What's it all about, Alfie?

When HandBrake 0.9.4 was announced, I immediately downloaded the new 64-bit version for Snow Leopard, and was excited about the possibilities. It's great to see the move to 64-bits, even though I know it's going to take a long time to get the vast majority of the apps there, it's great to see some open source headliners get there sooner than later.

But I hadn't tried to use HandBrake to rip a DVD since the upgrade. Just no need.

Then I read this off Daring Fireball this morning. Very interesting. I have to wonder how on earth the HandBrake guys built the 64-bit version if they didn't have a 64-bit VLC, and if they didn't have it, what did they use?

I have the FairMount (32-bit) installed, and can use that in the interim while VLC gets around to creating a 64-bit binary. Alternatively, I could just go back to a 32-bit HandBrake, and then move to 64-bit when VLC is there, but that isn't necessary with the FairMount work-around.

I just never imagined that they'd ship something that can't work. Very odd. If it turns out that the work-around takes too much time, then I'll fall back to a 32-bit HandBrake. But if I'm lucky, the 64-bit VLC will be out before I need to rip another DVD.

While I haven't had need to use it in a long while, Bean 2.4.2 was released today and I decided to pick up a copy. There are quite a few Snow Leopard fixes in this release, which is great news. I like having a fast, lightweight alternative to Pages that's capable of dealing with Microsoft Word files. Nice to have in my pocket.

Being an Electrical Engineer, I've always had a soft spot for SPICE, and the Mac port: MacSpice is a great little version that can get you some really nice performance and top-notch simulation results on inexpensive hardware. Today I noticed that MacSpice 2.10.22 was out and there were a few nice additions and fixes. While I'd really like to see a graphical client for SPICE, but I don't really have to have it, and the commercial ones are nice, but far too expensive for playing with.

Noticed today that Adium 1.4b16 is out with only three bugs left to be fixed until they release 1.4 final. I have to admit, this is one of the more complex pieces of code I use that's open source... it's put together by a bunch of guys that do it for the fun of it. Gotta appreciate the effort. I know I sure do.

This morning I noticed that HandBrake 0.9.4 was released - now with 64-bit versions that are Snow Leopard ready. It's my favorite way to rip DVDs for my Mac and iPhone - there's just nothing that even comes close.

One of the tools that has made the last year of my professional coding very nice is the H2 Database Engine. It's 100% Java, it's fast, it's flat-file or in-memory, and it's just as rock-solid as PostgreSQL. I love both of these databases, and while I can use others, if I get the choice, I'll use one of these.

H2 is amazing as an in-memory database, but it does file-system database as well. It's got all the things you'd want in a database: multi-version concurrency control, triggers, foreign keys - the works. It's super simple to use as well. Could not be easier.

Love it when we see things improving in it.

Today I saw that Björn was able to release MacVim Snapshot 51 with a lot of additions - including a Core Text renderer that should be the fastest way to render text on the Mac in Leopard (and Snow Leopard). While I haven't seen a lot of lagging rendering, it's always nice to see the best you can see when you're hoping around and scrolling in an editor - like Vim.

Again, Vim is probably my favorite tool for working with text, and MacVim is an excellent port to the Mac. It's really something you have to try.

Big news from the alternative browser space - Camino 2.0 has been released and is out there for all. It's not my top-flight browser choice, but you need to have a bunch of them to test all the pages you make, and this one is nicely Mac-like with the Mozilla engine behind it. It looks like it's got a new tab overview - like Safari's latest pages feature. Could be nice, sort-of like Expose for the browser. We'll see if it's really useful.

I noticed this morning that Google Chrome dev 4.0.249.0 was out for the Mac, and it fixes the nasty JavaScript bug that I submitted to Google a while back. I'm really excited to see this fixed, not for the Mac, per se, but the fact that this was the reason the Google Chrome Frame stopped working.

When I got to work and restarted IE 8, I was able to see that the auto-updating of the Google Chrome component in the Google Chrome Frame was working and my pages were working once again. Fantastic! I really love it when good software is written by great engineers.

This morning I noticed that they finally had an official release of Cyberduck 3.3. This new release is Snow Leopard compatible, and 64-bit all the way. Not that I use an FTP client a lot, but this is one of the cleanest I've ever seen. It does it all.