Monday, April 23, 2007
Linux Newsletter
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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.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":
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":
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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