It’s a good thing that Cat5 cable and pythons aren’t cross-fertile, otherwise you might end up with wiring that spontaneously reconnected itself whenever it felt bored. Not to mention trying to strangle the sysadmins when they walk by.

Randy has promised me I’ll be seeing the first strips with Gwen on Friday. Who’s Gwen? Wouldn’t you like to know… You’ll have to wait until early August to find out, because we have 3 more strips to work through before we get to them.

If you come to OSCon, you’ll get a chance to try to get me drunk and weedle hints out of me. You’ll also be able to pick up some cool Watering Hole swag, including bookmarks and coasters. And there will be 7 Watering Hole T-shirts to give away (out of only 11 total that exist in the entire world.) Look for me wearing one of the other 4…

There’s no information about Gwen in this week’s Linux news, but there’s enough other goodies to keep you happy. Read on for all the details.

A slightly off-topic rant to start the newsletter this week.

<rant>As a copyright holder myself, I respect the rights of other copyright holders to earn a fair living off their works. I even agree, in principle, that people should pay for the music they own (once, with the rights to do whatever they want with it). But, as this article in Florida Today notes, the music mafia (and using that term is an insult to organized crime…) has begun shaking down coffeehouses who have performers that sing copyrighted songs. One bar owner was allegedly shaken down because he had Monday Night Football playing in his bar, and “Are You Ready For Some Football” is copyrighted.

At one point the U.K. equivalent of ASCAP/BMI even attempted to bully a guitar shop into paying its copyright protection money, claiming that if people played copyrighted music while trying the instruments, the shop needed to pony up a royalty.

I have to ask, what will be next? Mind reading technology developed so that people thinking about a copyrighted piece of music can be forced to pay?
Gangs of RIAA militia accosting people in the streets because they were humming “My Humps?” There is a balance between protecting the rights of the copyright holder and acting like a bunch of jack-booted thugs, and the music industry entered the latter realm several years ago.</rant>

Meanwhile, in the enlightened world of the OFOW,* we’ll try to avoid incurring any royalty payments while going over this week’s activities. One article addresses a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time: just what a Linux device driver looks like on the inside. Valerie Henson did an excellent job showing how to do a “Hello World” example using three different approaches.

Kake Pugh has been involved in the OpenGuides project, which provides a software infrastructure for developing city information-based wikis. It’s written entirely in Perl, and Kake shows a bunch of code snippets that, among other things, filter wiki spam.

Tom Adelstein leads off the blogs this week with an essay on how to be a successful technical writer.

SpamAssassin is one of the Good Guys leading the fight against Viagra ads and pleas for assistant from African government ministers. So, chromatic took a moment to say thanks.

We all know that the iPhone is the trendy tech toy of the moment, but Noah Gift has a review of the latest fetish item from Apple, from the perspective of a programmer.

We’ve been hearing the technology X is going to be the Microsoft killer forever. So chromatic thought it might be interesting to sample the opinions of some O’Reilly editors as to its current relevance.

Next, he had an interesting discussion of Agile development, and a recent survey of what Agile practices are actually adopted. Love it or hate it, Agile is the flavor of the week.

Turning from the sublime to the ridiculous, Jonathan Wellons ended the ONLamp portion of our blogging this week with a useful tutorial on what to do if your Roomba suddenly decides to throw off the oppressive chains of floor sweeping.

Carla Schroder has a pointer to an article that lays out the current state of the art in Linux photography support.

And if you’ve got any experience running a Jabber service under Linux, Juliet Kemp would love to hear from you.

Gregory Brown is looking for something too, a nomination for a July Ruby Spotlight project.

And Nick Sutterer tells us about Apotomo, a widget library for Rails.

Anton Chuvakin has his security tip of the week, why you should make your logfiles available to your security team.

And he has 11 good reasons that you (or somebody) should be taking a good look at them.

Next week, there are three dynamite articles on the way. The second half of Jack Herrington’s series on “The Power of Google Gears,” Guiseppe Maxia’s colorful introduction to MySQL Proxy (yes, you can get your machine vmstats by running a SQL query!), and the beginning of an introduction to advanced JavaScript from Howard Feldman. Plus all the blogs you can handle!

* The ONLamp Family of Web Sites, not chosen as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World…

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