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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com

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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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