Book - New Releases

=================================================================
Have you read "Designing Interfaces," by Jenifer Tidwell? If so,
please take a few minutes to take a survey to help her understand
how the patterns are being put to work and how to improve any future
editions, and provoke discussion at her presentation at the
Usability Professionals' Association conference in June.

As an incentive, we'll send a free copy of "Information Dashboard
Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few
(O'Reilly, 2006) to ten randomly selected participants.

To participate, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=972273731710

=================================================================

Good evening Mister and Missus Open Source, and all the ships at sea. This
is your plucky Linux reporter, 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

DATELINE: India. Noted Yogi Iama Opensourcefantatic demonstrates his
amazing abilities of meditation and self-reflection. He credits Zachary
Kessin's article, "Code As Data: Reflection in PHP" with his supernatural
abilities. Kessin shows how to use the reflection capabilities of PHP 5 and
beyond to create automated test suites.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/04/26/code-as-data-reflection-in-php.html

DATELINE: Chicago. A rare total eclipse of the sun distracts patrons at
this museum opening of priceless gemstones. Deepak Vohra is inspired by the
event to write "Ruby on Rails Meets Eclipse." Vohra takes the reader on an
in-depth walkthrough of how to install the RDT and RadRails toolkits on the
Eclipse IDE.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/04/26/ruby-on-rails-meets-eclipse.html

OK, I've official exhausted my abilities to channel Walter Winchell, and now
return you to your regularly scheduled newsletter. Your humble editor
managed to ignite a bit of controversy this week with an ONLamp blog entry
that offered a possible reason that the Microsoft development platform
continues to be so popular. Is more choice a bad thing?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html

Staying with ONLamp, chromatic picked Wifi-Radar as his app-of-the-week in
his continuing "Thank You" series.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/thank_you_wifiradar.html

Apart from raising hackles with my monoculture essay, I also saw an
encouraging sign for desktop Linux during a local trip to a CompUSA to buy a
new laptop. Details in:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/two_signs_of_the_time_1.html

One of the benefits of being a leading technology publisher is that
O'Reilly gets the inside dope on trends in geek book buying. Mike Hendrickson
crunched the numbers, and doesn't like the way that system administration
seems to be heading:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/where_are_the_sys_admins.html

Jeremy Jones gives a useful pointer to where a growing library of audio and
video from PyCon 2007 can be found:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/pycon_2007_videoaudio_update.html

brian d foy is calling for nominations for the yearly White Camel award,
which honors non-technical achievement in Perl:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/2007_white_camel_nomination_pr.html

And finally, chromatic has a pointer to an article on the availability of
Perl programmers in London, and a few thoughts of his own:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/more_on_recruiting_perl_progra.html

Juliet Kemp, patron saint of Linux DevCenter, walks us through how to resize
your root partition on the fly, and wonders if the default 5GB value she's
been using is large enough anymore:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/repartitioning_on_the_fly_and.html

A busy, busy week on the Ruby blogs. Gregory Brown must not sleep much, as
he had not one, not two, but four different blogs this week. He started off
with a status report on Rupert, a Rails reporting engine:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/ruport_goes_rc1.html

The next day, he was back to blog on the Gotham Ruby Conference:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/gotham_ruby_conference_2007.html

Timothy M. O'Brien broken up his streak with a piece on Capistrano 2.0,
which he argues is not just for Rails. Capistrano is a tool for automating
remote system administration tasks. Or at least that's what the website
says; I had never heard of it until Timothy mentioned it:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/capistrano_20_not_just_for_rai.html

Gregory wasn't a man to take this lying down. He struck back with an
interview with Ruby Queue author Ara T. Howard, in his Digging Deep series:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/digging_deep_evil_packaging_tr.html

Finally, Mr. Brown shows us why a flaky system clock may cause camping to
break, at least if the file you're reloading has a mod date after the
current time:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/campers_beware_of_time_warps.html

Niel M. Bornstein, usually a blogger in XML Land, has joined the SysAdmin
team, and starts with an essay on data center automation:

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/04/data_center_automation.html

Looking ahead, three articles to choose from this Thursday (you did know
that ONLamp articles run on Thursdays, didn't you?) My trusty Rails-based
tracking system shows Tom Adelstein on the radar with a piece entitled "The
Top 7 Things Sysadmins Forget to Do." OpenBSD fanatics can look forward to
the Federico Biancuzzi interview with key OpenBSD developers on the upcoming 4.1
release. And Kevin Bedell looks at techniques for managing and working with
truly huge datasets.

