Sorry if things look like “WhyDontYou” are taking offence against PC magazines in general but somethings are too annoying to pass over! Take this months PCW for example.

Previously, we have ranted at some length about the crackpottery that is involved in “pricing” cover disks – well, we have had no impact on the market 🙂 and this months PCW proudly boasts software worth “more than” £365 on its “massive” 8GB cover DVD. I have already posted about the pricing of cover disks (read more) so I wont do much on that for now.

The made up value aside, this is definite proof that they now have much more space on the disks than they know what to do with. This month’s cover disk includes an amazingly esoteric array of pointless things – for example four (count ’em) linux distributions – Ubuntu 6.04, Slax, Gentoo and Fedora Core. Not that getting any of these to work will be easy – you have to load the DVD and then burn off the iso you want (is that really easier than DL’ing the iso in the first place – especially as the magazine gives no advice on this).

This leads me to the critical tipping point of the magazine. I can let most of the nonsense and padding it fills itself with slide. It is a magazine after all. I can ignore the vastly over priced cost of the magazine (although only just…). I can ignore the mountains of advertisments (which are there to keep the cost down…..) but its getting close now.

The killer is the Linux/Unix section.

What a surprise. PCW dedicates (and has done since the dawn of time) a whole two pages to the real operating system of choice – LINUX. Now, this is a magazine which has felt the need to put four distros on the cover disk so you would think they were up to speed with providing information and advice on the open source OS. Sadly this is not the case.

Once more, this is just another case of two more pages on Ubuntu. Argh. Why!?!

I could understand it if this was either a one off, or if Ubuntu had some quirks which were common to Linux. Neither is the case. I ranted about this last month – obviously PCW dont listen to me though 😉 and they have done it again.

The title of this months section is “Resolving Ubuntu Screen setup” – what madness this is. There is nothing they go on about that carries over to other distros – it even begins by mentioning how “one of ubuntu’s biggest drawbacks” is the lack of admin utilities other distros have… The whole article is written as if Ubuntu sponsor PCW. Maybe they do…

Is this the thin end of the wedge? Has Ubuntu been working behind the scenes to achieve Linux domination?

Well, I have no idea but I do know that the only way I will get next month’s PCW is if someone gives it to me…

Well, having recently come accross the Feed Digest block of RoR links (see RoR Post), you can imagine my surprise when I found the link pointing to “Ruby for Rails book now available.” Now this was apparently posted “2 Hours ago” so it cant be a book I have ever found before.

Looking at what is on the blog (and its subsequent links), it seems quite good. I am not 100% sure it is worth US$22.50 for a PDF version though, so I will almost certainly wait until it is on Amazon (and / or Ebay… :-)) before I give it a try.

Hopefully this will go some way towards changing my opinion of Ruby (and Rails) – at the moment it strikes me as an interesting toy and not really much use for 99.9% of “real world” applications. I can’t think of anything Ruby on Rails can do, which cant be done better and easier with a different language. The framework (so far) is (IMHO) far from an enhancement and certainly doesnt add rapid application development.

Still, I have been wrong in the past. Time will tell 🙂

On an unrelated quest (regarding RSS) I came across this excellent little RSS feed (converted to HTML via feed digest). Well worth investigating:

http://feeddigest.com/digests/ruby-on-rails.html

Don’t read unless you are a cat or dog. Dead rats, birds or other mammals do not make acceptable inter-species Easter gifts.

if you are a dog, feel free to bring home dug-up gold doubloons. If you are a cat, just don’t bother. There is nothing you can kill that will bring as much pleasure from your food providers than you could give by just not scenting every corner of their living rooms.

Interviews with Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, George Lucas and James Cameron – the ultimate blockbuster sci-fi directors – connected 50s movie clips in  “Keep Watching the Skies,” broadcast  in the UK on the Sci-fi channel this afternoon.

This could have been unwatchably dull. It turned out to be an excellent programme. The clips were well-ordered to present a narrative about early sci-fi. The uniformly - if oddly -white-bearded directors discussed the films that had influenced them as children. In the process, they explained a lot about the ideas and references in their movies, as well as contributing to a coherent argument about  how postwar sci-fi films reflected the social and political fears and hopes of the time.

For example, there was a fascinating bit where Spielberg discussed a film in which a group of kids were the only ones to see and communicate with a benign alien, which showed where he’d got the inspiration from ET and explained part of what he was trying to express in it. (Sorry, I wasn’t taking notes. I didn’t catch its name.)

The directors drew parallels between the two movie approaches to aliens – either childlike innocence repaid with evil, as in War of the Worlds, or human suspcion of outsiders, which leads to unnecessary wars against the Other. Inevitable comparisons were drawn with the expansion of Western cultures and the way the West reacts to the Third World .

There were a few unconvincing moments that I’m just putting in here to tone down the effusive raving. It’s hard to accept that even the most obsessive movie-goer could remember so much about their responses from 50 years ago. These directors could discuss scene details that their 6 year old selves allegedly noticed better than I can remember the broad plots of a quarter of the films I saw last year.

George Lucas claimed that his Star Wars robots owed nothing to Robbie the Robot in the Forbidden Planet, despite his admiration of the film, but was based on Fritz’s Lang’s Metropolis. This kept to the film directors’ union rule 43 – “A director must always reference at least one 1920s art film as an influence.”  This reference would be convincing from the director of Tron (a real nouveau Metropolis.) It beggars the imagination to connect R2D2 with the Metropolis robot images I have. Lucas’s words were undercut by being voiced shortly after a clip from the Forbidden Planet, where Robbie the Robot looked and acted exactly like R2D2’s big brother. (My bad here, it has occurred to me too late that he may have been referring to C3P10, which i suppose is a bit like a Metropolis robot. However, I am not going to spoil a good criticism, just because it’s contradicted by the facts.)

The movie clips were great. It had the seminal scenes from  movies which would be probably too boring to watch all the way through – now we’ve got used to better special effects and sci-fi that’s not shot mainly in a studio. They were connected in a way that gave me a deeper insight into the effects of their social context (fear of nuclear war)  than the tiny predictable sci-fi section of a Film course that I did at university x years ago.

Basically, it was a programme that had the acknowledged geniuses of mass-market sci-fi paying homage to their influences. It made you want to look at the originals and to reconsider the sci-fi from the 70s. It being on SciFi Channel, it will be repeated to death – it’s probably already been on a dozen times. It’s well worth watching out for.

For info (remember, we like lists…) , and to save people the problems I seem to have had over the last 24 hours or so the following are an excellent place to start adding repositories to YaST:

• http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.0/
• http://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/

(if you use a version of suse other than 10.0 ammend the number as appropriate)

A big list is available at:

• http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories

When it comes to updating YaST the fastest way to do this is by entering:

installation_sources -a your source url

And then wait for it to do its thing.

If you know of any other places worth using please let me know.