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

DATELINE: India. Noted Yogi Iama Opensourcefantatic demonstrates his amazing abilities of meditation and self-reflection. He credits Zachary Kessin’s article, ‘Code As Data: Reflection in PHP’ with his supernatural abilities. Kessin shows how to use the reflection capabilities of PHP 5 and beyond to create automated test suites.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/04/26/code-as-data-reflection-in-php.html

DATELINE: Chicago. A rare total eclipse of the sun distracts patrons at this museum opening of priceless gemstones. Deepak Vohra is inspired by the event to write ‘Ruby on Rails Meets Eclipse’ Vohra takes the reader on an in-depth walkthrough of how to install the RDT and RadRails toolkits on the Eclipse IDE.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/04/26/ruby-on-rails-meets-eclipse.html

Ok, I’ve official exhausted my abilities to channel Walter Winchell, and now return you to your regularly scheduled newsletter. Your humble editor managed to ignite a bit of controversy this week with a ONLamp blog entry that offered a possible reason that the Microsoft development platform continues to be so popular. Is more choice a bad thing?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html

Staying with ONLamp, chromatic picked Wifi-Radar as his app-of-the-week in his continuing “Thank You” series.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/thank_you_wifiradar.html

Apart from raising hackles with my monoculture essay, I also saw an encouraging sign for desktop Linux during a local trip to a CompUSA to buy a new laptop. Detail in:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/two_signs_of_the_time_1.html

One of the benefits of being a leading technology publishers is that O’Reilly gets the inside dope on trends in geek book buying. Mike Henderson crunched the numbers, and doesn’t like the way that system administration seems to be heading:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/where_are_the_sys_admins.html

Jeremy Jones gives a useful pointer to where a growing library of audio and video from PyCon 2007 can be found:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/pycon_2007_videoaudio_update.html

brian d foy is calling for nominations for the yearly White Camel award, which honors non-technical achievement in perl.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/2007_white_camel_nomination_pr.html

And finally, chromatic has a pointer to an article on the availability of perl programmers in London, and a few thoughts of his own.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/more_on_recruiting_perl_progra.html

Juliet Kemp, patron saint of Linux DevCenter, walks us through how to resize your root partition on the fly, and wonders if the default 5GB value she’s been using is large enough anymore.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/repartitioning_on_the_fly_and.html

A busy, busy week on the Ruby blogs. Gregory Brown must not sleep much, as he had not one, not two, but four different blogs this week. He started off with a status report on Rupert, a Rails reporting engine.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/ruport_goes_rc1.html

The next day, he was back to blog on the Gotham Ruby Conference.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/gotham_ruby_conference_2007.html

Timothy M. O’Brien broken up his streak with a piece on Capistrano 2.0, which he argues is not just for Rails. Capistrano is a tool for automating remote system administration tasks. Or at least that’s what the web site says, I had never heard of it until Timothy mentioned it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/capistrano_20_not_just_for_rai.html

Gregory wasn’t a man to take this lying down. He struck back with an interview with Ruby Queue author Ara T. Howard, in his Digging Deep series.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/digging_deep_evil_packaging_tr.html

Finally, Mr. Brown shows us why a flakey system clock may cause camping to break, at least if the file you’re reloading has a mod date after the current time.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/campers_beware_of_time_warps.html

Niel M. Bornstein, usually a blogger in XML Land, has joined the SysAdmin team, and starts with an essay on data center automation.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/04/data_center_automation.html

Looking ahead, three articles to choose from this Thursday (you did know that ONLamp articles run on Thursdays, didn’t you?) My trusty Rails-based tracking system shows Tom Adelstein on the radar with a piece entitled ‘The Top 7 Things Sysadmins Forget to Do’. OpenBSD fanatics can look forward to Federico Biancuzzi interview with key OpenBSD developers on the upcoming 4.1 release. And Kevin Bedell looks at techniques for managing and working with truly huge datasets.

ONLamp is always looking for new bloggers! If you have a unique viewpoint on the topics we cover, we’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at turner@oreilly.com, with BLOGGER in the subject!

Wrapping up this week’s newsletter, and in a blatant attempt to build some viral internet buzz around the upcoming ONLamp comic strip, here’s a first public peek at ‘The Watering Hole’, exclusively for Linux Newsletter subscribers (and your relatives, and your coworkers, and your paper boy, and…) The strip is going to launch Any Day Now.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/images/RejectedCover.png

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