Is there anything quite as disturbing as a close-up of a puckered-up camel?

This is the first time we’ve ever seen one of the animals actually doing their job. O’Reilly only publishes a few books a month, so the cover models have a lot of downtime. But as you can see, the photo-shoots can be brutal.

As I mentioned last week, Randy got me the first 4 strips with our new character, Gwen, last Friday. Gwen’s going to be our first regularly occurring human character, and you’ll see your first sight of her in 3 more weeks.

I’ll be posting next week’s strip from OSCON, spirits willing and the dam don’t break. Hopefully, the promised Internet connectivity in the hotel will really be there. It may post a bit earlier than the normal midnight time, because I’ll be on west coast time and don’t feel like waiting until 3AM.

Don’t stay up too late yourself checking out this week’s Linux News, which follows.

Everyone getting their bags packed and minds sharpened for OSCON? Your humble editor will be making the pilgrimage to Portland for the first time, and I’m looking forward to meeting some of the OFOW* authors and readers there. I’m looking forward to a great time! I’ll even try to get in some conference blogging while I’m there.

Meanwhile, we had three cool articles last week. Jack Herrington finished off his two-part series on Google Gears, the big thing right now in offline browser application development.

On a more database-oriented note, Giuseppe Maxia introduced us to MySQL Proxy, a man-in-the-middle intercept tool for MySQL that lets you do all sorts of creative things to a SQL request on the fly.

And Howard Feldman decided to go old school, and show us how to do a few cool tricks in JavaScript without using one of these fancy-shmancy JavaScript frameworks.

Comic strip over, it must be time for blogs. For those who like to live on the edge, Adriano Ferreira announced the next bleeding-edge release of Perl.

We use it every day (well, a lot of us do), but do you ever stop a moment to think about how much we owe to GCC? chromatic did.

Noah Gift thinks that there must be a lot of really cool Python code that’s hiding inside corporate applications, and would love to know about it. Not to mention a new ORM called Storm.

And then Jeremy Jones, Noah’s partner in crime on a new Python book, had more (and yet more to say about Storm).

And then he continued with a Python recipe of the week, showing off pyline, which lets you pipe output through a Python syntax-based translation.

Andy Oram dropped in to discuss IBM’s relaxation of licensing requirements for its royalty-free patents (brief synopsis: There aren’t any now).

We sometimes forget that blog is short for web log, and started out as a place to list cool web sites. Noah Gift didn’t forget, and has a blog about cool Python blogs.

Jeremy Jones had a dispatch from the field, saying that Pownce is based on Django. He also told me that the thrush sings at midnight and that orange ostriches seldom fly. I can say no more…

In another of chromatic’s many series (he makes Robert Jordan look like a piker), he had a review of the App::SVNBinarySearch CPAN module.

And Nitesh Dhanjani has a little ditty with the reassuring title of “Not for the Faint of Heart: Multiple Exploits Affecting Firefox, IE, Netscape, and Trillian.” Makes you feel all snuggly and warm, doesn’t it?

Continuing our rounds, chromatic made an appearance over in the DevCenter as well, wondering if porting open source applications to Windows is really a Good Thing.

And Juliet Kemp, queen of DevCenter, has another handy little script that automatically installs updates for apt-using systems via cron.

It was the Ruby blog’s turn to be pretty quiet this week, with Gregory Brown announcing the June Ruby Spotlight winner, Sequel.

And pointing the way to a one-click Ruby installer for OS X.

This week the database and sysadmin blogs were ominously quiet, but never fear! I’ve had a slew of new bloggers joining the club who should start posting soon. And next week, we’ve got two fascinating articles on the way. Adam Turoff continues his introduction to Haskell with a look at Pure Functions, and Jack Herrington has an introduction to using Flex with PHP, which is perversely running AFTER his article about building sites using Flex and PHP. These things happen… Plus blogs, blogs, blogs!

* The ONLamp Family of Websites, Peace is Our Profession

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