ONLamp is always looking for new bloggers! If you have a unique viewpoint
on the topics we cover, we'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line at
turner@oreilly.com, with BLOGGER in the subject!

Wrapping up this week's newsletter, and in a blatant attempt to build some
viral internet buzz around the upcoming ONLamp comic strip, here's a first
public peek at "The Watering Hole," exclusively for Linux Newsletter
subscribers (and your relatives, and your coworkers, and your paper boy,
and...). The strip is going to launch Any Day Now.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/images/RejectedCover.png

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

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===================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

===================================================================

Hello, Perl fans. This is the Perl newsletter, a short and quick mailing sent
to tens of thousands of your closest friends in the Perl community. Here's
what's new for your education, entertainment, and edification.

Perl News

Flavio S. Glock (famous among other things for MiniPerl 6) wrote a report
of the YAPC::SA hackathon in Porto Alegre, Brazil:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/1747255

The videos from YAPC::Asia 2007 are online:

http://tokyo2007.yapcasia.org/sessions/

brian d foy requested nominations for the 2007 White Camel awards, which
recognize non-technical achievements in Perl:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26/0434232

Ann Barcomb summarized the week in Perl 6:

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/33024

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/33031

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/33056

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/33063

Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33129

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33130

Perl at O'Reilly

Some of the largest databases and data sets in the world are part of data
warehouses--huge sets of information so poetically mined for trends. This
can lead to pretty charts and graphs, so it's important. Sam Tregar
explains the basics of data warehousing and walks through an example that
he and his colleagues created. There's Perl, of course:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2007/04/12/building-a-data-warehouse-with-mysql-and-perl.html

Like a natural language, Perl is malleable. You probably have an accent
in written Perl just like everyone has an accent in a spoken language
(except good old midwestern Americans such as your editor, whose accent is
as distinguishable and as impressive as plain oatmeal). Uniqueness is
fine and quirkiness is great, but clarity is as important in written
communication through source code as it is in spoken language. brian d
foy, a fellow iconoclast of capitalization, shares Five Ways to Improve
Your Perl Programming:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/04/12/five-ways-to-improve-your-perl-programming.html

Plato and Democritus might have disagreed about how many unique components
you can remove from and replace in LAMP before it loses the ineffable LAMP
essence, but Apache is merely the Texas Hold'em of poker--dominant but not
invincible. There are plenty of other options of well-tuned and
LAMP-appropriate web servers, including lighttpd. Bill Lubanovic
describes this option in prose much less purple than in this paragraph:

Your editor decided to stress-test the Parrot by generating nearly
meaningful nonsense algorithmically:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/perplexing_parrots_parser.html

Mike Hendrickson beat the bushes to find system administrators (we know
you're reading this):

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/where_are_the_sys_admins.html

James Turner experimented with a monoculture to find any lurking appeals:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html

Curtis Poe called down the wrath of the XML gods for his TAP-loving heresies:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/xml_versus_tap.html

Why yes, your editor did write this on a Friday afternoon! How could you tell?

-c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

===================================================================
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==================================================================
Sponsored by ActiveState Perl Dev Kit

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Dear readers,

This week Mac DevCenter has published articles on two important
technologies for Mac developers. TextMate is one of the most popular
text editors for Mac development work, and we have an interesting
example of how to customize TextMate from the guy who literally wrote
the book on the subject, James Edward Gray II. If you use TextMate,
or have been considering giving it a try, check out James' article to
get a taste of how powerful this editor is. And for the Python
programmers out there, Jeremiah Foster presents an introduction to
wxPython in the first article in his series examining graphical
toolkits for OS X.

