Software

Apple lingered about 6 hours today before posting its special event online, and now their servers are so saturated downloads are proceeding at under 10KB/s. It took what may be the foremost media technology company in the world 6 hours to post an event, a company that produces software designed to allow extremely fast editing and production of video.

Even with all the technology available to them their servers cannot handle the demand to get the event to my Apple TV in a timely manner. This is the clearest obstacle to the Apple TV replacing other media, the network it connects to simply isn't ready yet.

Having just returned from the Central PA Open Source Conference, I found it to be a very informative and useful conference. A wide array of interesting topics in different fields were covered, and there were many items I can apply over the next few months to my own projects.

My favorite session was Hardware and Honeybees, in large part because it showed interesting uses for technology and hardware hacking, something as a software-oriented person I do not see much of. Using cell phone text messages to control electric fences, web cameras to monitor hive status, and inexpensive temperature monitors to find problems were all topics in this interesting talk.

The latest pre-release version of Firefox 3 is available. As a main focus of this release, performance and memory usage are improved. In particular Zimbra, the most heavyweight web application I use, has much better performance when used with this version. A more native look and feel on OS X and Growl notification support are nice features too. It is enough of an improvement that I do not intend to go back to version 2 after experiencing this pre-release.

I have been an advocate of RSS ever since I discovered it. RSS allows me to keep up with the news on many topics while losing as little productive time as possible browsing many websites.

Having used many RSS feed readers, I have been consistently disappointed by the lack of synchronization support for read articles and tagged items across computers, as I use many different systems throughout the day. Google Reader has this feature by its nature of being a web application, but oddly for a company specializing in search, it didn't have feed searching, a feature I use constantly. I have switched between RSSOwl and Newsfire, liking the rich client features, continuing to be annoyed by the lack of multi-system sync, but not annoyed enough to write an RSSOwl plug in to do it for me (one of those things I would enjoy doing if I get some free time).

Yesterday Google Reader added feed searching along with other useful improvements and refinements.

MacHeist is at it again, with a whole new set of shareware applications being sold as a bundle. Although there does not appear to be a charity benefit this time, there are many more applications in the bundle. All applications have been unlocked at this point, so you are assured everything in the bundle. The offer expires midnight EDT on Thursday, July 19.

In homage to the movie WarGames, DEFCON encourages the player to replay cold war doomsday scenarios, sitting in a bunker commanding forces to destroy the enemy using silo, submarine, and bomber based nuclear weapons. Unlike other games which force the player to wage war on the developer's platform of choice, this game lets you destroy the world on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows.

To add some strategy instead of simple destruction, viable defenses are available if used correctly. One example are the silos which fire interceptor missiles, but only when not firing nuclear missiles themselves, preventing poorly planned attacks from hitting their targets. This creates interesting strategies and bluffs to be used against other human players.

Shall we play a game?

In the process of migrating from a Sharp Zaurus 5500 to a Nokia N800, I needed to convert my extensive ZSafe password list to Password Safe format so it works with pwsafe for maemo. In case it might be useful to someone else, the conversion script is available. Note that it requires pwsafe for Linux (I installed the pwsafe Debian package before building this script).

There is a wonderful application for OS X called Disco. It makes burning much simpler than the built-in Finder options, with the added touch of a smoking CD burning window which makes burning fun. I have found one problem with it though, the Spandex system doesn't always correctly span your files across multiple discs.

MacHeist, a group that has puzzles they call Heists periodically for members to solve and get rewards for completion, has a special bundle on their site for $49 until December 18. This bundle currently includes 9 applications, and will include 10 if they reach $100,000 raised for charity (25% of the bundle purchase price goes to charity). A large savings over buying the applications separately, with a charitable contribution to boot, I recommend anyone who runs OS X check out this offer.

The CSS Cheat Sheet dashboard widget is a useful quick reference when working with CSS. It includes commonly used information on selectors, the box model, units, and inheritance. It is especially useful in conjunction with an editor supporting CSS code completion.

Having strange issues where embedded Flash images do not load on some sites but do on others while using Firefox 2.0 on OS X? Update to the latest Adobe Flash Player. The 9.0 r28 update appears to fix these issues.

The Carbonated Orange Beverage Research Association produces a nifty little menu extra called Slim Battery Monitor for OS X. Whenever using OS X menu extras (which I am rather fond of) it is easy to eat up your menu bar real estate quickly, especially on a laptop. Unfortunately the OS X built-in battery monitor is a space hog. Slim Battery Monitor replaces the built-in with a very slim vertical and tastefully colorized version with quite a few more display options than the standard monitor.

Firefox 2 was released today. I have been using the release candidates for a while now, and recommend getting it now. Spell checking in forms (which is quite handy for this blog), session restoration (handy for trying add-ons; the restart to initialize the add-on comes back up with all your sites), and integrated RSS subscription support rounds out the features I have come to rely on.

Use a Mac and miss Expose when using Firefox tabs? Use a lot of tabs and want an easier way to navigate between them? Try Viamatic foXpose; once installed just tap F8 in Firefox to bring up tiled thumbnail previews of all your current tabs.

As I have a rather long commute to work every day, I use a lot of gasoline. Fuel prices are rather hit and miss though, sometimes the stations at home are cheaper than in Harrisburg, while at other times fuel is cheaper at home. I recently discovered an awesome Dashboard widget aptly named Gas to keep me updated with the lowest fuel rates in my area. It doesn't cover all the available stations, but it gives me a rather good idea of the price I should be looking for today.