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

Starting, as always, with articles, you had your pick of interesting topics to choose from. You could learn about “Migrating Web-Based PHP Applications to Ajax” from Bill Lubanovic:

Gregory Brown finished his two-parter on the Rails ActiveRecord persistence framework. Look for more Rails articles from Gregory in the near future.

Completing our trilogy of geekdom, George Belotsky had a thought and discussion provoking essay asking if Linux distributions need to reflect more of the industry trend toward Software as a Service.

Blog, blog, blogs, blogs… So many that I’ll be brief in my summaries this week.

Nitesh Dhanjani on a pleasant dealing with Apple’s Security contact:

chromatic gives a big shout out to Linuxfest NW:

Andy Oram discusses the germination of a Chinese hacker community:

The Perl Foundation has grants to give out, Curtis Poe gives a pointer to the application.

He also discusses the shortage of good Perl programmers:

BRAND NEW blogger Adriano Ferreira has a profile of the Textile markup language:

Andy Oram returns to talk about the influence of the OLPC project on desktop Linux:

Adriano made the most of his first week blogging, with a summary of upcoming Perl 5 changes.

Jeremy Jones talks about the Python Cheese Shop. It’s a bit runny, though…

Jonathan Wellons offers a streamlined way to use Google:

Your Humble Editor finished out the week lambasting Microsoft for its patent FUD maneuver.

Over at LinuxDevCenter, chromatic discusses what interoperability really means:

And Juliet Kemp suggests that backing up your root partition might be a good idea.

Giuseppe Maxia talks about ways to hack the MySQL log tables, over in the Databases blog:

And finishing out This Week in Blogs, Gregory Brown wonders if Ruby is a viable language to use to teach programming in schools:

THIS WEEK: Ryan Bagueros will give us an article sharing his experiences running geographically distributed software development, and Bill Walton starts a new series, “Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails.”

Do you have a better format you’d like to suggest for this newsletter? We can’t use HTML/Flash/Morse code, but if you think you know a way to make it more readable, please feel free to send it along to me. Notes telling me the current format sucks without a constructive alternative will incur the wrath of the Gods…