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In the interest of full disclosure, I’m writing these words on a laptop using Windows Vista Ultimate. I’d use the Ubuntu partition on the same drive, but GoToMyPC runs better under Windows, and at the end of the day I’m a pragmatist. The right tool for the right job.

To be honest, the biggest two annoyances I’ve had so far with Vista is that it’s painfully slow to boot, and seems to practically need to ask my permission every time it paints a pixel on the screen. And that Second Life doesn’t run very well on it…

Hopefully, you won’t find any annoyances in the week’s Linux News, which follows.

For those of you who haven’t read the final Harry Potter novel, I present the following anti-spoilers:

  • Voldemort is NOT driven insane when Harry replaces his wand with a new one running Vista for Wands 2007.
  • Ron and Hermione do NOT discover the secret to destroying the Death Eaters while reading obscure kernel source code comments.
  • Dumbledore does NOT return from the dead when his soul is found running on a Beowulf cluster in the Ministry of Magic.
  • The Daily Prophet does NOT assign Rita Skeeter to discover the true identity of Groklaw editor Pamela Jones.

    • While none of these things occurs in the Deathly Hallows, the following events did in fact occur this week on the OFOW*

    Flex is Adobe’s next-generation rich browser (i.e., Flash) framework. Jack Herrington gave us an introduction to the tool, by way of showing how it can be leveraged using PHP.

    And Adam Turoff had part two of his three part series on Haskell, a functional programming language. This time around he covered Pure Functions (which are functions without side effects).

    In the wonderful world of blogs, we start this week with the Sysadmin folks. Brian K. Jones is happy that the Python for Sysadmins book seems to be moving along nicely. He’s also working on new Python-related magazine.

    The Ruby blog was quiet this week, as was the Database blog. Come on guys, make some noise! But over in the Linux DevCenter, chromatic had more thoughts about the pragmatism of open source software running on proprietary platforms.

    We also welcome a new blogger to the DevCenter, Kevin Farnham has been writing for the O’Reilly Network for a while, but now you’ll be able to read his insightful thoughts in blog form as well.

    What is chromatic’s hot number one hit of the week? GDB!

    Andy Oram has been doing research on open source documentation and support. His latest report is on how to make mailing lists more effective.

    Do you know why you should fear XSRF? Nitesh Dhanjani does, and has some thoughts on why there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good automated tools to detect Cross Site Request Forgery.

    The kind of Lua that Adriano Ferreira talks about this week has nothing to do with grass skirts and roast pig, and everything to do with scripting. He lets us know about LuaPOD (Plain Old Documentation support for Lua) and Lpeg, a pattern matching library for Lua.

    Noah Gift is inviting you all to come to his house… Um, I mean come to the next PyAtl meeting. It sounds like a lot of cool stuff is going to be happening, if you happen to be in the Atlanta area.

    For those of us making the journey to Oregon this week for OSCON, chromatic mentions that there will be a “Beautiful Code” panel at Powell’s Technical Books nearby.

    And he finished out our blogging week by venting about the ridiculousness of expecting programming languages to be intuitive to new users.

    * The ONLamp Family of Websites, an official chapter of the Emma Watson Fan Club