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!

A happy Memorial Day Weekend to all of you living in the U.S.! Of course, you won’t be getting this until Tuesday, so it’s more of a “I hope you had a good Memorial Day Weekend,” but time is relative, right?

Everyone, be sure to come to Ignite Boston this Thursday. It doesn’t matter if you live in Kyoto, I’m going to expect every one of you to attend, and I’ll be taking names. There Will Be Consequences!

If you’re not in the states, but instead an inhabitant of the Continent, you might want to check out the upcoming GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference.

On to our roundup of the past seven days of fun and frolic on the OFOW.*

We begin with an introduction to functional programming, by way of the Haskell programming language. If you’ve only had experience with imperative programming languages (or if you don’t even know what an imperative programming language is), you owe it to yourself to check out Adam Turoff’s gentle guide.

Flex is Adobe’s answer to the platform-independent deployment environment question. But although the client-side may be handled using Flex, the backend still needs to be developed in a traditional environment. Jack Herrington uses a fictional YouTube clone as a way to demonstrate how PHP can serve as a server-side counterpart to Flex.

Finally, you may have learned semaphores years ago, or may have managed to go your entire career without ever having to use one. But even if you’re a semaphore pro, a good refresher can’t hurt. Vikram Shukla has a pretty comprehensive guide, including a comparison of POSIX and System V style semaphores.

Spencer Critchley led off the week in blogs with a pointer to a new book that provides a lot of missing information for Drupal users:

Andy Oram looked at how Splunk is mashing up its data to help sysadmins.

How do you keep geeks in your organization? Nitesh Dhanjani had some thoughts on the subject:

chromatic looks at coherence as an oft-overlooked feature of modern
DBMSi:

Jeremy Jones continued his reporting on the rewriting of the podgrapher utility.

Your humble narrator had some thoughts on Dell’s move to offer Linux-preinstalled systems.

Mr. Jones returned with a pointer to some pithy PyCon podcast (your tongue-twister of the week)

chromatic had two in a row, first mentioning that Microsoft is looking for an open source guru, and then reviewing the CPAN Pod::POM::Web module.

Over in DevCenter, Carla Schroder shared her experiences and frustrations with getting Linux to print.

Juliet Kemp discussed how to automount removable devices under Debian:

And in the spirit of the three female Indy drivers this week, Caitlyn Martin completed our all woman DevCenter blogfest with some information on the Feisty Fawn release of Xubuntu.

In databaseland, Roland Bouman debunked a common myth about the GROUP_BY
clause:

Brian K. Jones shares his path to sysadminosity over in the SysAdmin
blogs:

We end this week in the Ruby Blogs, where Daniel Berger laments the lack of bind parameters in ActiveRecord:

And finally, Gregory Brown starts his Summer of Code reportage with a look at RubyLand.

Looking forward, always forward, never backward, we’ve got two articles upcoming this week. Federico Biancuzzi has another in his series of BSD interviews, this time looking at Rootkits. And Andrew Hanenkamp, tells us about a single sign-on solution for Jifty called CAS+.

Until next time, remember that no matter where you go, there you are, unless you’re time-traveling, in which case there you were.

* Still the ONLamp Family of Web Sites…

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com