What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I was thinking about SQLite3 and decided to check and see if Base had been upgraded since the last time I checked. It's a great little tool for SQLite3 database, and there's a lot to like there. SQLite3 is the backbone of CoreData, and it's been shown to be a great alternative to a config file or even an application's data file. SQLite3 is a single file database, and it's fast.

So I checked, and sure enough, Base 1.4 was out with a few nice improvements: CVS loading, SQL loading, and a lot of nice exporting file formats. Impressive. I'm not sure I'll use all them, but to have these in this nice, minimalistic tool is a really nice feature.

It makes me want to mess with CoreData - or just get into more Mac development. Darn, it looks like a lot more fun than what I'm doing now.

I was thinking about Bean this morning and decided to see if they had updated anything recently, and indeed they had! Bean 2.4.3 was released back in February, and includes Czech localization along with various enhancements.

Nice to see it's still getting updates. Pages and TextEdit need competition on the Mac desktop and OpenOffice.org is too generic to be a good Mac app.

This morning I saw that ClickToFlash 1.6b8 was out with a few fixes for YouTube, so I upgraded it within the plug-in. It's very convenient. I have to say that I have really enjoyed using ClickToFlash, and don't miss all the Flash adds that used to clutter all the pages I went to. Now it's boxes, and if I want to see it, I can. But the vast majority, I don't.

Can't get any better than that.

Since I was doing some simulations yesterday, I decided to have a look-see at the state of gfortran at the HPC on Mac OS X web site. Sure enough, they had an update. I have been running the September 2009 version, and they are up to the January 2010 release. Good enough reason to get busy installing!

I then ran through all my FORTRAN code again, and it even caught a few 'column 72' errors that had slipped by. Interestingly enough, MacVim pointed these out with a yellow background highlight! Very neat. I did the easy fix and the warnings went away.

I do so enjoy FORTRAN. It's just plain fun to work with.

Because I'm not a big Windows fan any longer, I really appreciate the work the CoRD Team is doing to bring a nice Remote Desktop client to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. This morning I got a tweet that CoRD 0.5.3 is out that fixes some of the cursor problems and adds a hostname feature to the connection prefs.

Sweet. The less I have to run Windows the happier I'll be.

While I'm not sure it's necessary to keep up to date with OsiriX, it's still nice to be able to see the kids' and Liza's images from the doctor's office visits they have accumulated over the years. Sure, some will say it's a little creepy, but it's like baby pictures - sort-of. Well, today I noticed that OsiriX 3.7 was out, and decided to snap it up and upgrade what I had. Easy, quick, and really fun to look at the x-ray images over again.

This morning I saw a post in the MacVim groups digest saying that Snapshot 52 was released with a pretty significant list of updates and fixes. Most interesting to me is the inclusion of Core Text as the future of text rendering on the Mac. If this makes it smoother and faster, then I'm all for that.

It's still one of my favorite editors and only a slight second on my Mac to BBEdit. Great stuff.

This morning I noticed that Google had updated Chrome (dev) to 5.0.342.1, which is a welcome improvement. I've been using it as my secondary browser for several days, and I have to say that I think I'm still leaning to Firefox as a better experience. I'm not going to debate the speed of the V8 JavaScript Engine, I know it's better. But what I need in a secondary browser is something that feels right, and the fact that it's not WebKit is not bad either.

I'll keep Google Chrome around, and I'll give it a shot in a little bit, but it's just not as smooth as Firefox is for me. Nice, and close... but not a winner - yet.

Today I was checking on my WebDAV/SSL access to my home server and noticed that it wasn't working. I knew I had set it up once, and I couldn't imagine what had messed it up, but then I started looking at the error and access logs, and it was clear that the WebDAV lock database was not accessible to the plugin. Rats.

As I started digging, I noticed that the DAV config file: /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-dav.conf was not the same as I had originally had - specifically, the value for DavLockDB. What was there was pointing to some default Apple location, and even that wasn't really there. So I had to go in and set:

  DavLockDB "/Library/WebServer/WebDAV/DavLock"

and then a simple:

  $ sudo apachectl graceful

and my WebDAV/SSL was once again working.

It turns out that the DAV plugin makes several files with that root name, and there's no reason it has to be there, so if there's something in that location - wipe it out and then restart Apache.

Whew! I'll have to keep a closer eye on the Apple Mac OS X updates and make sure it's not breaking the configs.

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.