In the interest of full disclosure, I’m writing these words on a laptop using Windows Vista Ultimate. I’d use the Ubuntu partition on the same drive, but GoToMyPC runs better under Windows, and at the end of the day I’m a pragmatist. The right tool for the right job.

To be honest, the biggest two annoyances I’ve had so far with Vista is that it’s painfully slow to boot, and seems to practically need to ask my permission every time it paints a pixel on the screen. And that Second Life doesn’t run very well on it…

Hopefully, you won’t find any annoyances in the week’s Linux News, which follows.

Is there anything quite as disturbing as a close-up of a puckered-up camel?

This is the first time we’ve ever seen one of the animals actually doing their job. O’Reilly only publishes a few books a month, so the cover models have a lot of downtime. But as you can see, the photo-shoots can be brutal.

As I mentioned last week, Randy got me the first 4 strips with our new character, Gwen, last Friday. Gwen’s going to be our first regularly occurring human character, and you’ll see your first sight of her in 3 more weeks.

I’ll be posting next week’s strip from OSCON, spirits willing and the dam don’t break. Hopefully, the promised Internet connectivity in the hotel will really be there. It may post a bit earlier than the normal midnight time, because I’ll be on west coast time and don’t feel like waiting until 3AM.

Don’t stay up too late yourself checking out this week’s Linux News, which follows.

It’s a good thing that Cat5 cable and pythons aren’t cross-fertile, otherwise you might end up with wiring that spontaneously reconnected itself whenever it felt bored. Not to mention trying to strangle the sysadmins when they walk by.

Randy has promised me I’ll be seeing the first strips with Gwen on Friday. Who’s Gwen? Wouldn’t you like to know… You’ll have to wait until early August to find out, because we have 3 more strips to work through before we get to them.

If you come to OSCon, you’ll get a chance to try to get me drunk and weedle hints out of me. You’ll also be able to pick up some cool Watering Hole swag, including bookmarks and coasters. And there will be 7 Watering Hole T-shirts to give away (out of only 11 total that exist in the entire world.) Look for me wearing one of the other 4…

There’s no information about Gwen in this week’s Linux news, but there’s enough other goodies to keep you happy. Read on for all the details.

Sonoma County is not only the corporate home of O’Reilly, but also one of the world’s most famed wine regions. It’s a bit of hyperbole to say that they never get storms, but the climate tends to be quite mild.

In reality, the state of the wiring closet with Pye tangled up in it is a pretty good representation of most closets I’ve seen without a python tangled up in them. Every closet starts out nice and neat, everything labeled and all the wires in channels and twist-tied. This lasts about a day, until the first change, at which point expediency always overrides order

While we wait for Pye to make his moves of a sexy bunch of LAN cabling, here’s some equally sexy Linux News