TextMate is very popular among Mac developers, in part due to how
much you can customize the powerful program. James Edward Gray II
recently wrote "TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac" and presents
this article on creating an RPN calculator in TextMate as an example
of how to do complex TextMate customizations:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2007/04/11/customizing-textmate.html

In this new MacDC series, Jeremiah Foster presents an overview of
graphical toolkits for Apple's OS X. This first article looks at
wxPython, including installation instructions and breaking down some
sample code. If you've been wanting to use your Python programming
skills to develop for OS X, you'll want to learn about wxPython.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2007/04/24/graphical-toolkits-for-apples-os-x-wxpython.html

The Mac DevCenter blogs have been active and interesting. Follow the
details coming out about WWDC, learn the latest hacks available for
AppleTV, and help Erica pick a new programming language to learn.
Drop by and let us know what you think:

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog

Thanks for reading,

Bruce Stewart
Mac DevCenter Editor
bruce@oreilly.com

==================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

==================================================================

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=================================================================
Sponsored by the O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors
with educational offerings and certification for IT students
looking to further their careers or to launch one.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/ost_xml

=================================================================

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

This week I was knocked flat by a nasty illness, so XML.com took the
week off without a new article. But the weblogs were aflutter, and I
somehow managed to amass enough Firefox tabs to send out a few URLs.

XML.com Weblogs
---------------

Rick Jelliffe, Validating concurrent and interrupted elements in XML with Schematron
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/04/validating_concurrent_and_inte.html

Kurt Cagle, Chaos Storms and Metamagicians
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/04/chaos_storms_and_metamagicians.html

The Weekly Tab Sweep
--------------------

I'm not a Perl guy; in fact, I rather loathe Perl. That said, this
video of a talk by Audrey Tang about Perl 6 is quite fascinating:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3876155376103839772&hl=en

I *am* a Mac guy (after spending 1995 to 2003 as an everyday Linux
user), so when I learned about TextMate, I jumped on board. Now, a few
years later, I've gone back to my first love, Emacs. Two fun, useful
Emacs blogs I've been reading to get my chops back into shape:

http://www.emacsblog.org
http://emacs.wordpress.com

One thing I'm loving about OS X this week is how easy it was to
(finally) remap my keyboard to change the (useless) caps lock key into
something more useful for Emacs. I've been typing since high school, so
it's going to take some time to remap those muscle memories, but it's
already worth the effort.

We've been enjoying the last Sopranos episodes on HBO lately, and we
honeymooned in Italy, including a week in Sicily, this summer, so this
was an interesting read:

The chief of the FBI's organized crime unit on the history of La Cosa Nostra
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/april/mob.php

Computers? Well, I hate them, really, but what are you going to do?
What truly makes me happy is a great ink pen -- why didn't anyone tell
me about JetPens? Very cool:

http://www.jetpens.com

As always, thanks for reading!

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com

=================================================================
Scaling New Heights

Join us April 23-26 in Santa Clara, California for the MySQL
Conference & Expo. Scale to new heights at MySQL.

Register today!
http://www.mysqlconf.com

=================================================================

*** XML News from the XML Cover Pages by Robin Cover ***

For more information on any of these stories visit:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/coverpage/newspage.html

***

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==================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

==================================================================

Displaying Master-Details Relationships in ASP.NET 2.0

One of the common tasks in manipulating databases is displaying
master-details relationships. Wei-Meng Lee shows how you can use the
GridView and DetailsView controls to display records in the authors and
titles tables.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/04/24/displaying-master-details-relationships-in-aspnet-20.html

More Reasons Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop

My last blog entry, "Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop," got a
lot of pushback from Linux folks. Now I'm back with more reasons why Linux
will never overtake Windows.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/more_reasons_why_linux_will_ne_3.html

Todd Ogasawara is back with his weekly roundup of news about Windows
mobile technology. High on this week's list: Streets & Trips 2007.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/windows_mobile_weekly_roundup_33.html

IronPython v1.1 Is Now Available

M. David Peterson has the inside scoop on the latest release of IronPython.

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/msftironpython_ironpython_v11.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, Editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
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==================================================================
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Dear Readers,

This week we have some very interesting reading. Start with James
Turner's piece, "The Virtues of Monoculture," and you'll see what I
mean. If you are an open source person you have to ask yourself this: do
we need marginally different projects for no apparent reason
other than that "we can"? I am all for free choice, but doing something only for
the sake of doing it can divide the OSS community. Do you
think Microsoft does this in its product design teams? Check out what
James has to say here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html

Articles

In the spirit of our choice-is-important viewpoint, each article this week
has used a different programming language for example code. Choice
*is* important.

