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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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A slightly off-topic rant to start the newsletter this week.

As a copyright holder myself, I respect the rights of other copyright
holders to earn a fair living off their works. I even agree, in principle,
that people should pay for the music they own (once, with the rights to do
whatever they want with it). But, as this article in Florida Today notes,
the music mafia (and using that term is an insult to organized crime...)
has begun shaking down coffeehouses who have performers that sing copyrighted
songs. One bar owner was allegedly shaken down because he had Monday Night
Football playing in his bar, and "Are You Ready For Some Football" is copyrighted.

http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070708/NEWS01/707080343/1006

At one point the U.K. equivalent of ASCAP/BMI even attempted to bully a guitar
shop into paying its copyright protection money, claiming that if people
played copyrighted music while trying the instruments, the shop needed to pony
up a royalty.

http://iccoventry.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/tm_objectid=16513231&method=full&siteid=50003&headline=-you-need-a-licence-to-strum-stairway-to-heaven--name_page.html

I have to ask, what will be next? Mind reading technology developed so that
people thinking about a copyrighted piece of music can be forced to pay?
Gangs of RIAA militia accosting people in the streets because they were
humming "My Humps?" There is a balance between protecting the rights of the
copyright holder and acting like a bunch of jack-booted thugs, and the music
industry entered the latter realm several years ago.

Meanwhile, in the enlightened world of the OFOW,* we'll try to avoid incurring
any royalty payments while going over this week's activities. One article
addresses a topic I've been interested in for a long time: just what a Linux
device driver looks like on the inside. Valerie Henson did an excellent job
showing how to do a "Hello World" example using three different approaches.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2007/07/05/devhelloworld-a-simple-introduction-to-device-drivers-under-linux.html

Kake Pugh has been involved in the OpenGuides project, which provides a
software infrastructure for developing city information-based wikis. It's
written entirely in Perl, and Kake shows a bunch of code snippets that,
among other things, filter wiki spam.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/07/05/openguides-city-wikis-in-perl.html

The DSL connection over at "The Watering Hole" has been notoriously unreliable
(in fact, since the very first strip). This week, we finally find out why.

http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/2007/07/monty_pythons_tangled_circuits.html

Tom Adelstein leads off the blogs this week with an essay on how to be a
successful technical writer.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/winning_as_a_tech_writer.html

SpamAssassin is one of the Good Guys leading the fight against Viagra ads
and pleas for assistant from African government ministers. So, chromatic
took a moment to say thanks.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/thank_you_spamassassin.html

We all know that the iPhone is the trendy tech toy of the moment, but Noah
Gift has a review of the latest fetish item from Apple, from the perspective
of a programmer.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/iphone_review_for_programmers.html

We've been hearing the technology X is going to be the Microsoft killer
forever. So chromatic thought it might be interesting to sample the
opinions of some O'Reilly editors as to its current relevance.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/is_microsoft_relevant_in_a_pos.html

Next, he had an interesting discussion of Agile development, and a recent
survey of what Agile practices are actually adopted. Love it or hate it,
Agile is the flavor of the week.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/which_practices_are_most_usefu.html

Turning from the sublime to the ridiculous, Jonathan Wellons ended the ONLamp
portion of our blogging this week with a useful tutorial on what to do if your
Roomba suddenly decides to throw off the oppressive chains of floor sweeping.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/07/how_to_survive_a_robot_uprisin.html

Carla Schroder has a pointer to an article that lays out the current state
of the art in Linux photography support.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/07/adventures_in_digital_photogra_1.html

And if you've got any experience running a Jabber service under Linux,
Juliet Kemp would love to hear from you.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/07/jabber_servers_any_experiences.html

Gregory Brown is looking for something too, a nomination for a July Ruby
Spotlight project.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/07/looking_for_july_ruby_project.html

And Nick Sutterer tells us about Apotomo, a widget library for Rails.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/07/post_2.html

Anton Chuvakin has his security tip of the week, why you should make your
logfiles available to your security team.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/07/anton_security_tip_of_the_week_5.html

And he has 11 good reasons that you (or somebody) should be taking a good
look at them.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/07/top_11_reasons_to_look_at_your.html

Next week, there are three dynamite articles on the way. The second half of
Jack Herrington's series on "The Power of Google Gears," Guiseppe Maxia's
colorful introduction to MySQL Proxy (yes, you can get your machine
vmstats by running a SQL query!), and the beginning of an introduction to
advanced JavaScript from Howard Feldman. Plus, Pearl discusses interspecies
dating with Pye in "The Watering Hole," and all the blogs you can handle!

* The ONLamp Family of Web Sites, not chosen as one of the new Seven
Wonders of the World...

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

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