Welcome to week two of The Watering Hole, and an introduction to some of our cast. Pearl went to the trouble of introducing herself, you should know her from one of the most famous O’Reilly covers; the bird is Philip, the PHP eagle; and the snake is Pye, the Python… well, python. Specifically, an African Rock Python. Also appearing is Cecilia the Cow, one of the old-timers like Pearl, who graces the C Pocket Reference

I’ve always thought that it’s kind of unfair that Linux, Apache and MySQL all get a letter to themselves, while all three of the “p” languages have to compete for the last letter. If you’ve ever been in a room with a bunch of passionate p[ython|erl|hp] programmers, you’ll have no trouble recognizing the spirit of impassioned advocacy that is symbolized in the third panel.

Next week, peace? If the Protestants and Catholics can get along in Northern Ireland, maybe these three have a chance as well. As always, click on “Continue Reading” to read this week’s ONLamp Linux Newsletter

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LINUX NEWS FROM O’REILLY NETWORK
The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

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Good morrow, gentles. Prithee, doest thou require news of the day, of that most wonderful of operating systems which doth bear the sign of the flightless Antarctic bird? Wouldst thou know what hath transpired for yon these seven days, of the written comments of our most insightful bloggers?
Then hearken, for this be your weekly Linux Newsletter.

First off, news so big I can’t leave it ’til the end of the newsletter.
You’ve heard about it, you’ve gotten sick of me promising it would be coming Any Time Now. And now, it is here, a day you will want to remember so that you can tell your grandchildren about it. Yes, ring the church bells and let the doves fly, the comic strip has launched!

Ok, maybe it’s not world peace, but it is a new weekly webcomic that we hope will at least mildly entertain you (this, I’m told, is called lowering expectations…) Check out the first episode of “The Watering Hole,” titled “The Savannas of Sebastopol.” If you don’t find it enjoyable, simple returned the unused portion for a full refund. New strips every Thursday!

Meanwhile, despite this earth-shaking news, life proceeded apace on the ONLamp Family of Web sites (OFOW). Two new articles this week, the first of which is Federico Biancuzzi’s latest pre-released OpenBSD interview, a series he’s well know for. This time around, it’s the 4.1 release approaching, and Frederico made sure to ask all the right questions of all the right developers.

Zachary Kessin took a more reflective attitude, at least as far as PHP goes. His article, “Code As Data: Reflection in PHP,” shows how you can use the relatively new reflection functionality in PHP to, among other things, produce automated unit tests.

In blog-land, O’Reilly editor Andy Oram is looking for some people who have prepared and filed actual patent applications.

chromatic suggested that it’s time to break the perceived connection between math and computer science, a position I’ve held for a long time.

Short but sweet, Jonathan Wellons ponders a trend he’s seen, geeks working out. Is the skinny, pasty-faced developer a thing of the past?

Dave Cross reports that free Perl training will be available in London on June 2nd.

chromatic returns to talk about the idea of replacing abstract base classes in Python with traits and roles.

Over in DevCenter, Caitlyn Martin mentions rx320, a package for Linux that lets you tune a shortwave radio.

Juliet Kemp offers some pointers on what can go wrong with Linux sound, and how to fix it.

chromatic, the man of a thousand blogs, questions the wisdom of porting Microsoft’s Silverlight to Linux.

Finally, Brian K. Jones takes some time to consider why books targeted at system administrators may be on the way out. His idea? Sysadmins are becoming coders.

In the coming week, we have the following articles coming up. Gregory Brown will complete his two-part tour of the Rails persistence layer, “Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails.”
George Belotsky will be “Rethinking the Linux Distribution,” and Bill Lubanovic will show us how to doll up an application in “A Web Makeover with jQuery.”

Until then, enjoy the spring while it lasts, and did I mention we have a new comic strip?

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