The first article is about how data warehouses support complex ad-hoc
querying by end-users. In "Building a Data Warehouse with MySQL and
Perl," Sam Tregar describes the basic parts of a data warehouse and
outlines how to create one with Perl and MySQL. Data warehousing is a
deep topic, and this article will hopefully pique your interest to roll
your own. Check it out here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2007/04/12/building-a-data-warehouse-with-mysql-and-perl.html

In our second article, Thakur Thribhuvan describes how temporary
destinations are a useful tool in message-driven architectures in his
piece, "Designing Messaging Applications with Temporary Queues." In
this article, Thakur looks at the benefits and drawbacks of using
temporary destinations in an enterprise healthcare system. He also
looks at design perspectives for using temporary queues as an
alternative to static queues and explores some design strategies using
synchronous requests and replies. Check it out here:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/04/10/designing-messaging-applications-with-temporary-queues.html

In our third article, "Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction
to the Heart of Rails (Part 1)," Gregory Brown shows how the Rails web
framework is well suited for the "M" of Model View Controller (MVC).
You don't have to be a Ruby or Rails guru to understand this tutorial. The
first part of the article walks you through Object Relational Model
(ORM) fundamentals using ActiveRecord by example. The second part builds a
small but functional application to show how ActiveRecord
works within its setting and in concert with the other toolsets Rails
provides. Check it out here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/04/19/understanding-activerecord-a-gentle-introduction-to-the-heart-of-rails-part-1.html

Blogs

The top three blogs at the moment are listed below. They all have
something in common. They, too, are talking about choice. They have
plenty of comments as well. Go see what they have to say:

1. Erica Sadun's "Blog bleg: Help me pick a language"

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/blog_bleg_help_me_pick_a_langu.html

2. Curtis Poe's "XML Versus TAP"

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/xml_versus_tap.html

3. Preston Gralla's "Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop"

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/why_linux_will_never_take_over_1.html

Podcasts

We don't exactly have a new podcast this week, so I thought I would point
out a new Video service available from our friends at Safari.

Safari's integrated collection of online books, videos, and article
content is available from no other source. The online training videos in
the Safari Library cover a wide range of topics. Check out a sample at:

http://safari.oreilly.com/video

Stats

Well, I have some interesting data to report on. Where are all the
sysadmins? I did some analysis of our book-purchasing audience. This
is a time-oriented graph. If you notice the spikes on the "Consumer"
trend line, those represent the end of each year. Consumer purchasing
reaches a peak at the end-of-the-year holiday period. Consumer means
people who buy computer-oriented books like Ipod, Digital Photography,
etc.--books that are not for software developers, system
administrators, or other computer science types. So look at the decline
for system administrators. That is certainly interesting to me. Could
it be that there are no really new IT admin tools or technologies to
explore?

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/where_are_the_sys_admins.html

Comments

Any comments, ideas, or thoughts on features or content you would like to
see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you request it.

Mike Hendrickson
General Manager,
The O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

=====================================================================

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Ah Spring, when the thoughts of young geeks turn to love. Love of a new
Core 2 Duo notebook. Love of the latest web development frameworks. And
this week, the ONLamp family of products (OFOP) has a lot of geek love to
share with you.

Articles? Articles? You want articles? Well, we got 'em, starting with
Gregory Brown's first installment of a two-parter on ActiveRecord, the
object relational guts that live inside Ruby on Rails. If you want to
learn more about how to make Rails live well with your database
infrastructure, you could do worse than to start with "Understanding
ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails":

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/04/19/understanding-activerecord-a-gentle-introduction-to-the-heart-of-rails-part-1.html

Continuing on the database theme, have you ever thought about the
differences between a highly relational database that aims to maximize
normalization, and a highly denormalized one that incurs redundancy for
speed? Sam Tregar takes a look at the advantages of the second approach in
"Building a Data Warehouse with MySQL and Perl":

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/databases/2007/04/12/building-a-data-warehouse-with-mysql-and-perl.html

Articles not enough for you? Well, we got blogs too, lotsa blogs. This
week, to be different, I'll break 'em out by authors. ONLamp veteran
chromatic has the next installment in his "Linux tools to be greatful for"
series; this time it's KMail in the spotlight:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/thank_you_kmail.html

He moved on to report on a potentially hazardous intersection between
case-insensitive file systems and Perl pragma:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/when_strict_isnt_strict_enough.html

