afongen

Jaguar comes with Perl 5.6. This is okay, I guess, but Perl 5.8 has been out for close to a month and includes some useful improvements, so why not install Perl 5.8 on Jaguar?

MySQL 4.0.3 has been released, and with it MySQL 4 is in beta.

All new features have been added by now and the TODO items are all done. The focus is on stabilizing the 4.0 tree now, while all new features are being implemented in 4.1 instead.

All sorts of fun things for me to play with today.

Maybe all it took was my complaining about it here. Because whammo, Netscape 7.0 has been released.

(Release notes, seizure-inducing ad graphic from the download page, FTP site).

Installation went smoothly, it grabbed my Mozilla 1.1 profile, plugins seem functional so far, and now I’m ready to recommend that we get it installed at work. Yes! That should eliminate about half of our Netscape 4 traffic, and along with it the conviction that every page must look exactly the same in all browsers. I still face that, I think largely because people expect all sorts of whiz-bang wizardry from the five-year-old monstrosity on their desktop.

I suddenly am not sure where I put my notes from OSCON. So before I lose this URL again: Abuse Detection in Apache, Brett Glass’s presentation at the 2002 Open Source Convention.

I’m with Pinder: I feel dirty using the IE skin for Mozilla. How weird. I wonder if I’ll feel better about the XP skin when it’s done. I’d like a Mac IE5 theme, it’s a much more pleasing design (the graphite color, please). Regardless, for those of you who get the evil eye from tech support for using a browser other than IE, here’s something to consider.

Dive into Mark: Jaguar, Jaguar, Jaguar. Posted here because otherwise I’ll lose track of it.

Mozilla 1.1 has been released (download), hours after I downloaded 1.1b via my newly-functioning broadband connection. If you ‘ve been using 1.0, you’ll like this.

Now, if Netscape would just release verion 7.0, I’d be a happy man. I long ago started feeling personally responsible for the fact that we’re still using Netscape 4.7x at work. The LAN staff asked about upgrading to 6.23, and I strongly suggested they hold off until 7 was released, since it’d be built on a much newer and more stable codebase. 7.0 PR1 has been available for months now, and people are getting a bit testy. I’m one of them. I’d love to leave Netscape 4 behind.

On the other hand, I do believe in getting things right rather than shipping ahead of schedule. Netscape 6 was released before it should have been. Perl 6 is being released when it’s good and ready. I guess I should be patient and wait for Netscape to do the same with version 7: release it when it’s good and ready. Thing is, Mozilla 1.0 was released some time ago, 1.1 is now out, it should be ready, already! Or so it seems to me.

‘Course, the question should be asked: what have I done to help? Nada. So I’ll shut up now.

And oh yes. What of that broadband connection I mentioned? In talking with AT&T tech support last night, after two and a half days of trying to get this dang thing working, they suggested that I eject the installation CD. Bingo, everything worked. Oh yes, of course the CD would tie up the network connection. How silly of me not to have seen that. Sheesh.

Very little about this weekend turned out the way I expected it to. I did go to the Apple store for the Jaguar release, which was a blast. They had expected maybe 500 people to show up; there were over 2000! It was like that in Apple stores all over the country. We were in line for about two hours before we made it into the store, by which time they started to run out of stuff to sell. My friend Jim, who had tagged along on a whim to buy a computer, found that the 17-inch iMac he’d settled on was out of stock. I managed to score a copy of Jaguar, though, which was my goal. We left around 1am and the place was still hopping. I have no idea what they did on Saturday, considering that their stock had been depleted so dramatically.

Then I had to get up early to wait for the guy from AT&T to come set up cable modem. He did arrive when AT&T said he would, but I still don’t have Internet access. After trying for hours to get the dang thing working, I called AT&T and was told the work order hadn’t been closed so the account couldn’t be activated. Hmph. Hopefully that’ll be squared away by the time I get home today.

I want to wait until we have broadband working before I set up the home network, just cuz conceptually it seems cleaner, so I didn’t get around to that. Not to worry, though, I had plenty to do: Kiara had decided to paint the nursery. Then Sunday night I got to babysit little Robert. He is such an adorable kid, the highlight of the weekend.

Once he was asleep, I attempted to work my way through the Perl Exegesis 5. Myabe it was the fatigue, or maybe it’s honestly just impenetrable, but I was lost about a third of the way through. I’ll give it another shot, but I might just wait until Perl 6 is released and there’s a new Camel book before I try to follow what’s happening in regular expressions.

What I had really hoped to be reading was JMS‘s Rising Stars, but I can’t seem to find my copy of the first volume. I guess I’ll wait to reread it until the third volume is released (I’m not collecting individual comics on this one).

Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), by the way, is excellent. If you’ve been waiting to make the switch, now’s the time. Even on my old iMac, it seems faster and generally more pleasant to work with. Others have discussed it in greater detail than I will. Suffice it to say that I am more than pleased, except that I’ll have to build Perl 5.8 since Jaguar ships with 5.6.1. Once we have broadband and I can download OpenOffice, I might even be able to convince Kiara to make it our full-time OS. For most of what I do, it already is.

A new PGP Corporation has been formed and has announced that PGP 8 will be released in November, including Windows XP and Mac OS X versions. Phil Zimmerman’s on the technical advisory board. There will still be a freeware version. I’m glad that someone picked up on this after Network Associates dropped the ball, and that there’s an OS X version. I was tired of either launching Classic just to use PGP, and even more tired of using GnuPG. GnuPG’s great if you’re using something like Mutt, otherwise not so much.

“Encrypt-a-script.” Feh. Who believes this stuff?