Good thing for Ruby that the WH universe is connected through a wormhole to the Dudely Do-Right one.

This week’s strip include a big shout-out to my main man, Illiad, over at UserFriendly. As all good webcomic aficionados should know, Columbia Internet (and it’s long-suffering tech support slave, Greg) is the setting for UserFriendly. I’ve been lucky enough to do business with Illiad when I was Senior Editor over at LinuxWorld Magazine, I arranged to reprint UF strips in the magazine. If this strip ends up being one tenth as funny as UF, I’ll be a contented man.

If contentment has slipped out of your fingers, maybe a dose of this week’s news from around the OFOW will help

Well, the longest day of the year is past us now, but because of that age-old paradox of nature, summer has hardly begun yet. Families are packing up their families to make a pilgrimage to <insert your favorite theme park here>, and parents are already counting the days until their bundles of joy will be out of their hair and returning to school. But after you convince daughter Susie that brother Carl really didn’t put an ancient Aztec curse on her, take a sec to unwind with some of our delightful OFOW* content.

Gregory Brown continued his exploration of all things Ruby and Rails. This time around, he offers a tutorial on how to gain access to the database capabilities of ActiveRecord without using the Rails scaffolding. Just because you’re not doing a full-blown Rails app doesn’t mean can’t use the cool toys.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from shiny new Rails, Philipp K. Janert reminded us that some of our old pals from way back in the Unix days can still bring useful functionality to the table. Pic may not be the fanciest ray-tracing textured mapped graphics package on the block, but there’s a lot you can do with it.

In da blog hood, my main man, Andy Oram, thinks that maybe one of you might be able to help discredit a bogus patent, now that the USPTO is finally letting people who know about the technologies in question review applications.

What made chromatic feel grateful this week? Callgrind! Why? Read!

If you want to know what was new and cool at the last Python Atlanta Group, you’ll have to ask Jeremy Jones. Or, just read his report.

As one of the committers on Struts 1.1, I like to think I know a little about the Model-View-Controller pattern. Curtis Poe would like to help educate those who don’t.

OSCON is coming up! I’ll be there, and the O’Reilly booth is even going to have a Watering Hole theme! But if you’re actually concerned with things like tutorials, chromatic knows what he wants to see and isn’t afraid to let us know.

brian d foy let us know that the summer edition of the Perl Review is out, and he’s looking for a few good writers.

It seems like Juliet Kemp has a useful recipe of some sort in the DevCenter. This week, she shows how to use an entry in /etc/aliases to create a mail gateway for the RT problem ticketing system.

We could use a few more bloggers in our database and sysadmin areas. If you think you have a unique viewpoint on either topic, get in touch with me and we’ll see if you have what it takes to join the elite corps of O’Reilly bloggers.

Until next time, keep the faith and stay cool! Unless you live in Australia, in which case, keep warm!

* If you don’t know yet that it stands for the ONLamp Family of Websites, you haven’t been paying attention.

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