He considered the value of using brown-bag lunches to explore specific
aspects of software development, in the same way that an Étude is used to
develop specific musical skills:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/how_do_you_get_to_cmu.html

He finished the week looking at how to use the Perl MarkovChain package to
generate nearly correct input to test parsers for potentially fatal bugs:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/perplexing_parrots_parser.html

Our other prolific ONLamp blogger this week was Ann Barcomb, goddess of Perl
Posts, who had not one, not two, but three Perl 6 Mailing List summaries to
offer up:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/weekly_perl_6_mailing_list_sum_29.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/weekly_perl_6_mailing_list_sum_30.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/weekly_perl_6_mailing_list_sum_31.html

Jonathan Wellons looks at an effort to model how open source developers
interact, as attempted by CVS logs of some popular projects:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/agentbased_simulation_of_open.html

How can you advocate for the use of Python without becoming a zealot?
Jeremy Jones points us to an essay that attempts to answer that question:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/on_python_advcocacy.html

Ending up the week on the ONLamp blogs, Curtis Poe takes a swing at XML,
which he argues is overly complex, poorly understood, and implemented poorly
by many toolkits:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/xml_versus_tap.html

Juliet Kemp reports on the release of Debian etch (4.0), over at Dev Center.
She upgraded to it, and has a report from the field on how it went:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/debian_etch.html

For a quick hit of SQL goodness, check out Giuseppe Maxia's little gem over
at the Databases blog. He looks at how to handle a multiple dataset select
from MySQL using Perl:

http://www.oreillynet.com/databases/blog/2007/04/handling_multiple_data_sets_in.html

Do you CEE what I CEE? Anton Chuvakin does, and lets us know about the
Common Event Expression, a new log format that is just emerging from its
shell, over in the SysAdmin blog:

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/04/finally_common_event_expressio.html

One new blog this week in the Ruby/Rails world comes from Timothy M. O'Brien
about how Rails responds to criticism of missing features. Lots of good
links in a short post:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/rails_scaling_to_multiple_data.html

What's coming up next week? Three juicy new articles for your reading
pleasure, each one of which should inform and delight you.* If you're a
Rails fan, Vohra Deepak looks at the Ruby on Rails development environment
under Eclipse. PHP more your style? Zachary Kessin discusses how to use
reflection under PHP. Still not happy--want something a bit more sysadminy?
Let Ron Aitchison alert you to the Five Biggest DNS Errors you can make.

Also on the horizon, the previously threatened comic strip is poised, poised
I say, to make its debut in the next few weeks. What can I tell you about
it? Well, not to give away too much, I'll say it's called "The Watering
Hole," and features characters named Pearl, Ruby, Pye, Phillip, Linus,
Bonita, and Cecilia. Look for a link to it soon off the ONLamp main page.

Finally, I'm going to try to launch a new ONLamp feature, the ONLamp
Ombudsman. Do you have an issue with a technology covered by ONLamp
(including RoR, Databases, and Sysadmin?) Have you tried the mailing lists
and forums to no avail? Send 'em to me--care of the address at the end
of this newsletter, with the term OMBUDSMAN in the subject--and I'll select
a couple a month to track down and bring back the answers. I can't
guarantee yours will be answered, but if it's of general enough interest, it
stands a good chance!

Until next week, this is your ONLamp roving reporter, signing off.

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

* Delightfulness not guaranteed. Your degree of informedness may vary. Do
not read while operating heavy machinery. If delight lasts longer than four
hours, seek the advice of an Architect or Administrator, as it may be a
symptom of insufficient cynicism.

================================================================
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April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
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=================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

=================================================================

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another issue of XML.com.

This week Michael Day asks an intriguing question: which XML technologies
are beautiful? I agree totally with one of Mike's answers, namely, RELAX NG.
It's a joy to use and is conceptually elegant. Very nice.

Do you think beauty is a useful criterion for judging technologies?

I'm curious which answers the XML.com audience will give -- check out the
comments section of the article.

Which XML Technologies are Beautiful?

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/04/18/which-xml-techologies-are-beautiful.html

In lieu of the browser tab sweep that usually appears here, I want to say
a few words about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday.
VT is about four hours southwest of Washington, DC, where I live and work,
and a real part of the DC community. We all know people who go and have
gone to school there -- friends of friends, the children of coworkers, family members.
VT has always been of interest to me, as well, since it has a fine technical reputation.
The company I outsource my corporate email to is located on the VT campus!

