The 19th century illustrations that O’Reilly use for the book covers give a sense of identity and branding that is known throughout the computer industry. Since most subjects aren’t associated with animals, the books themselves have frequently created mascots, such as the camel for Perl. In the cases where there’s an obvious choice, such as Python, the cover usually is what you’d expect. So the use of horses for Linux titles is a bit bizarre, to put it mildly. Now you know why, arctic habitat ain’t cheap.
Yet another week without Linux news, I’m still recovering from vacation and promise to have my act back together next week!
A quick and dirty note this week, as I’m still traveling in the DC area and am worn out from driving. There will also not be the customary Linux News reprint today (I’ll try to do it ASAP, it takes a fair amount of manual labor.)
This week’s in-joke is the reference to Laurel. Laurel (Ruma) has been one of the faithful production folks who makes sure that all the ONLamp (and other O’Reilly Network) articles end up looking perfect every week. I say was because she is moving on to bigger and better in an editorial capacity at O’Reilly, something that all of us who know Laurel are very happy about!.
The original version of this strip had a very different looking Laurel (with a much darker skin color!) That’’s because in the script I sent to Randy, Gwen was talking to people off-camera. He thought it would be more effective to have them in the forefront. All to the good, except that I hadn’t sent him any reference photos of Laurel, so he just used his imagination. He was a very good sport about redoing that panel once I sent him a photo of Laurel.
We have multiple Mikes at O’Reilly, so you are free to decide for yourself which Mike the male in the first panel doesn’t look like the most.
As you may know, it’s impossible to prove that something doesn’t exist. Therefore, there’s no way I can prove that there isn’t a cabal of elite geeks plotting world domination. But it is obviously highly unlikely. Just keep telling yourself that, are prepare to welcome your new wireless network mind controlling overlords…
There are no subliminal mind control messages TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO READ THE WATERING HOLE in this week’s Linux news, thankfully
FOO Camp is O’Reilly’s annual private get-together of movers and shakers in the industry. As mentioned last week, it stands for Friends of O’Reilly. It’s essentially a weekend of camping at the Sebastopole, CA headquarters, with informal talks by attendees and conversations that stretch on into the night.
While this strip takes it to an extreme, FOO Camp is definitely (from what I’ve been told, I haven’t been able to make one yet) the geekiest camp-out you’ll ever see. Laptops are in evidence all over the place and there’s WIFI as far as the eye can see. BTW, if you know the management structure of O’Reilly Media, there’s an in-joke this week. There’s another one coming in two weeks, watch for it!
Due to your humble editor spacing out this week, there’s no Linux Newsletter. Look for a double-edition in next week’s strip!
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.
We all know that some models suffer from eating disorders. Unfortunately, poor Mycroft suffered from an eaten disorder…
You might get the idea from the strips to date that Ruby isn’t a very nice person (ok, not a very nice spotted jackel.) Trust me, under that cold, professional, knife-you-in-the-back exterior lies a gentle soul that likes butterflies and kittens. Fortunately, you won’t be seeing that side of her personality any time in the near future. Butterflies and kittens make for bad comedy (lolcats not withstanding…)
This week’s Linux news isn’t nearly so cute and cuddly, but it is free and available by reading on.
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.

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.

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.

Sonoma County is not only the corporate home of O’Reilly, but also one of the world’s most famed wine regions. It’s a bit of hyperbole to say that they never get storms, but the climate tends to be quite mild.
In reality, the state of the wiring closet with Pye tangled up in it is a pretty good representation of most closets I’ve seen without a python tangled up in them. Every closet starts out nice and neat, everything labeled and all the wires in channels and twist-tied. This lasts about a day, until the first change, at which point expediency always overrides order
While we wait for Pye to make his moves of a sexy bunch of LAN cabling, here’s some equally sexy Linux News

Good thing for Ruby that the WH universe is connected through a wormhole to the Dudely Do-Right one.
This week’s strip include a big shout-out to my main man, Illiad, over at UserFriendly. As all good webcomic aficionados should know, Columbia Internet (and it’s long-suffering tech support slave, Greg) is the setting for UserFriendly. I’ve been lucky enough to do business with Illiad when I was Senior Editor over at LinuxWorld Magazine, I arranged to reprint UF strips in the magazine. If this strip ends up being one tenth as funny as UF, I’ll be a contented man.
If contentment has slipped out of your fingers, maybe a dose of this week’s news from around the OFOW will help

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

Poor Pearl, first she’s attacked by Congressmen, now she’s getting snide backhanded compliments from a vain jackal. And to think she gave up a role in The Mummy Returns for this…
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-Ruby or something, based on the character of Ruby being a stuck-up, conceited publicity junkie. In fact, I like Ruby (and Ruby on Rails), I recently created a system to manage all the articles I have out being written, built on RoR in under a day. But Ruby is definitely the Hot Thing of the Moment, and like all Hot Things, it is suffering from a bit of overhype. It’s easy to see how Ruby could consider herself the center of the universe.
If Linux, Open Source, Databases or Sysadmin are the center of YOUR universe, the week’s ONLamp news follows.

