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…

True parenthood is standing out in the pouring rain watching your kid play lacrosse. True geekdom is doing that in the morning, editing ONLamp articles all day, and writing this thing late Sunday night. To quote a certain Dr. Smith, “Oh, the pain, the pain…”

But we spare no expense here at the Linux Newsletter. Vestal Virgins hand-pick the bits from our lavish bit-fields to make up the characters that go into our articles and blogs. So here without further adieu, the week that was.

Ryan Bagueros has spent a lot of time managing software projects with team members scattered around the world. He distilled the wisdom he’s gathered into a dandy article titled “Tools for Geographically Distributed Software Development.”

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/05/17/tools-for-geographically-distributed-software-development.html

Bill Walton, meanwhile, began a new series that builds off his previous “Rolling with Rails” efforts. Time to dig out your pots and pans and do some “Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails. ” The first subject on the menu, migrations.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/05/17/cookin-with-ruby-on-rails—may.html

chromatic stared us off blogwise with a salute to NoScript, one of his favorite FireFox plugins.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/thank_you_noscript.html

Adriano Ferreira gave an excerpt of an interesting thread in the Perl world right now. Just why *do* lines end with semicolons?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/why_insisting_on_semicolons.html

Is any programming language truly immune from bad coding practices? Well, chromatic sez there’s no such beast.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/does_your_programming_language.html

Mike Hendrickson announces the upcoming Ignite! Boston. I’ll be there, giving a hopefully inflammatory talk titled “Less is More–Why the World Doesn’t Need Your Idea.” Come throw tomatoes.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/ignite_boston.html

chromatic, who evidently never sleeps, announces the latest release of Parrot.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/parrot_0412_of_the_caribbean_r.html

He also provided a handy checklist to determine if you’ve got a DSL or an API on your hands.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_is_it_a_dsl_or_an_api_ten.html

Rounding out the ONLamp blogs, Jeremy Jones discusses how he rewrote the Python-based podgrabber package.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/rewriting_podgrabber_part_1.html

Anton Chuvakin is mad, mad I say. He claims that anyone who has ever bought software must be.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/05/are_you_mad_are_we_all.html

Over in Rubyland, Gregory Brown announced the 1.0 release of Rupurt, his pride and joy.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/post_1.html

Curt Hibbs gives a pointer to a YouTube video that gives the Apple/PC ads a Ruby/Java spin.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/hilarious_adspoof_from_railsen.html

Finally, Mr. Brown returned at week’s end to announce that the Google Summer of Code will be reported on our own Ruby blog. Can’t wait to see what gets cooked up!

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/05/oreilly_ruby_will_cover_the_go.html

Also, there’s an event you should be aware of: the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference. If you are involved at all with content, media or publishing of some kind, you should check out the TOC Conference being held June 18-20 in San Jose, CA. Take a look at the keynotes, speakers list, and tutorials here:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc.

The speakers presenting at this conference are amazing. Be sure you catch Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) speak about “Free Culture and the Future of Publishing.” If you would like to attend, please reference this code and receive a special O’Reilly Network Member discount of 40% off: toc07orn

Upcoming this week (Lord willing and the dam don’t burst), an in-depth examination of Semaphores from Vikram Shulka, an introduction to the Haskell programming language from Adam Turoff, and a look at integrating Adobe’s Flex with PHP from Jack Herrington. Plus, a new comic and blogs a plenty. Right here at the OFOW*.

*ONLamp Family of Web Sites

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