I have no idea what to say about this tragedy, except that I hope we can
wring some good from it. I have tried to be more patient and understanding of
people this week, especially those who seem like they might have trouble fitting in.
Of course that won't prevent a sick person from hurting others, but we can never
know whether our small acts of kindness keep others from reaching some awful,
inward tipping point.

Some political pundit, who isn't worth naming here, suggested yesterday that those
among us who profess no religious faith were missing from the public square after
tragic, painful events, since we have no God or gods to which to pray.
Since I count myself among the secular, I cannot say in truth that I will pray for the
families and friends of the victims.

But I do feel compassion for them and empathy for their loss. I hope for the eventual,
natural ebbing, if not cessation, of the pain of their loss. And I stand with them
to change our society to make the recurrence of such tragic losses less likely in the future.

Kendall Clark, kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com

=================================================================
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Installing and Configuring ISA 2006

Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006, Microsoft's latest
release of its popular web proxy and security suite, has become a
full-blown perimeter security solution for both small and large networks.
Chris Sanders shows you how to set it up and configure it for best
performance:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2007/04/17/installing-and-configuring-isa-2006.html

Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop

For my next book, "The Big Book of Windows Hacks," I've just written a
hack about how to run Ubuntu inside Windows Vista. Great fun, great hack,
and it's great to be able to run Linux on a Vista machine. But it's
convinced me more than ever that Linux will never take over the desktop.
Check out my blog for details:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/why_linux_will_never_take_over_1.html

Freeware/Open Source for Windows Weekly Summary

Todd Ogasawara is back with his weekly roundup of great free software for
Windows. Among them, PowerShellIDE:

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/freewareopen_source_for_window_21.html

See you next week,
Preston Gralla, Editor
WindowsDevCenter.com
pgralla@oreilly.com

=====================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
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=====================================================================
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stuff from our sponsors!

Downloads - Free Training - Webinars - Updates

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# posted by giu @ 2:31 PM 0 comments

==================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

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==================================================================
Greeetings Readers,

Articles

Hooray, Perl 6 is here! Let everyone know, Perl 6 is here! OK, so I am
two weeks late on my April Fool's joke, but when is Perl 6 coming? Well,
if you want to start using some of the features being built into Perl 6,
you don't have to wait: start by reading "Lightning Strikes Four Times," by
Shlomi Fish, Bob Free, Mike Friedman, and brian d foy. They explain that
good software design principles tell us that we should work to separate
unrelated concerns. Ideally, it's possible to replace any one of your
MVC components without breaking the whole system.
Other concerns are difficult to separate. See what they have to say:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/04/12/lightning-four.html

In "Five Ways to Improve Your Perl Programming," brian d foy explains
that inside every tangle of obfuscated Perl code is a clean,
well-architected gem struggling to emerge from its cocoon. A
well-designed program can simplify testing
because you've broken the code into distinct parts that lend
themselves to unit testing. You can test the parts without running the
entire program. Check out what brian has to say:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/04/12/five-ways-to-improve-your-perl-programming.html

Blogs

On the blog front, we have Chris Adamson's provocative piece on
"Leviathan's Ipod." The post has brought out partisan groups supporting
and denouncing the ideas. When a blogger gets folks to argue
passionately on both sides of a topic, I think he's done an
excellent job. Go see for yourself:

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/leviathans_ipod.html.

Speaking of passionate, you have to read Bruce Stewart's post on "Apple
Postpones Leopard Release Until October." The cult of Mac folks has
come out. I wonder when another major hardware/software manufacturing
type of company will build such a strong brand and product loyalty as Apple has.
See what I mean:

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/apple_postpones_leopard_releas.html

Podcasts

In "Distributing the Future," hosted and produced by Daniel H.
Steinberg, the latest installment is "Finding Your Voice." There are
three pieces that center on this theme. Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks
to John Battelle about the corporate voice that Google has taken on.
Moshe Cohen is a clown who performs using his voice but no words.
In many of his missions, including Clowns Without Borders
USA, he cheers people up but also leaves them with a deep lesson. Finally,
there's a remixed piece by David Battino from the Digital Media Insider
that looks at how much computer voices have improved.
Check it out:

http://www.oreillynet.com/future

Stats

Well, in the stats area, we have a couple of things to show you. One is
a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago that has garnered a few
comments. It is about language dimensions and dementia. Basically, I
think folks are crazy about their language, regardless of how highly it is
ranked on some scale. Check it out here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/03/language_dimensionsdementia.html

And if you want to see what people are looking for on each of our
centers, you can get that data here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/feeds/widgets/organic_search_tagcloud/

As always, if you have any ideas, questions, or something you want to
write, please send your thoughts to ideas@oreillynet.com

Thanks for reading.

