Linux News from O'Reilly Network

I've always been skeptical of Feng Shui, the art of placing one's possessions to maximize harmony with one's surroundings. But, having struggled for years to keep my home office organized, I had a bit of an epiphany over the weekend and realized that by putting my two desks into an L configuration instead of on opposite sides of the room, the entire room suddenly had a much more usable flow and everything was where I needed it to be. Color me harmoized!

Meanstwhile, there's things afoot with ONLamp.com and the rest of the O'Reilly network sites. Getting our minds around that whole Web 2.0 thing, we're going to be transitioning from articles to podcasts, screencasts, interviews and videos. Rest assured, there will still be lots of crunchy techie goodness to enjoy, but you can also expect to see more interviews with influential players in the Open Source community, screencasts demonstrating the latests development technologies, and video from events such as OSCON.

The transition will be a gradual one, so don't expect to see our traditional articles disappear overnight. I'm lining up the first round of podcast interview victims... um, subjects, as we speak. In the meanwhile, there's some good articles still yet to come, starting with Brian DeLacey's outstanding look at Ubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron). This was delayed a few weeks due to a death in Brian's family. It was well worth the wait and we definitely appreciate the effort Brian put in to get it to us under trying circumstances.

One Really Big Tube
Ruby is winding up her tour of great European hacking hotspots, we'll be starting something equally silly next week in The Watering Hole.

Microsoft Trojan Horse Part Duex: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions and Connectors
Noah Gift is Not Impressed with Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager. He claims it's actually a Trojan horse...

Microsoft Integrating Some of OpenPegasus into its System Center Operations Manager
On the other hand, Todd Ogasawara is taking more of a wait and see approach.

MS-SQL Injection Attack.. Here we go again.
MSSQL is falling victim to a new injection attack, which depressed Dustin Puryear no end.

Microsoft PowerShell 2: Going Beyond its UNIX/Linux Insprirations
Todd took a deeper look at PowerShell, and what it owes to its Unix/Linux roots.

PyMOTW: cmd
Saving us from an all-Microsoft week, Doug Hellmann presented his Python Module of the Week, CMD. You make command interpretters with it, according to Doug.

Patrick Michaud on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit
Our own chromatic had some Parrot news. He says that the compiler is turning out some impressive results.

Full Exclusive Mark Shuttleworth Video Interview Now Available
We ran a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical (Ubuntu), but only a portion of the whole thing. Noah Gift points us at the full interview.

Microsoft Needs to Promote Non-MS Open Source Projects
Microsoft's new openness to Open Source is all fine and good, says Todd. But Microsoft needs to start embracing non-MS projects.

Greedy Coin Google App Engine Application With Source
Noah Gift has turned in an article on using the Google App Engine that we'll be running soon, he gave us all a sneak peak at some of the code.

GRUB Legacy, Ext3/4 smackdown
There's an incompatibility between e2fsprogs and legacy versions of GRUB, warns Carla Schroder. Read about it here before you brick your system.

Linux vs. Windows Metrics -- Nothing Is Quite What It Seems To Be
Caitlyn Martin wonders if you can really get an unbiased set of Windows vs Linux performance benchmarks.

Ruby Mendicant: Hadean Prawn
Because you all donated so much, Greogry Brown is able to take nearly half a year off, and try to develop a PDF library for Ruby. It's called Prawn.

Filesystem Monitoring: You're Doing It Wrong
Chris Josephes thinks that when looking at disk usage stats, it's not the raw percentage you want to worry about. It's the slope of the trend line.

Poll #8: What additional information is most useful for log analysis?
And rounding out the week, Anton Chuvakin has another poll. What features do you find most useful when looking at a log?

That's it for this edition, look for more information about the ONLamp revamp in upcoming weeks, and if you live in the US, rejoice that we're almost out of primaries!

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