Looks like a new neighbor moved in while Pearl was visiting Our Nation’s Capital. And there’s nothing like the fear of becoming obsolete to bond former enemies together. I’m sure that given time, the old timers will learn to get along with Ruby. Of course, I’m also sure that we’ll see the Chicago Cubs win a World Series in my lifetime, so you may want to take that prediction with a grain of salt. While Pearl unpacks her luggage, enjoy this week’s Linux News!

Poor Pearl, she would have been better off claiming to work for the cigarette industry. Although there are certainly any number of open-source-friendly legislators in Washington, there are also any number that keep the interests of their deep-pocketed corporate campaign contributing corporations in mind. Richard Stallman’s recent trip to Cuba probably didn’t help Pearl’s cause much, nor did the fact that she’s clearly of Middle-Eastern extraction…
Thankfully, you can sit safe at home, free from Congressional witch-hunts, and read this week’s ONLamp news!

Just as The Godfather and The Sopranos have forever associated Italian-Americans with organized crime, Joe Camel has put a stain on all honest, hard-working ungulates. Pearl, of course, would never condone smoking for anyone, especially children. For one thing, it can mucks up hard disk drives, especially those old Century Data removables. But I’m dating myself…
I’ll be at the first Ignite! Boston on Thursday the 31st of May. Drop by and say hi if you’re a fan of the strip. And now, on to this week’s ONLamp news…

Welcome to week three of The Savanna-Wide Wrestling Federation The Watering Hole. Believe it or not, next week plot is actually advanced! We’ve got the story arc written and drawn out through week 14 now, so I can say with authority that there’s some fun stuff ahead, IMHO.
If you happen to be in the Boston area, I’ll be at Ignite! Boston on the 31st of May, 2007. I’ll be the guy in the Watering Hole t-shirt (gotta love Cafe Press…) Of course, once The Watering Hole takes its place among the greats of the webcomic world, they’ll probably be available through O’Reilly. Hubris, what’s that?
Click on Read More for your dose of ONLamp news for the week

Welcome to week two of The Watering Hole, and an introduction to some of our cast. Pearl went to the trouble of introducing herself, you should know her from one of the most famous O’Reilly covers; the bird is Philip, the PHP eagle; and the snake is Pye, the Python… well, python. Specifically, an African Rock Python. Also appearing is Cecilia the Cow, one of the old-timers like Pearl, who graces the C Pocket Reference
I’ve always thought that it’s kind of unfair that Linux, Apache and MySQL all get a letter to themselves, while all three of the “p” languages have to compete for the last letter. If you’ve ever been in a room with a bunch of passionate p[ython|erl|hp] programmers, you’ll have no trouble recognizing the spirit of impassioned advocacy that is symbolized in the third panel.
Next week, peace? If the Protestants and Catholics can get along in Northern Ireland, maybe these three have a chance as well. As always, click on “Continue Reading” to read this week’s ONLamp Linux Newsletter

Hello and welcome to The Watering Hole. Randy and I are glad you dropped in, and hope you’ll make this a regular stop! At the moment, the schedule is to update the strip every Thursday, you can subscribe to the RSS link on this page to be notified of new strips.
For those of you who might not know, Sebastopol, California is the location of O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters, right in the middle of the Sonoma County wine country. It’s a pretty campus, with buildings spread out rather than up, nothing is over 2 stories high, as I recall.
Elsewhere around ONLamp, there’s a lot of good stuff to see, as usual For more, here’s this week’s Linux Newsletter!
Good evening Mister and Missus Open Source, and all the ships at sea. This is your plucky Linux reporting, bringing all the news of the day (or at least all of it that happened in the ONLamp Family of Websites.) We begin our panorama of stories with three fast-breaking articles in the news this week.
DATELINE: Washington. The House Committee on irresponsible network administrators opened a hearing today into lax DNS practices. Those testifying could have used a look at Ron Aitchison’s article on ‘Five Basic Mistakes Not to Make in DNS’. From making sure to reverse-map your private address space to checking your domain for lame delegation, this article can serve as a model to domains everywhere!
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2007/04/26/5-basic-mistakes-not-to-make-in-dns.html