What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I noticed that the 'dev' feed of Google Chrome is at 5.0.335.0, and so I decided to download it and give it another try. The reason I'm not using it more is that I've found it to be very unreliable in connecting to the sites/servers that I want it to. I wanted to use it as my back-up browser, which is Firefox 3.6 now, but it just wasn't as stable and useful as Firefox 3.6.

While I use Google Chrome all the time in my work at The Shop, and find it to be a very respectable browser for the work I do there, the Mac OS X port is just not up to that level of quality - yet. Well... today when I tried 5.0.335.0 it was acting much better about getting to the sites and moving between them. Not bad.

Given this, I may give it a day or two and see if it holds up to the same load that Firefox does. If so, I may switch over. Would be nice to see.

I saw this morning that NetNewsWire 3.2.5 is out and contains a few fixes for authentication bugs and possible crashing problems. Brent pointed out that he's planning on releasing several small bug fix releases as opposed to waiting for one big one - just to get the fixes out to those effected as soon as possible. Sounds nice.

This morning I saw that Camino 2.0.2 is out with a few security fixes. Sounds about right, but since I don't use it that much, I'm not really that concerned about the threats. Still, no need to be silly and not get the update.

This morning I was running and watching a little TV when I saw a Comcast advertisement for their new high-speed service. It seems they are planning on moving to 100Mbps speed in the near future. Now I'm not sure if this would be a great deal for us... we had the Extreme 50 for a few weeks and weren't really thrilled with the speed. It seemed to Liza that it was even slower than the Ultra which is 30Mbps/7Mbps.

I'm not sure if it was the Comcast infrastructure or Liza just not wanting to pay the extra $50/mo (now it's only a difference of $37/mo). But we went back to the Ultra, and she's happy with that.

But I have to say, if I could really get 100Mbps to the house, that would be very sweet.

In an unexpected, but nice, update, Twitterrific tweeted that 3.2.2 was out with a few fixes and some commercial additions. It's nice to see the Mac desktop version getting a little love, especially given that there have been numerous updates to the iPhone version recently.

So I had to get it and give it a whirl. Works great.

This afternoon I got a tweet about a new release of Acorn 2.2.1 which improves a lot of the JPEG image handling when flattening the image for web export. No longer is the background messed up, it's white (JPEG doesn't allow for invisible background) and there are a few other fixes. In all, a nice upgrade.

Today I was checking on the latest Google Chrome for Mac and noticed that WordPress 2.9.2 was out and so I definitely needed to upgrade all my journals at HostMonster to the latest version. It's one of the most popular blog software packages, and as such, it's the target for a lot of malicious code. Better safe than sorry.

Today I knew that Marie was glad I was her Dad. She called this morning and had a problem with Pages '09 and an outline she had been writing as a homework assignment. She had accidentally compressed the outline into "one line per item" mode, and was in a bit of a panic because she needed to have it printed out for today.

I looked at what she was doing, then we went through all the menu bar settings and at the very right, there it was. Click that, and she was in business.

The relief in her voice was something I'll remember for a long time. Moments like this - where you can tell that one of your kids is really, honestly, grateful that they are your kid, are few and far between for teenagers. It was something I really enjoyed.

I got an email (as a beta tester) from Cabel for Unison 2.0.4. Seems there were a few issues with the PPC support, and he wanted folks to test it before releasing it. I got it and my old issue of a GUI imperfection is still there, but I got a reply from them about this and know that they are working on it as time permits. This morning, I got a

I love their applications, and can only hope that the way they code is as elegant. Wonderful work.

Well... VLC 1.0.5 is out and because of a lack of Mac developers, there's no 64-bit version of it available. This means that HandBrake - which now sees itself as a media converter and not a DVD ripper, running in 64-bit mode can't load the libdvdcss.2.dylib that's in VLC, to decode the DVD. Sure, there's FairMount - again in 32-bit mode, but that's just the same problem. It looks to /Applications/VLC.app/ for the file, and if it can't load it, then it, too, bails.

So it seems that no matter what I do, the version and build of VLC is the key. If it's 64-bits, then it's OK for HandBrake and FairMount. If it's not, I can still use FairMount 32-bit to unlock the DVD, and the 64-bit version of HandBrake to convert it, but we're still dependent on the build of VLC. And as long as it's 32-bit, there's really no reason to use the 64-bit HandBrake. I don't rip that many DVDs, and when I do, I just want something that runs.

It's disappointing that they create HandBrake the way they do... removing the critical file, but that's life. It's their choice. For now, I'm running HandBrake 32-bit with VLC 32-bit because that's all they have. And it works.

Maybe someday there will be a 64-bit VLC, and then I can move to 64-bit HandBrake.