What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 15.0.874.21 was out, so I picked it up. It looks a lot like it's getting close to the promotion stage, as backed up by several of the comments on the release notes page. I like that they are working hard on the Mac OS X Lion compatibility, and in recent weeks they've been updating the V8 Javascript engine as well. All good news.

Just wondering what they are going to do next. With the binary-mode web sockets, it's possible to do a lot with this… I just don't know what they are planning on doing. Hope it's interesting.

I haven't posted any updates to Google Chrome dev for quite a while, but I've been updating every chance I get. The most recent cut is 15.0.874.15 and has the latest V8 javascript engine, as well as lots of fixes for Mac OS X Lion (10.7). It's been at version 15 for quite a while, and they are starting to issue updates to the "fourth octet", so I'm guessing that it's getting close to time to cut version 16 and make 15 the 'beta' channel and keep on going.

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.

It's quite possible that the problems I've been having with FreeTDS and iODBC on Ubuntu 10.04 are solved. One of the other guys working on this problem with me spent a little time this morning looking into this issue and seems to have found it to be a pthreads deadlock. By simply changing the threading model used by the ODBC driver, things seem to have stabilized. This is done by editing the /etc/odbcinst.ini file to include the line:

  Threading = 2

When I added this to the configuration, all the lock-up connection problems I've been having went away. It appears to be that the FreeTDS driver isn't thread-safe on the connection level, so this make sure that only one thread at the ODBC level uses a particular FreeTDS connection object at a time.

Fantastic news!

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.

These GitHub Guys are pretty amazing... already they have released GitHub for Mac 1.0.3 and it's fixed a lot of the issues I had - save two: the ability to set my picture for local repos, and the ability to set the description of the local repos. I've sent these to the GitHub guys, and they say "Not yet, but maybe", and that's good enough for me. Face it, that's about all I could have expected.

It's smooth, slick, everything you'd expect from the GitHub crew - but it's all on my Mac. Love it.

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.