Linux, Apache and MySQL all get a letter to themselves, while all three of the “p” languages have to compete for the last letter. If you’ve ever been in a room with a bunch of passionate p[ython|erl|hp] programmers, you’ll have no trouble recognizing the spirit of impassioned advocacy that is symbolized in the third panel.

Next week, peace? If the Protestants and Catholics can get along in Northern Ireland, maybe these three have a chance as well. As always, click on “Continue Reading” to read this week’s ONLamp Linux Newsletter

Hello and welcome to The Watering Hole. Randy and I are glad you dropped in, and hope you’ll make this a regular stop! At the moment, the schedule is to update the strip every Thursday, you can subscribe to the RSS link on this page to be notified of new strips.

For those of you who might not know, Sebastopol, California is the location of O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters, right in the middle of the Sonoma County wine country. It’s a pretty campus, with buildings spread out rather than up, nothing is over 2 stories high, as I recall.

Elsewhere around ONLamp, there’s a lot of good stuff to see, as usual For more, here’s this week’s Linux Newsletter!

Good evening Mister and Missus Open Source, and all the ships at sea. This is your plucky Linux reporting, bringing all the news of the day (or at least all of it that happened in the ONLamp Family of Websites.) We begin our panorama of stories with three fast-breaking articles in the news this week.

DATELINE: Washington. The House Committee on irresponsible network administrators opened a hearing today into lax DNS practices. Those testifying could have used a look at Ron Aitchison’s article on ‘Five Basic Mistakes Not to Make in DNS’. From making sure to reverse-map your private address space to checking your domain for lame delegation, this article can serve as a model to domains everywhere!

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2007/04/26/5-basic-mistakes-not-to-make-in-dns.html