Why Dont You Blog?

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…

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1. “Success” here means “success in making up inspirational lists.” The first rule is therefore to make up an inspirational numbered list.

2. Ignore the dictionary definition of secret. Otherwise, by definition, the seven secrets aren’t.

3. Put said numbered list on a web site. Don’t divulge more than a few of the secrets online,  so that you can get subscribers to pay for your book or CD in order to find out the others.

Sorry, folks, there was no room for any more secrets but you can find out full details of the amazing secrets of business success by visiting http://www.compuskills.co.uk.

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If you think of Christopher Ecclestone as a present day Tom Baker, this new Dr Who acts more like a modern Sylveste McCoy.

Still, the first programme of the new series wasn’t bad. If he tones down the suppressed hysteria, he should be OK in the part. 

Billie Piper did most of the acting in this first episode. (She has the advantage of  loooking and sounding dumb  - and of even having demonstrated real-life dumbness by marrying Chris Evans. So, when she turns in a competent performance, as she has done throughout Dr Who, the audience is so impressed that she can do little wrong.)  Maybe she should stay centre stage throughout the series or at least until we can get used to yet another Dr Who with an annoying face.

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This has got to be one of the oddest but most welcome holidays.

Odd? It doesn’t have a set date. It’s something to do with phases of the moon, I believe. Who works it out? Every year, calendars tell us when Easter is. Who tells the calendar manufacturers? They could print all the diaries and Western calendars in the world by just working out the leap years and setting the length of February - making sure they remember the old “February has 28 days clear… etc saying” to work out how long the months are. They can easily set out the dates of Christmas and New Year and May Day. But when it comes to Easter and Whit and Pancake Tuesday and all those other days (sorry, Days) that depend on Easter - who tells them?

Also odd, because if it’s supposed to be the date of the crucifixion, then why not just set one, as has been done with Christmas? The obvious argument is that it’s the old spring festival and reflects the progress of the northern hemisphere’s yearly cycle. Which is obviously true and fair enough. But why doesn’t this apply to Christmas? It’s always a couple of days after the Winter equinox.

Welcome? Good Friday is the only bank holiday that’s on a Friday, which makes it seem particularly well-named as Good. All other bank holidays allow you to miss a work Monday, but there isn’t that much you can do on a Sunday that requires an extra lie-in on Monday. Bank holiday Mondays turn Tuesdays (so-so) into alternate Mondays (bad). Good Friday turns a Thursday (so-so) into a Friday (good) AND gives you an extra Saturday (excellent). And even gives you an extra Bank Holiday in the next week.

Even better, Easter comes at a time when you have to be clinically depressed not to feel some optimism relating to the next few months of warmer longer days, no need to wear overcoats and boots and tights (this is only an advantage if you’re a woman, normally). This year it was perfectly timed to match the first decent weather seen all year in the North of England.

More good things - even if you have 30 kids, nephews, nieces, friends’ kids, grandhildren and great-grandchildren to buy presents for, you can get them all an Easter egg and have change out of £40. Try doing that at Christmas.

(Buy them Cadbury’s Creme Egg multipacks and you’ll have change out of a tenner, but you have to be on the dole or a pensioner to get away with that, really. Even better, you can get those candy-coated little chocolate eggs that are speckled to look like real birds’ eggs. However giving one of those would probably be worse than just not giving anything. Ideally, you have to put a few in tissue paper in a fake bird’s nest made out of Flakes. )

And you don’t have to go round a million shops choosing things. If it’s chocolate and it’s even remotely oval* - it will do. They’ll not notice any difference after the first one or two anyway, and it’s ten to one they’ll vomit them all up within 3 hours of waking anyway.

Altogether, it’s hard to find anything bad to say about Easter as a holiday season. As a religious festival, it’s hard to say anything that won’t offend somebody in some way, so I won’t.

… Or not much anyway. This is a bit related to its religious side. The music is rubbish. Christmas has fantastic carols. Easter doesn’t have much in the way of songs. “There is a green hill far away” is about it. This has miraculous powers to bring tears to the eyes of any child who’s ever had to sing it in Assembly. However, set it against the full set of carols and Christmas wins hands down over Easter. But that’s probably the only thing its scoresheet is down on.

So, Happy Easter

* A Terry’s chocolate orange will do at a pinch. In fact, a box of chocolates is OK as well, unless it only has square ones, in which case it’s all nougat or toffees and NO ONE will thank you for it.

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Not wishing to completely alienate the last two posters here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/experts-on-the-internet/ and http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/web-design-articles/) I still feel the need to defend .net slightly and possibly play devils advocate.

As a magazine, .net has no pretences of being a scientifically rigourous journal and there certainly isn’t any peer review process…, so it is a bit unfair to critise its articles in that light. The magazine is a “trade journal” and as such is supposed to be targetting its articles in that direction. The e-commerce competition was (IMHO) more a case of seeing what can be done to the standards and requirements of in-house judges - not a test of cold, hard, customer service. I am not saying they are right in doing this, but you would hope any website which was planning to introduce an e-commerce application would conduct extensive customer research, not simply rely on the opinions of three “ivory towers” types.

I agree with heather’s comments that the internet using public dont really care about what backend technology is in place - all they want is to achive thier goals (find information, buy things, play games etc) with the minimum of hassle. The fact a site is open or closed source is largely irrelevant. However, .net magazine is aimed at other Web Builders (webmasters, web designers etc., whatever you want to call them). This means the back-end matters. The update process matters. The ease of construction matters. The ease of update matters. And so on.

In my mind, this is what .net magazine was targetting and, to an extent it has achieved it’s goal. Now, the important question is “should it change its goals?” Personally, I think so. It is trying to be all things to everyone and as a result it is failing badly in some respects.

This months magazine has a section where it tears Tesco.com’s website / user experience apart. This is all done from the “fellow expert” point of view but it is couched in “customer-focus” terms. Now, I am not disagreeing with the comments .net has made (tesco’s website certainly could be improved) but the resounding fact of the matter is that despite its “failings” this is one of the biggest online grocery sites there is. That certainly means more than Gareth Knight’s judgement on its style and system.

I think there is a very real risk that dedicated net-geeks may get snared up in a circular self-fulfilment, where the opinions, judgements and criticisms move further and further away from the mainstream (and therfore “public” opinion). That is ok if your website provides a service to nothing but other geeks, but if you are selling to the public make sure you get their feedback!

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