Monday, June 12, 2006
Returning Like Some Unsung Hero
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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Greetings, readers. The Linux newsletter has returned from vacation (now
there's a metonomy for you). Hopefully the mini hiatus has merely
sharpened your appetite for the latest free, libre, and open source
software news and opinions from the O'Reilly Network.
Here's what happened recently:
Failure is a part of life. Wisdom and knowledge grow out of learning from
failure. Unfortunately, computers don't learn that well and software
rarely recovers from failure gracefully. There are ways around that
though. For example, Greg Retkowski recently combined a couple of useful
and well-known system administration systems: Nagios and Cfengine. Here's
how you can make your network heal itself:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/05/25/self-healing-networks.html>
Though it seems like all network-service code should use C or C++ to give
optimal speed and to twiddle bits effectively, it's possible to write
useful, powerful, and speedy network applications in higher level
languages. Zed Shaw does this in the Ruby world. He's the author of the
popular Mongrel webserver. In a recent interview with the O'Reilly
Network, he explains how he builds reliable code:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/05/post.html>
Almost every time your editor pulls out his trusty PowerBook in public,
someone leans over, blinks, makes a face, and asks "Ewww, why are you
running *Linux* on Apple hardware?" After explaining things for the
umpteenth time, he recently wrote an opinion piece about why Mac OS X just
didn't work out as a Unix on his desktop. (He doesn't think less of you
for liking it; he just works better this way.)
<http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/06/01/switching-back.html>
Some people claim that mere APIs and libraries are domain-specific
languages. Perhaps they are, but when you can rearrange the very syntax of
a language to make common operations trivially easy to write and to
understand, then you're closer. Yung-chung Lin recently released a set of
CPAN modules called FEAR::API to make web programming, screen scraping,
and data manipulation exceedingly easy. Here's how a domain-specific
language for web clients works:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/06/01/fear-api.html>
Tags and folksonomies help organize data in lightweight, bottom-up ways.
They're an important part of new user interfaces built in the Web 2.0
style. They don't have to be distracting or flashy and thinking about them
can help focus your mind on other useful interface presentations and
decisions. In an excerpt from a new PDF, "Building Tag Clouds in Perl and
PHP," author Jim Bumgardner gives several suggestions on building
effective tag clouds:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/08/designing-tag-clouds.html>
If you can read this paragraph, you can read the Inform 7 programming
language. That's right, the next great development in natural language
programming may have come from the world of interactive fiction. Inform
developer Graham Nelson recently released a new version of his programming
environment; Liza Daly explores how it enables and encourages new and,
perhaps, better ways of programming computers:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/08/inside-inform-7.html>
In recent podcasts, your editor interviewed Brad Fitzpatrick, creator and
lead developer of LiveJournal, about the perils of running a large site
and the techncial decisions he's made along the way:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/05/22/distributing-the-future.html>
Your editor also lamented the lack of the world's most perfect programming
language:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/05/15/distributing-the-future.html>
Finally, he interviewed Chris DiBona as Google's 2006 Summer of Code
project began:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/06/05/distributing-the-future.html>
In weblogs, Juliet Kemp restricted rsync to run over ssh:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/05/restricting_rsync_over_ssh.html>
Carla Schroder solved some printing issues after an upgrade to Ubuntu's
Dapper Drake:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/06/upgrading_to_dapper_turboprint.html>
Then Caitlyn Martin found herself in RPM hell yet again with yum and pup
in Fedora Core:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/06/the_new_rpm_hell_or_why_yum_an.html>
Your editor almost finished his 30-day project of refactoring a large Perl
application:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/refactoring_everything_day_24.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/refactoring_everything_day_25.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/refactoring_everything_day_26.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/refactoring_everything_day_27.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/refactoring_everything_day_28.html>
Curtis Poe pondered the question of whether Perl belongs in LAMP:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/lamp_linuxsapachesmysqlphpytho.html>
Steve Mallett slimmed down the default Mac OS X install:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/shave_your_osx_default_install.html>
Jeremy Jones did not gush over the Ubuntu Dapper Drake installation:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/installing_ubuntu_dapper_the_g.html>
Ming Chow reviewed Google Spreadsheets:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/google_spreadsheets_handson.html>
Andy Lester explained how to spread your knowledge--just talk:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/spreading_knowledge_through_ta.html>
Thus ends another fortnight. Look at all the things we cover. How can
you not read us obsessively every day?
Tell your friends,
- c
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
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