Monday, July 10, 2006
The Andy Oram Show
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, readers. This is the Linux newsletter, a weekly mailing (except
for four-day weekends such as last week) reminding you to expand your mind
and invest in your future by learning more about free and open source
software. Conveniently, the O'Reilly Network has quite a few articles and
weblogs about it all....
Whatever fellow editor Andy Oram thinks is important, your editor watches.
Andy recently attended a symposium on identity. Though that one little
word sounds awfully dull, there's an amazing amount of work and thought
and potential in the whole system. For example, who online do you trust
with what information? Why? There aren't many easy answers, but there's
plenty of room for privacy and for open, information-minded people to make
the world better. Here's what's going on:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/29/the-long-view-of-identity.html>
When Andy's not attending tip-of-the-spear conferences, he spends other
time thinking about how to make good information more available to
everyone. In particular, the quality of community-written documentation
is very spotty. Some projects do well, but most do not. Are there ways to
encourage better documentation? Are there better ways to organize and
produce it? "Rethinking Community Documentation" describes the problems
very well and offers a few potential solutions:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/06/rethinking-community-documentation.html>
Relational theory isn't always the easiest thing in the world, especially
if you just want to put data into a database and take it back out later.
Add in complex relationships between data--many to many, for example--and
your queries can get messy. You have a couple of options: avoid these
relationships, do it all in SQL and your high level language, or push some
of the logic into the database again. David Wheeler recently experimented
with using PostgreSQL database functions to manage complex relationships.
Not only is the code simpler and safer, it's much faster. Here's what he did:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/29/many-to-many-with-plpgsql.html>
In weblogs this week, Jeremy Jones hacked a Perl Hack into Python:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/hacking_a_perl_hack_for_python.html>
... and figured out how to use Python UI libraries and threading together:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/pygtk_and_threading.html>
Curtis Poe announced the Perl Foundation's next round of grant proposals:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/call_for_proposals_perl_founda.html>
Andy Lester announced a call for recruits for the Parrot project--no
special experience necessary beyond time and interest:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/calling_for_parrot_janitors.html>
Your editor found an excellent weblog elsewhere about how to sneak testing
into your development environment:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/how_to_sneak_testing_into_your.html>
Tara McGoldrick Walsh tried Google Calendar for an extended period and
reports on her findings:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/google_calendar.html>
Roger Weeks looked at his phone bill and wondered exactly how mergers
benefit customers:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2006/07/mergers_are_good_for_customers_1.html>
Tom Adelstein wondered if impolitic Linux fans might make the job market
harder for other Linux administrators:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2006/07/linux_and_microsoft_taking_a_p.html>
Justin Clarke tried to make his website produce valid XHTML. It was more
work than he anticipated:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2006/07/the_quest_for_valid_xhtml.html>
Caleb Tennis just loves the Summer of Code-sponsored Ruby extension maker:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/06/mkmf_mkrf.html>
Austin Ziegler requested bug reports for Ruby Windows extensions:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/06/desperately_seeking_win32_exte.html>
Curt Hibbs pointed to RailsConf keynote videos online:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/07/railsconf_2006_keynote_videos.html>
Rob Orsini reported on a new Rails deployment scheme that makes life much,
much better:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/07/deploying_rails_with_pound_in.html>
Giuseppe Maxia demonstrated how to measure the resource consumption of a
MySQL server process:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/databases/blog/2006/07/measuring_resources_for_a_mysq_1.html>
Carla Schroder gave up on Dapper Drake:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/goodbye_dapper_1.html>
Caitlyn Martin revisited the subject of Linux on old, old laptops:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/atticware_revisited_stepbystep.html>
Remember, OSCON is only two weeks away. Rest up for the flood of
information available then.
Going to bed early tonight,
- c
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
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