Monday, April 30, 2007
Linux Newsletter
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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com
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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
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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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