Mike Hendrickson
General Manager, The O'Reilly Network

=====================================================================
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=================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72-Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195, register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

=================================================================

It is a dark and stormy night... As I write this on Sunday night, the wind
outside is whipping the trees around and whistling through the telephone
wires. I sit before the glow of my trusty computer, putting my faith in my
new UPS and hoping that this isn't the third week in a row I'll end up
sitting in the dark listening to its plaintive beeps.

At least I can warm my soul with the bountiful selection of articles and
blog entries that crossed the threshold of the ONLamp family of websites
this week. Article-wise, Stéphane Faroult finished his two-part series on
emulating SQL analytic functions under MySQL. Stéphane certainly knows his
way around a query, and I hope to have him back to enlighten us again.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mysql/2007/04/12/emulating-analytic-aka-ranking-functions-with-mysql.html

The other article this week was from Perl powerhouse brian d foy. brian,
who along with chromatic causes Outlook to throw a hissy-fit of
capitalization every time I try to type their names, has distilled some of
his wisdom from Mastering Perl (coming out soon), and presents it here for us.
If you aren't using these Five Ways to Improve Your Perl
Programming, you're missing out on some good stuff.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/04/12/five-ways-to-improve-your-perl-programming.html

We'll start this week's visit to exotic blogsville with our Ruby contingent.
Daniel Berger has a hilarious and also enlightening tutorial on the
truly evil things you can do with the Ruby class system.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/ruby_code_that_will_swallow_yo.html

Gregory Brown, who will grace our pages this week with a Ruby article, is
getting drowned in Ruby support questions on the RubyForge support forum.
Stop that!

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/a_gentle_reminder_rubyforge_fo.html

Last summer, Ruby Central participated in Google's Summer of code. Austin
Ziegler has a look back at who participated, and what they did.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/ruby_central_and_the_google_su.html

Short but sweet, Gregory Brown has the last Ruby word this week with a
two-liner that will escape HTML in a document.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/04/trivial_scripting_with_ruby.html

Monday morning opened bright and early with chromatic's next installment in
his "Thank You" series, this time awarding the gold statue to Screen, the
poor man's X11.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/thank_you_screen.html

Jonathan Wellons took time to pose the question, what are the crucial two
things you'd say about LAMP if you were asked? The "Two Things Meme"
reminds me a lot of what we used to (and still) call "the elevator pitch,"
what you'd say about your company or product if you had the space of an
elevator ride to do it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_two_things_about_lamp.html

The next day, he was back to ask if FOSS has its own version of 1984's Newspeak.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/1984_wasnt_just_the_year_richa_1.html

The Python Recipe of the Week is how to use a decorator to check method
signatures. Jeremy Jones gives us a pointer to it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/recipe_of_the_week_decorator_f.html

How do you maintain a FOSS project? Many die on the shoals, never making
it out of the sea to evolve into greatness. "Chromatic".toLower() wants us to
look at a good essay on the subject, relating to Gtk+.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/improving_the_maintainability.html

Mr. Wellons poses a number of computational brain teasers, the kind where
there might be a better approach than brute force. Give them a try and see
if you can find a way to crack them.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/what_do_7_77_and_168_have_in_c.html

In a few months, if all goes well, schoolchildren in a number of developing
countries are going to start getting their hands on Linux-powered laptops,
courtesy of the OLPC project. Brad Fuller gives us a peek at the Sugar UI
that will ship with them.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/nigerian_school_kids_use_linux.html

Linux Geekette Juliet Kemp is looking for good tools to improve workflow in
Linux. Got one handy? Drop her a line.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/04/workflow.html

A nice nugget of SQL from Giuseppe Maxia over on the Database site, showing
how to handle multiple datasets in MySQL from Perl.

http://www.oreillynet.com/databases/blog/2007/04/handling_multiple_data_sets_in.html

Brian K. Jones suggests that source control favorite CVS actually stands for
Coding Versus Sloth. He has a long discussion of why checking in your
little admin script hacks into CVS is a smart move in the long run.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/04/cvs_coding_versus_sloth.html

Anyone who works in the industry knows that the amount of time you actually
spend coding can sometimes be a frighteningly small percentage of your time.
Jonathan Wellons closes out the week in blogs by asking, "What is your text
to code ratio?"

