Month: August 2006

This year is 25 years since IBM launched the first IBM PC in 1981. PC World have put together a list of 25 of the ‘Greatest PC’s of All Time’ – the list is an interesting computing history of machines pre and post 1981, including greats such as the Apple II and the Comodore Amiga.

Noticably absent from the list are the machines big in Europe during the same time period. The Sinclair Spectrum was one of the first and the arguably the best selling home computer of it’s time in the UK (during the early 80’s) and most of Europe. Also missing from the list, the Atari ST – although if this is the ‘greatest’ of all time, it would have to be the ST Falcon030, which was an awesome piece of hardware, just out of reach of most people’s pockets at the time.

O’Reilly have been experimenting with short downloadable PDF books, which they are calling ‘Short Cuts’. The latest is ‘Getting Started with Hibernate3’ which you can purchase now from their site for $9.99.

Anyone tried one of these ‘Short Cuts’ yet and have any comments? They look like a good idea if you are looking for something to get you started quickly?

Just one day after the security announcement and patch, there is a new Rails release, 1.1.6, which further addresses the security risk.

Earlier in the week when the first announcement came out there wasn’t any indication of what the issue was, but apparently the security risk was a hole where a user could execute code on your filesystem. Nice. A reminder to do some testing with that shiny new development framework before you deploy your new app out there on a production server…

Paramount will be the first movie studio to release a new movie on DVD and the two new competing hidef DVD formats, HD-DVD and Bluray at the same time. The movie is Mission: Impossible 3. Read more here.