If you’re wondering what a steam locomotive is doing running through the center of the O’Reilly compound in Sebastopole, CA; the answer is simple. a wizard did it.

For those of you interested in pre-ordering Revenge in a Nutshell, it will be published on April 1st, 2008. However, be aware that possession of this book has been classified as a class-B felony in seven states.

Will Ruby escape her terrible fate? Will we manage to consistently spell Pearl’s name right from week to week? Will Watering Hole doodads be available at the O’Reilly booth at OSCON? For the answers to none of these questions, check out this week’s Linux News

Your browned and crispy editor (a weekend in the sun watching lacrosse games) reminds you that last week, he expressed a degree of uncertainty as to exactly what articles would run on the OFOW.* Well, as it turns out, we had a bumper crop at the last minute.

Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp completed his look at CAS+, which implements single sign-on under Jifty. In the second part of this two-parter, he looked more generally at what happens under the hood when an SSO request is made.

Andy Oram, meanwhile, had the results of a survey he conducted trying to determine why people volunteer to write documentation for open source projects, along with some analysis.

And rounding out our triumvirate of tech, Phil Crow used a holiday parable to illustrate how easy it is to write CRUD applications in a Perl framework called Gantry.

Technically, the ONLamp blog from Mike Hendrickson happened last week, but it snuck in after I had finished the newsletter. He looked at how open source book sales compare with proprietary technology sales at O’Reilly.

I had never heard of It’s All Text, but chromatic swears by this Firefox extension.

He also blogged on a new feature of of Perl 6 he added to the Perl 6 implementation in Parrot, which is intended to be an example of how to use Parrot’s compiler tools to write a programming language hosted on Parrot.

Andy Oram reported on the Linux Foundation Summit:

Caitlyn Martin reported on the back and forth posturing between Linus Torvalds and Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz of OpenSolaris and GPLv3:

Juliet Kemp provided a startup script for Condor (a distributed computing project) under Debian:

Curt Hibbs likes the fact that Ruby on Rails has strong international
interest:

And completing our summer-doldrums-shorted blogs for this week, Jim Alateras has a pointer to a nice tutorial on Rake:

*OnLamp Family of Web Sites