Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Monkey versus Robot
LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com
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Hello, everyone. Before the Linux newsletter starts, your editor must
reach into the mailbag and credit reader A. M. "Todd" Sabuncu for catching
the word "metonymy" misspelled in last weeks newsletter. (Your editor
knows what it means, though he often confuses it with synecdoche. He just
cannot spell it, at least not as easily as squamous.)
With that bit of mischief out of the way, here's the tiny slice of the big
pie of F/LOSS that ONLamp covered last week.
If you've ever worked tech support (or seen The IT Crowd), you know that a
monkey with the proper three-question script could answer four out of five
questions. Making monkeys do that job might violate animal cruelty laws,
but why not a robot? If your users can use AIM or another chat system,
you may be able to set up a bot as your front line of support to answer
frequently asked questions. Don't get lost in the thought of natural
language parsing and schemas; reuse some of the work Robert Treat and
others have done to "Build Your Own AIM Answerbot":
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/15/aim-answerbot.html>
Last week was our Where 2.0 Conference, dedicated to all of the
interesting and useful information in the emerging open location
information space. Our conference coverage is available, including plenty
of smooth-voiced Daniel Steinberg interviews:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/where_20/>
In weblogs this week, Tim O'Reilly shares information on the O'Reilly
anti-spam system:
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/radar/rss10?m=1005>
Your editor called for public use of the google.com domain (it's satire):
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/open_up_googlecom.html>
Then he found a long thread on the Perl 5 development list about the
not-imminent not-death of Perl 5:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/come_back_zinc.html>
Dave Cross lamented all of the bad ways people store date information in
databases:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/storing_dates.html>
Bruno Pedro tried to enable accent-insensitive fulltext indexing in
MySQL:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/accentinsensitive_fulltext_ind.html>
Jeremy Jones played with Tabblo, a photo-sharing site built with Python
and Django:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/tabblo_a_django_site.html>
Lyz Krumbach reviewed Google Earth, which now runs on x86 Linux:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/06/google_earth_for_linux.html>
Juliet Kemp upgraded to Apache 2 and ran into index issues:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/06/apache2_issues_indexhtmlold_mu.html>
Caitlyn Martin has a new favorite Linux distribution: Xubuntu:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/06/meet_the_newest_member_of_the.html>
Gregory Brown wonders what skateboarding has to do with Rails:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/06/a_skateboarder_though.html>
Pat Eyler interviews RubyQuiz master James Gray:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/06/rubyquestions_for_the_rubyquiz.html>
Geoffrey Grosenbach dissected the metaprogramming in why the lucky stiff's
Camping framework:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/06/wild_and_crazy_metaprogramming.html>
Tom Adelstein decided that, job-wise, the Linux desktop has not yet
arrived:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2006/06/not_yet.html>
That's it for this week, except for a plea. Do you remember The Perl
Conference before it was OSCON? Do you have any photos, memorabilia, or
stories to share? If so, please contact your editor (chromatic at oreilly
dot com).
Even TPC after OSCON is good,
- c
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
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