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/whats_your_text_to_code_ratio.html

If you've made it all the way to the bottom with your sanity intact, your
reward is a peek at what's coming up this week. The final mix is still in a
bit of flux, but I'll definitely be able to present, for your reading pleasure,
the first half of an in-depth introduction to the Rails ActiveRecord ORM, by
RubyMaster Gregory Brown, and "Building a Data Warehouse with Perl and MySQL,"
courtesy of Sam Tregar. Coming your way on Thursday, as always.

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

================================================================
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# posted by giu @ 2:01 PM 0 comments

===================================================================
Microsoft hosts MIX, a 72 Hour Conversation About the Web !

Join Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach and Michael Arrington
April 30 to May 2 at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.
For only $1195 register and get a free copy of Windows Vista
and a commemorative edition of the Microsoft Expression Suite!
Go to VisitMix.com for more information.

http://www.visitmix.com

===================================================================

Greetings, diverse Perl people. This is the Perl newsletter, sent out
every two weeks when the planets align favorably, designed to keep you informed
as to what's going on in the Perl world.

Hopping to it... now!

* Perl Events

Linuxfest Northwest 2007 will take place on April 28 and 29, in
Bellingham, Washington. Allison Randal, Tim Maher, Brad Fitzpatrick, Brian Aker, and
your editor (he thinks) will all present:
http://linuxfestnorthwest.org

The Toronto Perl Mongers have announced a hackathon on April 28:
http://rakudo.org/hackathon-toronto

Parrot's monthly bug day is also tomorrow. Join #parrot on irc.perl.org as
the core developers prepare for the monthly release, squash bugs, add new
features, and guide newcomers to contributing documentation, suggestions, tests,
fixes, and patches:
http://rakudo.org/parrot/index.cgi?Bug%20Day%2C%202007-04-14

Registration has opened for YAPC::NA 2007, in Houston:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/31/0445246

* Perl News

The Perl Foundation awarded Phil Crow the second Perl 6 microgrant. Phil
plans to write a tool to convert Java declarations to Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/06/1148214

YAPC has announced a call for venue for YAPC::EU 2008:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/05/1952240

Your editor minuted the Perl 6 design minutes:
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/32837
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/32977

Ann Barcomb summarized the week in Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/31/148237
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/2143229

Note that Ann is still looking for an assistant; if you'd like to
contribute greatly to the world of Perl 6 and are willing to gather a weekly summary
(using some powerful tools), please contact her.

* Perl at O'Reilly

OpenGL is a powerful API for 3D graphics programming. Perl programs using
OpenGL can outperform C programs using OpenGL in some cases. Bob Free
explains.

Aspect-oriented programming is a powerful, if complex, idea for
separating design concerns from an inherited object hierarchy. Perl's subroutine
attributes can help you achieve AOP concerns. Mike Friedman demonstrates.

Keeping test counts up to date in Perl test programs under active
development can be tedious. The Test::Count module is one approach to managing this
complexity. Shlomi Fish explores its use.

Perl can be pretty loose about which arguments you pass to which functions
and why. Sometimes you need to know more about what you've received, but how
can you check an object's type accurately without getting false positives or
negatives? brian d foy walks through the possibilities.

Yes, that's right--it's time again for Perl Lightning Articles:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/04/12/lightning-four.html

In other news, Jonathan Wellons solicits your two facts about LAMP:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_two_things_about_lamp.html

Matt S. Trout has begun to write a new Perl REPL:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/writing_a_modern_perl_repl.html

A new Perl-only Google search engine has appeared, thanks to Andy Armstrong:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/a_perlonly_google_search_engin.html

That sums up the week. Next time, how about reviews of B::Concise and
App::SVNBinarySearch?

That's the plan,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

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