What's it all about, Alfie?

It's been several weeks since I posted anything. It's been a hard time on many levels, and it's gotten me to the point that I just couldn't bring myself to write a thing. There was certainly a large component that was work. Things have been very unsettling at The Shop recently, and it's only very recently that I've been able to get some amount of distance from these issues and put them into a little bit of perspective.

But home has been stressful as well. Certainly, it could be argued that the one is a contributing cause of the other... working 13 hours days with a hour plus commute means that I am home very little time in the evening before I have to get some sleep for the next day. I certainly can't blame the family for this, but they certainly have added to the stress and feelings of helplessness and drifting.

So it's been a tough couple of weeks. I'm not exactly sure what's happening, or what will happen. I do know there have been a lot of updates to Google Chrome dev - it's now at 15.0.849.1 and doing fine. I'm not sure about all the update posts... It's nice to look back at them and see the update history, but after a while it seemed like the only positive things I wrote about were the software updates. That really started to contribute heavily to the de-motivation.

So today I decided I needed to write this down. I'm not sure that it's going to make a big difference in things, but maybe it's just the act of writing again that I needed. Maybe it's just taking the time to think about things in a slightly larger context that helps make things look a little less gloomy. I sure would like it to be that easy.

Well... that's the source of the silence. Self-imposed. Maybe I'm turning a corner.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 14.0.814.0 was out, and while it's been a while since they've released an update, it's nice to see that things are stabilizing out and settling down. Seems like the biggie in this release is the V8 engine to 3.4.7.0, which is nice because that's becoming the new development/deployment environment. While you're not going to do a lot of high-powered math, I have read about someone's extensions to WebKit to include OpenCL and the GPU processing for JavaScript. Now that would be neat. To be able to use the GPU in JavaScript without having to explicitly code for it. That would be neat.

In any case, it's up, I got it, and things are going well.

After another recent beta release, iTerm2 1.0.0 is out. This is a really nice replacement for the Mac OS X Terminal.app and has a lot of features that I don't even use. It's the BBEdit of terminal apps. It's got more features than I think almost anyone would need. One of the ones I really like is the ability to hide the scroll bars. I just don't need them, and they don't make it easier to scroll - that's built-in to the OS. Maybe with Lion (10.7), they will be less intrusive, but for now, I really like iTerm2.

Wow! I checked this morning and WordPress 3.2 is out, so I ran over to HostMonster (again), and upgraded all my installations right away. It's fast and painless, and the new features - like the reworked dashboard and the new "out of my face" editing page are all steps in the right direction, in my book. Very nicely done, indeed.

This morning I noticed that WordPress 3.1.4 was out, so I headed over to HostMonster and upgraded my installs using SimpleScripts. It's almost trivial these days, but that's a major statement of all three groups involved. Amazingly great software wonderfully supported.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 14.0.806.0 was out and the big changes (other than breaking the Mac relaunching) is the latest V8 engine - 3.4.6.2. It's nice to see them continuing to make the JavaScript faster and better, even though it's all under the covers, it's becoming a platform for application building, and in that, it's nice that folks are still working on it.

I read a piece this morning about the browser being "done" - and for the feature set it focused on, it pretty much is. Pages render, links work, speed is pretty good, so it's all going to come down to polish. If you can make the JavaScript faster, then more complex things can be done in it, and the "richness" grows. I'm hoping that they keep pushing Apple to improve Safari as well. It's a nice platform to build on.

This morning I got a tweet that MacVim Snapshot 58 was out, so I went to get a copy and see what had changed. I was very excited to see the latest Vim source included as well as a "significant" memory leak plugged. I haven't had any real problems with MacVim, but when the guy building it finds something significant, it's nice to know he's looking.

Still one of the best editors on the planet, get it if you're a Vi/Vim user.

This morning I got a tweet from the Adium developers that 1.4.2b1 was out with some of the "lost" MSN features restored. It's not a surprise, with 1.4.2 taking a few away, it's not at all surprising to see them respond quickly with a new release. I was a little surprised that they added in the Facebook connectivity, and with a web page authentication. Interesting, but a little odd. I'm glad I'm not a big Facebook fan. Kinda creepy the way these guys are requiring web page-based authentication.

Anyway, it's running fine, looks OK, and glad they are on top of these updates.

I have to admit that git is an amazing source control system. It's what I have been looking for for a long time, and it fits perfectly into the way I write code. So when GitHub sprang up, I loved it! What a great place. You can do issue tracking, forking... it's amazing. Well... today they outdid themselves. They released a Mac git client: GitHub for Mac.

It is a beautiful git client for the Mac with all the features you'd expect, but the added bonus is that they have complete knowledge of the GitHub API v3, and it's integrated into the app. This means all the things that might be hard, or time-consuming can be made very simple and easy with the client app because it has inside knowledge of the "other side" - sitting on GitHub.

Traditional and GitHub. Amazing combination.

I'm not a huge Git GUI user, but this is my preferred tool for sure. Simply amazing.

This morning I noticed that Base 2.1 was out. It's a very nice SQLite3 database tool for the Mac with some really nice looking graphics and very good speed. I've been a paid user since v1.0, and seen it get better and better. I just like SQLite3 and think there's a lot of smarts in using that for CoreData. Just wish I had more time to mess with it.

Nice tool. Great update.