What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I saw that VLC 1.0.1 is out, but interestingly enough, it wasn't available from the "Check for Updates" within VLC 1.0. Odd, but maybe they think this is a minor update and they didn't create a package to be downloaded/updated the other way. Seems reasonable, but I still wish they had release notes, or at least made them easier to find. I just couldn't find them on the site. Very odd for an Open Source project.

Anyway, got it so that I can keep ripping DVDs when I want to see them on my iPhone.

When I was rebuilding my laptop, I started Firefox, like I always do, to open up a set of pages to HostMonster so that I can see what is going on there with all the sites I host there. Well... I noticed that WordPress 2.8.2 was out, and so I went to the SimpleScripts console at HostMonster and upgraded all my installs to 2.8.2.

The SimpleScripts install really is just about as easy as it can be. There's never a problem with the updates, everything is saved, they are fast, close to the release dates of the packages. Really, it's far better than the other package installer I used at HostMonster. Nice.

During the rebuild of my laptop this morning I got another update notification - this one was from Growl for 1.1.6. This one even had release notes! This is the messaging system that a lot of Mac software uses, and I have to say, when I first saw it I thought "Why?", but now that I'm using my Mac as everything, it makes a lot of sense. Get the notifications you want to see as you want to see them. Nice.

Anyway, the fixes look like they will help, and with Snow Leopard on the way, it's nice to see these packages getting updated.

This morning, as I was finishing the re-build of my laptop, I got a notice from Perian that 1.1.4 was out, and so I updated that right away. Perian is the QuickTime plug-in that allows it to play a ton of additional file types, and since I still get a lot of media from family and friends that was created on PCs, this is a really nice thing to have.

Super nice thing to have.

This morning I was upgrading Firefox and I noticed that WordPress has been upgraded to 2.8.1 and I went over to HostMonster to see if SimpleScripts had the update - sure enough, it did. I'm not exactly sure why the availability of this update didn't generate an email like the previous one did, but no matter, I spent the few minutes updating the WordPress installs on my HostMonster account.

I do think this is a great thing - HostMonster and WordPress. Very nice.

This morning I noticed that Firefox 3.5.1 is out with the same suite of stability and security fixes inside. Not bad, it's been a week or two and so the attacks begin. I'm glad I don't write browsers or I'd get a serious case of paranoid coding. I'd be looking at all my code thinking how some 15 yr old idiot, sitting in his parent's basement, in Russia, is going to attack my code. Yikes. I can live without that.

They found a crashing bug that's been in the code for a while and so issued a fix for that right away - snapshot 47. Nice guys. Thankfully, the crashing bug isn't something I've run into, but it's nice that they are really pushing the envelope of user testing and finding these things.

Well... today I lost about an hour messing around with some code I had refactored to make a little factory of sorts so that it could be shared amongst two classes that had no common class ancestry. It was that or a lot of copy-n-paste, and there was just too much code to do that. So I did the refactoring and then a lot more coding and then hit the tests.

It wasn't the coding, but the testing that gave me fits. Specifically, because I did so many changes, I just did the standard Ant build and then deploy to the Tomcat server. There was a problem in setting this trigger on an H2 in-memory table, and for the life of me, I could not figure out why.

So I dug into the code, and what I found was that I was the victim of incomplete dependency checking by Ant. I should have rebuilt a few more classes that were effected by the refactoring, but Ant wasn't smart enough to do that. I'm not complaining, but when I look at Ant, I really see something made by a group of people that didn't like Makefiles.

I've used Makefiles for years and it's a far better system than Ant - even for Java, and while it doesn't claim to do dependency checking on it's own, there are tons of tools to create those dependency checks that are air-tight in their completeness.

So once I did a clean build, things started working again for me. It's something that I've had long conversations about with friends - the way the Java Lobby seems to be unsatisfied with the existing state of things, and rather than just make a 'makedepends' for Java, they have to XML-ize it, and make a new Java-based, Java-built tool that claims to do these things, when it really only does them slightly worse than the 20-year old tools that everyone else knows.

It's what I dislike most about Java. Not the language, but the people that are it's fanatical following. Spring, Faces, J2EE, the list goes on and on.

This morning I noticed that the folks writing Cyberduck came out with a minor point release - and it's been a long time in coming. I can't remember the last time I saw an update from this crew, but then again, the software has been stable and hasn't needed updating.

It honestly looks more like a bunch of little feature enhancements as opposed to bug fixes, but that's just by count on the release notes. In any case, got it, and use it from time to time.

This morning I saw that Miro 2.0.5 was out with important fixes for YouTube video downloads. I've not used Miro as much as I had hoped, primarily because it doesn't have the content that I'd like to watch - Hulu Desktop does. But in the spirit of supporting a good cause, I'm going to keep looking at Miro as it's all about the Creative Commons, and that's a cause worth supporting.

It's got content, and it looks good. Give it a run.