At long last, a recurring human character appears! Meet Gwen, O’Reilly’s new geeky marketeer. As originally envisioned, Gwen was a very different character with different job responsibilities. She got tweaked during concept development into the form you see her now. I’ll be sticking some of Randy’s original concept art under the voting button in a week or two.

Don’t worry that the animals are being abandoned though. Gwen is a part of the Watering Hole universe, but only one member of our extended cast. Besides, opposable thumbs come in useful sometimes… Like for clicking the link to see this week’s ONLamp news.

Does anyone remember the movie “Sliding Doors?” The premise was that if Gwyneth Paltrow’s character hadn’t been delayed by missing a train, her entire life would have turned out differently. Well, if my wife and I hadn’t stopped for 5 minutes to get an iced coffee on our way to pick up my son from 4-H Survival Camp, we would have been there 3 minutes before he tripped over his bag waiting for us and broke his wrist, rather than 2 minutes after. To our credit, this was a 3-hour trip each way, so spending a few minutes to stretch our legs is forgivable. Nevertheless, if he grows up to be a force for evil rather than good because of this, you can blame Dunkin Donuts, not us…

While not learning all about Salter I fractures, I still managed to get you all some good stuff to read last week on the OFOW.* Adam Turoff completed his look at the Haskell programming language, focusing the last article on monads. Those rascally little fellows are how anything with a side effect gets executed in Haskell, and Adam had all the skinny!

On a more nuts and bolts level, I know I’ve always been curious about how to get sound in and out of a Linux box, from a programmatic standpoint. So, I asked John Littler to give us an overview of the process, and he was happy to oblige.

Blogwise, chromatic took a look at Haskell from the standpoint of a C developer.

Meanwhile, the options for e-commerce with Python were examined by Noah Gift.

Jeremy Jones points us to an article on the disfavor that email is undergoing among kids, and expands on the thought.

There was a lot of interest in an essay by JT Smith, who comes not to bury Perl, but to praise it.

Mike Hendrickson announced Ignite Boston 2; I’ll be there (hopefully), will you?

Next, chromatic wondered why people complain about code quality, when the quality of their written English is so bad.

Code galore was available in Jeremy Jones’ third installment of his continuing efforts to rewrite his podcast snarfer.

And Uche Ogbuji gave a shout-out to AuthKit, a Python tool for HTTP authentication.

Want a minimalist Linux desktop background? Caitlyn Martin has some advice for you.

Juliet Kemp has a cron script to keep your Google Desktop updating happily without too much spamming.

Caitlyn finished off the DevCenter blogs with a two-fer, both talking about VectorLinux.

Do you exist? A tricky metaphysical question, but Gregory Brown has a piece of Ruby that can answer it, at least for tests.

And Austin Zeigler needs someone to take over three Ruby packages he currently maintains. Any takers?

* ONLamp Family Of Web Sites: Always Fresh, Never Frozen!

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